I have a good idea of how to position most buildings in relation to each other but the barracks flummox me. I’m not good at military strategy. Do you place them on the outskirts of your town? Or closer to the center? What’s ideal?
Barracks make really good Super Towers with more ranged fire available, so I tend to put them right behind the walls on major avenues of Raider approach to augment the towers’ fire. If I have a really sprawling town, that means placing Barracks on opposite sides of the town so that the troops in them can react to raiders coming from several directions, and I have tried placing Barracks in the middle of town as a ‘reaction force’. Since I try to stop raiders from getting into town in the first place (“Stop 'em at the Wall!”) that, for me at least, is a second best solution.
I use two strategies. First is to keep it close to where the raiders are heading, the Town Centre and/or the Vault. The second is to place a barracks with a three-person crew behind two or three towers and surrounded by double stone walls along a known line of Raider approach, the towers being double manned as well.
I find the first strategy to be cheaper, the second creates kill zones if you leave a narrow, clear path between the walls.
since distance to invaders matters because soldiers have travel time i like to evenly space them out across the area of the town when possible, so as if each barracks is assigned slices of the pie of the city. not always possible, but it’s what i try to do, so the soldiers aren’t running for miles before they can reach the raiders that are busting down walls.
barracks has sort of dual use…
-
as mentioned, sort of a super tower of sorts, if you keep the soldiers garrisoned, their DPS (damage per second) is much higher than guard towers, and their cost per soldier in terms of gold, is much lower than guard towers.
-
As an offensive tool, or deploying soldiers from barracks and fighting raiders in open field or counterattacking fleeing raiders.
So there’s a couple of planning considerations:
- higher elevation = better, similar to guard towers, but even more so due to the increased DPS
- travel time- how quickly can they move to intercept a raid or breach in your walls
- your population size and ability to “field” a garrison of troops economically-- gold, population, and the weapons.
I use a few strategies:
-
early game-- i use my barracks as sort of a reserve to handle anything that gets past my walls or towers-- usually centrally located next to, or in close proximity to, critical infrastructure (gold storage, trading post, town hall). I also often deploy the garrison, using the flag combat area, outside the walls to secure undeveloped sections of my town from animals, boars, wolves, etc. Or if i’m expanding a good chunk and my defenses are “under construction”-- to protect my builders. This is usually suffecient till tier 3 when you start dealing with bigger raids.
-
Tier 3 and Later- Defense in Depth strategy. This is real strategy, i used it a lot of in my army days as a young lad IRL… but the idea is to have a series of mutually supporting primary and supplemental defensive positions-- not all of them are actively occupied. How does this look like in the game… well you still may have your inner cordon of barracks and towers from the early game, but you turn their production off, since they can often be garrisoned when needed very quickly due to proximity of weapons. You then build a series of barracks around major avenues of approach to your town-- look for key terrain-- hills, elevation, natural chokepoints bounded my lakes or cliffs. Tie in your walls and fences. The “garrisons” don’t always have to be full strength. For example, maybe you need to split your coverage between two avenues of approach. So you might have three barracks… 1 for each avenue of approach, but maybe they’re only 25% strength. And then you have a third barracks that’s splits the difference. Imagine a V shape. This third barracks would be a full stack garrison, or as much as your can afford… and you would then use it to reinforce one of the other two barracks depending on where attack is coming from. Or potentially, you fall back to a new inner “layer” in the defense as the attacking force breaches the outer layer.
The reality is using this approach, most raids can be handled before they even get close to your town. But you may need to activate all defenses, the whole enchilada, when you get an invading army. (And usually you have 12 months to do this).
- CSOP strategy-- another effective strategy, that I’ve seen other players utilize, that is also kind of based on real life, i call the “csop strategy”…csop stands for combat security outpost and is pronounced “see-sawp” – it’s a real thing. But principally the idea is you create a strong point, or a fortress of sorts, elsewhere on the map, usually forward away from your main-town, but i’ve also seen it on the edges of town, this is usually a barracks with 12 to 24 soldiers and 4-5 guard towers, walled in. Imagine a wagon wheel type configuration where you barracks represents the “hub” and the guard towers are the “spokes”. A star configuration is also popular choice. Their range or MEL
max effective range" should all overlap. Bonus points if they’re elevated. And the basic idea is to interdict threats to the village away from the village. It’s also useful to intercept battering rams. Usually the garrison can deploy out and attack raids in the open, and then “fall back” to the barracks under the cover of the towers-- the raiders typically will pursue (to their demise).
That strategy might be even more useful in the next update as you’ll have horses and catapults to contend with and might not just be able to set back and “let them all come to you” so to speak.
You can, and I often do, and historical castles often did as well, blend these strategies. You have a series concentric defenses and maybe that is anchored to a strongpoint-- csop type thing. That’s basically how they used gate houses back in the day. But most castles had an inner keep made of stone, but maybe they had a few “palisade” mont and baily type things forward-- and those would handle bandits, but if they have ever got hit with a proper army everyone would kind of fall back to the main castle. Anyway-- no wrong answers, try it out, can always move your building if it isn’t working for you. But the principles are kind of the same-- purpose of defense is to buy space and time, or break up an attack so it comes at you piece meal instead of all at once.
A few additional notes;
It can be helpful to think of your defense in layers, as mentioned, but also as a series of supporting primary, supplemental, and alternate battle positions. (different countries have different terminology-- but it all kind of gets at the same thing)
primary-- is a battle position you occupy 24/7 year round, and these are usually your most probable or most important things you have to defend. i.e. town center, main gate.
alternate-- is a battle position that you occupy, but only when the primary position is destroyed or is overrun-- usually. A fall back position if you will. imagine inner walls and outerwalls-- you only defend the inner walls once the outer walls fail… defending them otherwise would be a waste of resources.
supplement- is a position you don’t occupy, unless the attack comes from a less probable direction-- for example, “you were expecting to defend from the north but, the raid came from the east.” .
In the new patched version, adds even more dynamics to this given you different troop types.
In addition to those positions-- Usually a defense also includes some type of reserve that can be sent out to reinforce as needed, this should be optimized for response time. (travel time)
Defense also includes obstacle placements-- in the game you have walls, fences, and roads… but you can also utilize natural terrain. Most people use obstacles to fix-- or completely impede the movement of an attacking force. But i would mention, obstacles can be used in other ways-- to turn, delay, etc. An example of this in the game is fences or making a real zig zaggy or sepentine road-- they’re not going to stop raiders, but they may turn or delay raiders down a certain route which can help “funnel” them into your defenses or buy time for you to garrison towers or send troops. Or they may split raiders into two smaller forces instead of one giant force. Which is easier to deal with with one at a time.
Edit: Here are some pictures to illustrate:
This would be an an example of an inner layer, i don’t keep actively garrisoned, but can be garrisoned quickly if needed.
This would be the middle layer, also lightly defended, just there to delay and buy time for inner layer to garrison.
An example of an outer layer, tied on a hill between to lakes, arrows indicate direction of movement of raiders, v indicates direction of village. Roads stay in the effective range of tower and barracks.
Different approach, less developed, but we curve the road around the hill to maximize exposure to arrows and slow down approaching attackers.
Kind of an example of a CSOP on flat ground, we position it at the intersection of two naturally existing chokepoints. we make sure to have overlapping fields of fire. The village is south of this picture.
And if we were to look at this in the real world it would look something like this:
– which is a 2 dimensional graphical representation of a defense in depth. squiggly things are an obstacle belt, the solid line positions are primary, the dotted lines are alternate. And the defense is tied to 3 mutually supporting hills. in the picture the attacking force is on the left and defending force is on the right…
Another picture of the inner layer early game, it’s all still a Work-in-progress but the idea was to build the town around the mountain, expanding outwards. The barracks protects the main road to and from the town center.
3 Likes
I don’t understand which is the relation between number of troops inside barracks and row shot against enemy after patch 0.9.2.
Did someone understand it?
thanks!
Early in the game closeish to the town centre from the common invasion path. Later I build two, one on each of the two most common invasion paths on opposite ends of the town, usually have a wooden square wall around the whole town by now. Later I build one in each corner behind the walls as super towers and so two forts can deploy soldiers along any point in a side of the square. later still I will fill in the gaps in the walls with 1 or 2 more along each side wall, so that they serve as basically tower and deployment centres. Though I rarely if ever need to dispatch them from the barracks assuming the entire length of the walls are covered for archer fire range. One fort with at least 10 archers can decimate like 150 bandits in one go.
1 Like