Does the size of invading armies depend only on your population, or is your wealth taken into account as well?
I’ve capped my population at 500 for performance reasons, but I’m hoping as I get richer that I will attract more and more formidable invasions. So far it doesn’t seem to be getting harder though.
I have only observed an increase with population. I doubt there will be an official release of information on this but you can always try locking a very low population and see if it gets any higher, even in the highest difficulty. You bring up an interesting point though as I am actually on the opposite side. I want my more advanced cities to scare off the invaders or else have them come with more powerful alternatives like siege engines or something. Otherwise, it’s just too easy to funnel them into a kill lane and let your cities be able to function without having to hide everyone and disrupt production.
My town’s population is nearly 600, and usually I get an invasion with 100+ invaders. People said that it seems the town center level is one of the factors that determine how big an invasion is, so I keep my town center at level 3 and try to upgrade as many towers as possible before reaching level 4.
I just started a new village using an exploit of having a block of 12 guard towers within range of the market so they each provide income (even when shut down) and let my village of population 42 run on its own for 25 years while I took a nap. I came back to see the population in half, and gold stocks full for what can be stored, but the next raid was still only 4 so it seems population plays a huge role in this.
From my experience, population, defenses and wealth are the main factors.
When you start getting high incomes the numbers of invasions increases considerably, just as when your population increases.
Raiders will probably come all the same for long, but that factor is pretty much clearer when it comes to the invader army. They do come in bigger and stronger waves when you have tons of gold and if you are heavy guarded (too many towers and barracks). Its really a big deal to choose between paying them or take the risk of broken things and people dead.
I think you’re right that wealth doesn’t have an effect. I’m still at 500 pop and I’ve gone up to most of a million without bigger invasions.
I would love if they added a notoriety system where your settlement would get a reputation that could lean into either style. Either you get rich and pay the right people and get left alone, or you hold staunch and fight increasingly well trained armies after your massive booty. Like the traders have person personalities it would be neat if armies were represented by personalities too.
I’m pretty amazed that they regroup so quickly after a couple years and come back in even larger numbers. Despite their last defeat.
They’re not easily discouraged … or very desperate.
Curious about ways to “cap” population (in the 400-500 pop bracket).
Just say no to new immigrants?
Exactly. No housing space for new births and reject all newcomers
Definitely not money. They attack at over 100 raiders (even with 3 rams year 42) although I have something like 4k total gold INCLUDING the trading post.
When they ask for a ransom, it’s like 2k … so I say OK (but seems odd that such a big invading army would have enough with only that 
) … I pay because I don’t want to lose villagers because they are not capable of hearing the bell that is supposed to tell them to move back in town (I value their life 
).
…
and I was still tier 3 when they attacked me with 3 rams (thought that tier 4 triggered it so waited to have a great economy before).
Year 53 - tier 4 - 1325+3481 gold ingots
The destroyed building is a fence for my cows … like it was important to set score 
(still annoying)
I HATE it when they destroy the fence keeping the deer out of my farm.
I read that if you place towers near your fields, you can stop the raidors from doing this?
No, I have towers, but they still do it. They just die doing it.
It’s not like they couldn’t jump over the fence, no, they have to destroy it. Got my fields swarmed by 16 dears and 4 boars during 2 years, time for my builders to fix the fences.
Annoying …
I had to replace the low stone walls with the regular reinforced high stone walls around my fields and the pastures to stop them doing it.
I did that and they still kept breaking them, so I just removed all the walls and hired a hunter. The meat makes up for any lost crops.
I placed roads around all my fields hoping they would bypass them, but they still tried to go through them, breaking down my walls.
In my experience the raider numbers depend on population numbers but I haven’t noticed or established a proportion.
My ransom invaders happen ton T4 only and when my gold reached more than 10K (I really placed all my golds to global) on 360 population. The demand was at 8k plus. When I deny them they attack immediately, 86 raiders plus 1 ram. The previous raiders were around the same at 350 population. And for many more years there wasn’t any ransom raids.
152 population- had 23-25 raiders.
172 population- had around 30 raiders.
180 population- had around 33 raiders.
The trend is an increasing numbers as population rises. But they are not much of a problem even if my settlement is almost open. I use a 2 towers outskirts defense (both walled) to filter/eliminate their numbers before they enter my main town.
I anot sure what works to determine this. It’s been suggested that the extortion demand amount varies with the level of gold in your global storage (not trading post) so I have attempted to follow this and reducve that to minimum but in late game <1000 pop the gold you can make means you always have to keep reducing and transferring back to TP. I have seen that that works and if you leave too much gold in global the ransom amount goes up considerably. As to raider numbers it does seem to go up a lot as your pop gets higher. I’m using a mod to increase resident level, and so far running 1,446 pop and raiders are now regularly 200+ , so this seems to be valid…