This is a updated guide to defense and survival on the game state post Battles Update from 29 October 2022.
For the second part check May's Guide to Advanced Fortifications
By: LariLaranja, May.
Surviving is the big question, and the answer is usually violence. A porcupine is a harder catch than a rabbit, and so will you if you prepare for it since the start. Defense is the most important part of the game since the very beginning.
Stone Age defense is the easiest it ever gets, by mid-copper, and later it's downhill and takes more investment to survive against a determined attacker. Your greatest defense is the use of patrols to slow down an occupation force and kill off small raiding parties, while using forts to defend your population centers. Here follows an explanation of concepts and later a brief series of examples on fort design and patrol composition.
Before delving into this guide make sure to read all sections concerning Game Concepts and War
Glossary of Terms[]
- CS: Countryside, the subordinate territories to your Regional Centers.
- RC: Regional Center, your Hamlet, Village, Town and City level tiles.
- Patrol: A Formation in a Patrol action.
- HB: Height Bonus.
- PP: Political Points.
Core Understandings[]
Defensive warfare stands on Patrols, Height Bonus, Autodefense and Walls.
Patrol[]
Is an action you can take on Army or National Army formations. Especially fast formations of speed 4 and lower have a range of 2 while slower formations have a range of 1.
Once you declare a formation to enter patrol they'll get an animation of circling the tile they're based on, by clicking on said formation you'll see the range of their patrol. While declaring the formation you can pick the enemy strength threshold which says the total enemy strength that this specific formation will engage without fleeing, if the total enemy strength when it enters or attacks your territory is greater than that the patrol will not engage, if it's lower or equal then it will engage, and if the attacker reinforces the ongoing battle and those reinforcements bring the total formation strength above the threshold your patrols will disengage and retreat going back to patrol.
Height Bonus[]
Is a bonus to damage and skill a ranged unit gets when attacking another in a lower elevation. Ever 5 units of height difference gives +1 to those, up to +3 at 15 height difference. You want ranged formations to be the highest you can get.
Ranged units firing at targets on a higher elevation suffer a penalty, much the same as the height bonus, of -1 to damage per full 5 units of height difference.
Walls[]
Are your greatest of friend as they do not offer cover for attackers and makes them into sitting targets for your ranged units, you want as many layers of walls as you can afford.
Auto-Defense[]
Is your Stone Age savior, but later on, it becomes at best a slight annoyance. Auto-Defense is a free auto generated group of small weak formations of Warriors on Stone Age and Peons on mid-copper age and later, which equals about 75% of your total active population not part of the militia. These formations do not reduce your population when they die and are essentially a filter against taking over entire cities with little to no attackers. Auto-Defense triggers when the strength of all attacking formations up to its trigger moment combined is greater than twice that of all defending formations, but lower than the strength of all defending formations and all possible Auto-Defenders combined. Peons have strength 11, warriors have Strength 8.
What's Coming for You[]
During a defensive war, you'll face a few different threats to your survival depending on what type of goal your attacker has both for the war and out of mechanics and how committed to extermination they are.
Annihilation: When the objective of your target is to kill off your nation he'll seek to burn down your houses as each burned down house kills every occupant which can amount up to 6 piglets, 1 active, 1 sow and 2 oldpigs per house.
Conquest: When your target aims to take a specific tile with no interest in Annihilation for the sake of it, he'll more likely than not lessen his costs and thus restrict to holding the War Objective for a massive war morale decay for you. However, when the objective of your target is of conquest it often comes with actions of Annihilation as it helps with the future resettlement of that tile and weakens your capacity to fight back now and in the future.
Sieges: More often than not any type of war ends after at least one RC being occupied by the attacker which cripples your economy and army capacity and once it happens the attacker can use your fort against you when defending it against a recover. The largest problem with sieges is that once the attacker wins said siege the surviving attacking formations will loot and pillage the local tile, more often than not, depending on number of surviving attackers, genociding your population down to a no recovery point.
Starvation: Both industrial and food starvation are a threat once your attacker sieges down your cs, either cutting them off into a Un-Administered Territory status through strategic sieging or outright occupying all of them. Industrial starvation is the most dangerous of them as it will kill your local economy destroying your wealth, prices and all income from exports, as you can always import food through the market it's unlikely you are importing the raw materials for your industry.
Surviving and Diplomacy[]
To actually survive a defensive war, whatever objectives the attacker may have you'll need every page in the book and while said book is heavily weighted towards you, your attacker is likely stronger.
Before any mechanics of how to defend are spoken of, how to design forts, how to set up your patrols or optimize Auto-Defense; You need to be aware of the most important tool; Diplomacy. Ask for help, go at it on global chat, send missives and direct messages to your neighbors, and get others to defend you.
Just don't get their direct help by having their armies sit on your fort, as that will entail on a heavy penalty to war morale. But by attacking your aggressor individually, either for their own personal gain at raiding a busy target or because they want to protect a new or weak player.
Don't be afraid to ask for help, and make sure to point out how badly defended your aggressor is while he is busy crashing against your wall of defenses.
Your Fort and You[]
Onto how to actually build said layers of defenses. Forts are the center of your every RC, they will protect you against Occupation actions, sieges, which are attempts to occupy your tile, sieges are dangerous for more reasons than just losing control over your tile temporarily as noted in Sieges under What's Coming for You.
Your fort determines whether your attacker is even capable at all of succeeding a siege, depending on the technology available.
Early forts become impossible to take very easily as the numbers needed to successfully breach them, once fully garrisoned, is beyond what multiple players could amass. But this massive defensive advantage drops really quickly.
A small hill fort with space for 5 squads of archers.
For your very first fort you'll want a hill, if you have any, no matter how small its top area is, any height bonus is better than none and using the terrain features to save on walls comes in hand to lower upkeep and minimum material cost.
Start saving on fort material the moment you get into a world, but don't worry about actually building a fort for the first day as no one is even capable of declare a raiding war on you by that point, however by the second day the quickest and luckiest of players will have enough PP to declare war on someone close by.
When it comes to actually designing it's a very case by case question, try to use your terrain features to minimize your material cost while keeping the greatest difference in height between the units breaking down your walls and the one shooting at them as it's the difference in height that matters, not the absolute height.
If you have a very large hill then wall it in, if you can afford to, and resist the urge to prioritize your storage inside. Put your houses there instead, and only store the most important of resources on restricted storage inside your fort. Your goods being stolen won't kill you, however, your houses being burned down will. As noted in Annihilation under What's Coming for You.
I personally like leaving enough space to place the second and third layers of walls as needed when building around a hill. On the accompanying image you have roads marking where the second and third layers of walls can be placed with only minimal changes needed to the fields behind. Roads also block slums from spawning in the way of your walls when emergency comes, and you just need to be quick.
Notice how the line of destruction ends at the archer range. If built better, more would have survived.
Always wall in as much of your housing as you can when war is imminent, and only protect any production buildings you absolutely cannot afford to rebuild. The most important thing about defending against attacks is to have your defenders not waste their ammo at targets which are just too distant, and defend your own ranged units from massed enemy ranged fire. That leads us to:
A Tower a Day keeps the Raiders Away[]
Red and Green are good positions for a village worth of towers between the inner wall and a possible second layer. Yellow for the slightly worse single layer fort.
Protecting your own ranged comes in forms of Cover from Walls and Battlements, but most importantly, Towers, to draw enemy ranged fire by being targeted before your own ranged is in range due to being closer to the enemy.
Towers deal very little damage but have an absurdly high Toughness value, making even the most basic of them take hundreds of bow shots to kill due to the extremely low chances per shot. Thus, you want to position your towers on the very edge so the circular Area of Engagement of any attacking ranged units catches the towers before your own units and deploy your own ranged in the innermost part of the fort.
However, as your own ranged will move during battle to engage units in range of the borders from their Defensive Zone the ideal is to place your towers outside said defensive zone while still not being vulnerable to melee, that is between the innermost and second layer of walls. Or any unique, funky placements due to weird natural formations.
After having your towers well positioned you may be tempted to get as much wall cover as possible but because of how much units will move around your fort to fire at other targets the Cover of said walls apply to units on the same tile as them is more often than not irrelevant as your ranged will likely never walk into the same tile as the walls.
For flatland forts, there isn't anything you can do to improve the good old square except either building a second layer of walls and placing your towers between both layers or making thin arms to house your towers and thus draw fire before your ranged moved in to fire back.
For studier forts you'll want to terraform and build platforms once you reach bronze age and can afford it. For help with that read May's Guide to Advanced Fortifications
Autodefense and You[]
Auto defenders are suicidal, near useless and free. During Stone Age, they will take care of most attacks that triggers them by themselves. However, they are very fickle by not triggering unless the attacker is twice as strong as all defending formations, thus expecting you to do your job and protect your people.
To maximize your auto defense during the Stone Age you want to avoid militias, if you can, because militias reduce the actives accounted towards autodefense. And have a small but painful garrison, so it's large enough that your aggressor has to attack with a much superior number but not strong enough that it will deny autodefense against the attacking formation.
The Ghost Bows[]
Due to all the changes to Raiding AI any formations in a Raid action will outright ignore ranged units in the open and just walk around to raid while under fire without a care in the world.
This means that if your city is too big to wall with your current resources leaving one or two squads of bows outside your walls in defensive mode will have them follow and fire away at any Raiders, however as soon as the attacker notices that they'll certainly send in a small formation on a Battle order to kill off your bows before leaving with a significant change to war morale and your loss of both equipment and pigs.
Garrisons and Melee Units[]
Melee squads as part of the garrison are strong as they'll hold on the tickling of enemy breachers which you can predict by the massive stack encamped near your RC, but also by some patterns on what units are good for sieges. Those being high armor high count units, currently only infantry, and of that infantry only the Hoglite and Porcus are game changers that make possible taking on strong forts with Steel units not being a factor on a persistent game outside of Forever Server at this moment.
Both of those siege infantry units are vulnerable to different melee garrisons that counter them massively, that being the Battleswine and to a lesser extent Axepig as a disproportionately strong counter to Hoglites, or Cataphract and Camephracts for countering Porcus.
If anyone ever sieges you down with an unending horde of low armor units, treat any other spear infantry as a lesser version of Hoglites when it comes to counters but also specially vulnerable to Swordpigs. Meanwhile, Axepig, Swordpig and Battleswines can be thought of a lesser version of Porcus when it comes to countering them on a defensive siege.
Breaches are Tight[]
As of the date of this writing, 22/04/2023, only one squad at a time can go through a Wall breach at a time, with all other squads in the same formation using that wall breach pilling on and waiting while the rest of squads from other formations idling and walking around outside the walls until they get their chance to go through one wall breach, which usually means using the same couple of breaches already created.
The implications of this is that only one or two enemy squads will enter your fort at a time, and that makes your defensive melee units inside the fort a magnitude stronger than expected due to charge mechanics. When charged the defending squad only gets a 'defense' against one squad, and an already engaged squad gets no 'defense' against any other squads charging it as a follow-up which leads to all the mass kills from a charge without any losses for the charging squad.
Which leads us to:
The Deletion Squad[]
The deletion squad is the power move that trumps all moves during a defensive siege. I hate the existence of deletion squads but as long as it does having it be a secret of a few only worsens the problem and shedding light onto it might bring changes.
A Deletion Squad is a moderately large group of high mass high reach melee Squads that sit protected from enemy ranged fire on your fort as the last line of defense between your ranged and the pointy things of your evildoers. Any high mass high reach unit does the job, but Camephract, Cataphract, and to a lesser extent Hoglites will do the job. A high mass is important, so it gets the largest charge bonus possible and a high reach, so it kills the receiver of the charge before it takes any losses, guaranteeing the lowest losses per charge possible.
Before you have access to those units, any group of melee squads will do the same with a lesser effectivity with spear units doing better than others, with 5 unshielded snouts squads being able to kill five times as many Axes and Eagles trickling in through a breach.
The Problem with Islands[]
Embark forts are strong and always have been, but with the changes to warfare protecting your population from genocide became far more crucial, rendering most natural islands a horrible early fort as they lack the range to protect any houses placed by the shore.
Natural islands still make for an amazing asset for the late game once they can be developed into a last stand against an Occupy action. Due to the massive penalty to armor of embarked units, these last stand forts can house your government buildings and just be a general pain for anyone trying to siege you down.
For tips on how to use islands and embark forts read May's Guide to Advanced Fortifications
Death Patrols from the Fog[]
Patrols are your automated, and mostly smart, defenders of CS and Claims. They will stop weak scouting parties from even spotting your real troops positions and slow extremely committed attacks down to a crawl of one cs taken per day if you do your job well enough.
The best use of patrols is with fast shock units, aka cavalry, but specifically Heavy Cavalry doing it the best, with Elephants and Mammoths doing a slower but equally good job, just more akin to Light Cavalry.
However, as it comes getting cav is hard due to the early game scarcity of horses and camels, but specially their prohibitive cost to those in a budget, and just outright impossible before midway through copper age. For that reason, it's important to keep note of certain sizes of other units that make for a Reach 2 patrol, which means a formation with speed 4 or less. You can achieve that with 13 Axes, Eagles, Warriors, Topilis, Snouts, Better Snouts, Spearpigs or Longswords.
Using Patrols[]
Raise patrols of enough size to stop anything they throw at it up to the Strength Threshold you've set but beware, strength is not a universal measure of power as some units just do better against others so swords going into your spears will still win very hard and preparing for these cases takes a lot of being aware of your aggressor and what he can and will field. Changing up your patrols based on their units isn't always feasible, but you should seek to do it whenever you can afford to and have the materials for it.
When setting up your patrols use a small part of your formations as Enemy in Range and the remaining as Enemy Attacks so when your attacker checks for a patrol by only walking in with a small formation he won't see the true size of your defensive squad, it also stops scouting moves by small weak formations. Meanwhile, the true force will defend your cs from occupation, so they can't easily tie down your patrols on Enemy in Range and start sieging down a path to your RC or starving your industry.
Once you've set your patrols keep in mind that smaller infantry squads do much worse than larger ones due to the bonus to skill per 5 units in a squad, thus your 10 squads of 13 axepigs patrolling will do deceptively worse than expected even losing to 100 axepigs in 5 full squads thus adjust your strength threshold accordingly, this is just a cost you have to pay for not having cavalry, a very heavy cost at that.
Ending the Threat[]
As a defender, all you need to do to win a war and thus war reparations is kill enough of your enemy units in positive exchanges before they finish their objective and win. But if you want to either end it faster or forever, you will have to go and fight on your aggressor's land.
Taking the Fight to Them[]
During a Defensive War of any type you get access to the now unique to defenders action Sack which is just a vengeance button, it will burn down a ridiculous number of houses in an RC, pretty much for as long as they survive doing it, or if unopposed it stops at 50 buildings. This is the ultimate genocide button, which allows a defender to outright delete their aggressor if they don't surrender in time.
With said action, you can target your aggressor industrial material CS and breeding cs, where they'll get their extra actives to fuel the army losses every war brings. You'll first need to identify their primary industry, then find where they get the materials and burn down those CS or outposts as well as the fattest cs populations you can find to deplete the supply of new recruits.
For said revenge campaign, you'll need formations strong enough to either not trigger autodefense or beat the autodefense and still sack the tile with the survivors.
For help at offensive moves go to May's Comprehensive Guide to Murder