Enemy Siege Tactics

A town encased by a wall is undoubtedly the most effective way of keeping out every kind of baddie who wants to steal your stuff. But if history has proven anything, it is that a wall or a locked door can only deter a determined enemy for so long. That’s why I suggest giving the enemy a few more tricks up their sleeves on how to get past those pesky walls.

  1. You could allow the Ogres to break down walls made of wood or clay. They’re big fellas, a few nice swings could be just enough to poke a hole big enough for the rest of the raiding party to enter. A good counter to this would be to build walls of stone.

  2. Allow raiding parties bring workers to battle. When the Ai see’s no way into your settlement they should make their own! The enemy should escort their workers to your walls to build siege ladders (at a slower pace than regular workers) to allow their allies to scale the terrain and loot the settlement! This would give the enemy workers a powerful role rather than just stand around and be useless.

  3. If your walls have a gate or door, Goblin thieves should be able to pass right through and let the enemy in from the inside. Or at the very least just them. What theif gives up upon reaching a locked door? A terrible one.

  4. A Trojan Horse like tactic. Little Stone Golems and Entlings look very similar to the wood and stone Hearthling workers bring in on the constant. Perhaps every once in a while an unaware Hearthling could accidentally bring one of these little beasts into your town. They could become active and begin to attack once they reach the stockpile or final destination the Hearthling was bringing it to.

  5. And lastly zombies could occasionally rise from the ground inside the walls. It’s the most cheap method, but the zombies are slow and pretty weak so it would be more of a quick scare rather than a game ending tactic.

This should keep the players on their toes and be more engaged in combat rather than surrounding the town with a fence and calling it a day.

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  1. sounds very fun, but this’d mean that a ‘repair’ option for buildings has to become available, and some kind of physics that allows ogres to destroy voxels. I think this one will be the hardest to achieve, but it’ll be worth it.

  2. really like this one. Stone golems have to come from somewhere right? Maybe you set them free when mining, but they stay in rock form until midnight. By that time your workers should have already cleaned up the mining site and brought the stone inside. One problem is, however, that this works fine with stockpiles, a little less with chests and other containers.

  3. Zombies rising from tombstones still seems like a fun little danger added to the remembrance of your fallen hearthlings. Makes a graveyard even more omnious!

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For the golems, they could become active the next time the Hearthlings use the dropping animation rather than when they reach a specific destination. The golem could appear in front of the chest rather than actually going into it.

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This is awesome. My one other thought is that maybe goblins could build turrets to attack your workers when they go out.

I’m not sure that the primitive era the game is based around could support something complex as a turret. I feel in terms of combat based machinery the Trebuchet or a Ballista is about as advanced as we can get.

You haven’t promoted an engineer yet, have you?

Turrets are their basic reason for existing. (even if they happen to use turnips for ammo)

Holy smokes, no I haven’t! I never really saw any reason to upgrade so I never bothered. Maybe that idea has some merit after all

To be fair, I haven’t done so (yet) in any of my towns due to still learning the game, and the length of time it takes to train a Smith to the point of forging the Engineer’s Wrench.

I need a spare Smith to promote to engineer (but haven’t the time to train a new one), because the Engineer can’t be used to do smithing work. (much like how the cook can’t do farming)

It “only” takes a level 1 smith and a wrench to promote, but needs a level 3 smith to make the wrench. -_-

EDIT: I had the levels wrong, but the 2 level gap was correct. I’ve fixed it.

Cooks farm all the time.

I have cooking set to maintain a minimum of a certain number of dishes, which the cooks do quickly, and once they’re done they’re out there in the fields helping the farmers.

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That said, the engineer indeed cannot be used for smithing. Levelling up an engineer takes quite a slow time, especially without a smith to produce bars for him.

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You wouldn’t and shouldn’t convert your primary blacksmith to an engineer. You train up a secondary blacksmith and switch him or her over at the appropriate level. Hell, 20 bronze ingots or so worth of work will get you a new blacksmith good enough to switch over.

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its often hard to train a second blacksmith… as the first blacksmith will always be doing the work instead of the second blacksmith

I think the solution to that is to build a second set of forge/furnace. That way, both smiths will be able to perform their jobs simultaneously. That’s what solved the problem in case of engineers, at least, when I wanted to train a second engineer, and even bronze cogs got relegated to the senior engineer.

Even better, just uncheck the job from the first blacksmith. If one of the recipes is still assign to him, just erase it and ask again for the item, it will go for the new blacksmith.
Or you can simple demote the main blacksmith, and promote it again after the second one got into the engineer class.

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You can turn off “job” in the blacksmith hearthling’s settings and he’ll take a short vacation while the newbie apprentices.

You can also queue a bunch of high level crafts and make them top priority so the master will focus on those instead of basic smelting.

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I always just demote my main blacksmith to a worker for the very short time that the intended engineer needs to make a few ingots (maybe 10/15?). Then just re-promote him/her back to blacksmith.

I really hope someone takes this on, because this would add a whole new dimension to the game :smiley: