if you think that's bad... once, I helped a settler by saving his friend from raider, and once I got there, she stood up with full armor, and flashed her CHAIN GUN! how the hell do you get kidnapped with a freaking CHAIN GUN?! yeah.... settlers are useless.....

The best thing to do is wipe out any settlements that need help. It's clear the settlers are all plebs and don't deserve the frozen-vault-messiah's love.

It needs to be an optional thing. When a settlement defense notification pops up a timer should initiate giving you time to get back there to help defend it...if you want to. You should also just be able to ignore it and let your defenses do their job, at the risk of possibly losing a settler or two or having your defenses broken. But you shouldn't be required to be there. It's really pretty stupid. I have a minimum of 200 defense at every single settlement on the map. Most of them are over 300, and my main settlements are over 600. All I have to do is fast travel back there, hang out for a few seconds until the enemies get obliterated by lasers and missiles, and then I'm done. This is simple, but it takes a while. I've either gotta walk potentially all the way across the map, or fast travel back. Then either walk back to where I was, or fast travel to location close to where I was and then walk back. This can take a sizable chunk of game time especially for the people (like myself) that play mostly without fast travel. It's a poorly constructed game mechanic and it's really one of the only major complaints I have about the structure of the game.

Could be an idea for Bethesda to make it so that a settlement is only 'attacked' when you are actually there (in the settlement boundaries) or within a certain radius of the settlement - would save all this fast travel nonsense back to a settlement that really didn't need your help and let you get on with the game - simples

yup

it's a feature designed around fast traveling and that's annoying :/

completely destroys all the immersion

I don't even think that is an excuse.

It is just a poorly implemented feature. Hopefully they will fix in in a DLC, but if not mods will probably help. I for one am planning to try my hand at 'fixing' this aspect of settlements thought now that I'm seeing how full my plate is with coursework this semester, I may not manage to be as productive with modding as I had imagined back in December.

If you are on PC you should try the Settlement Raid Mod at the Castle or Starlight and type in CRI or DRI. That's the hardest attack tier but 27 settlers could perhaps win.

Hmm, so far, not being asked to do such a Minuteman quest like that, I keep well away from the guy, and only have three, undeveloped settlements that are not worth the raider's effort.... maybe that's the answer... leave the settlement not-worth-it to attack, nothing there. I put a couple of turrets there of course.

I really hope some skillful modders give the whole settlement (incl defense) mechanic an overhaul. There is so much potential there.

Or maybe even a settlement DLC. Would be perfect. More Sims™ please!

here is something strange except for3 supermutants carrying missile launchers i never but never had one of my settlements attacked and those supermutants got blown up by my defenses in less than 3 seconds

combination of heavy machiengunturrests and missilelunchers

except for defending the castle which is a mainquestlune mission i never had the pleasure defensing a settle ment from anything bigger than a bloatfly flyin to vlose to my settlements

i do not even bother with guards any more i just build this 3 story defence tower per settlement these days

I'm fine with that, but there could be 2 types of attack notifications:

1. Settlement was attacked, but the settlers defended bravely. (No change to defenses required.)

2. Settlement is being attacked, but needs your help. (You'll have to visit, and beef up defenses.)

I think that would make a lot of difference, and give a sense of progress once you get a settlement self-sufficient defensively.

Oh, BTW - and someone else said this first - we need a nag message when a settlement needs our help as the notifications are easy to miss. We're constantly nagged if we are carrying 1 unit of weight too much, but if a whole settlement is attacked we get one shot to read the notification.

If they do not attack Diamond City, it is fair that they do not attack me. I downloaded a mod which finishes with the attacks and I'm happy as well.

They do attack Diamond City, though. I walk in on those fights all the time.

i'm afraid you're mistaken.

i ignored when sanctuary hills was attacked. after the quest said "failed", my settlement had only 3 persons. those 3 essentials, the rest were wiped out.

it's [censored] having turrets, guards with laser and plasma weapons to be defeated by a bunch of crappy enemies if i'm not there...

what's the point of having turrets and equipping the settlers if YOU NEED TO BE THERE to defend those people?

if i'm needed to be there, even having a fortress like defense, i'm sorry but it's a stupid system

There has to be a formula, calculating the chances against the type of enemies and the number thereoff. Right now, you can just stand by and watch while the attack is destroyed. But if you're not there, you surely lose. Inn fact, the wisest course of action is to just stand by, since you can kill settlers. And if some of these dorks happen to step into your line of fire, the whole population turns against you.

ig you give them enought weapons. build walls around the whole place you want your base to be. you give them the best turrets you can get and they still need your help, then i'm sorry but they deserve to die, because it's being too incompetent to live in this world.

I have not seen this: settlers dying as a result of the attacks, and you might be the only one, in which case you might be mistaken.

Generally what happens when you "fail" to help them is that some stuff gets damaged.

I'm not sure that telling developers what they made is "stupid" is ever a good idea (unless you want to get nothing out of them ever again), but I agree it is not yet fully functional and satisfactory

The point and the fun lies in giving the defenses meaning. You know, looking for the best overlapping firing lines of turrets, building choke points where enemies get stuck and the likes. Equipping your settlers with valuable gear to fend for themselves. But as it is, you can just slap

a few turrets into the landscape to raise the defense rating and be done with it.

There are certain locations I walled in. There's only one heavily guarded entrance. But no, that's only eye candy, since I saw attackers spawn smack in the middle of these settlements. How they're supposed to get there is anyone's guess.

So, right now, all of this is meaningless. Be there and win. Don't be there or miss the message and lose. That's all there is to the system.

Oh, I've seen it too. A few days ago, I decided to start over and connected a few settlements before even talking to Garlic or going to Concord for the group of walking nuisances. I had three settlers at Sanctuary and for some reason the game decided, it would be fun to let it be attacked by high level gunners. After that, I barely survived at that level, I was short of a settler. Took a couple of game days to find her lying in the undergrowth where the cooking station is located at the start.

huh?

almost all my settlers have died on attacks on the settlements, that I didn't bother joining

Well, I have not

It was my understanding that all settlers have the "Protected" flag. If that is the case, it should be impossible for them to be killed by other NPCs unless their deaths are scripted. Protected actors can be killed by the player character at any time, and apparently turrets, mines, or explosions caused by the player character (meaning turrets or mines that you place, explosions that result from a shot you fired, etc.) count as damage from the player character.

I have observed settlers exhibiting the characteristic "bleed out" mode animations when they are engaged in combat with hostile NPCs, so I am pretty confident that settlers do have the Protected flag at least some of the time. Not all settlers of course, but the ones that are residents of your allied settlements.

There are a number of possibilities for the discrepancies in our observations.

1. One of us is just plain wrong in what we have observed.

2. Settlers protected status is changed to normal while the player character is not in the cell

3. Else (and this would achieve the same effect) the scripted damage effects of failed "help settlement . . ." quests simply mark a settler or two or three as dead depending on the values being used in the script.

4. The deaths of settlers you are observing were caused by turrets, or other stationary actors (mines, tesla fields, etc.), which were placed there by the player character; as I said, it appears that these are equivalent to the player character in terms of causing lethal damage against protected actors.

I am new to FO4 and for one was really looking forward to building settlements and putting in the time and effort - and even rebuilding\repairing smaller weaker settlements following attacks that I could not be there for and trying to make them stronger and more strategic to deal better and better over time with attacks (so you actually are are rewarded in your time and effort spent making a settlement more powerful and strategically defensive) . And yes I would try to be there for an attack but if I am too far away I would like to think there would be some logic to the outcome of an attack if I am not there as I am a No-FastTravel purist.

From what I have read so far though it does seem that a majority despite their efforts of arming settlers to the teeth, placing turrets and or other defenses as strategically as possible and having a very high defense rating.......means d!ck

so I am now asking myself and other No-FastTravel purists.....what is the point of even bothering with what sounds like a typical Bethesda thing to do of sticking in something as a selling point to make us all at first go Ooo and Ahhh Cool, when actually from what I have just been reading SOUNDs LIKE (as I am only going on what most of you are saying) is nothing more than a new concept that is a basic, not even BETA, Work In Progress - that console players will never see it develop any further past its current state.

At least PC players will have at some point some Mods to make this a meaningful part of the game to venture into.

Console owners - Unless you aren't having any problems with settlement attacks that you are not present for, then you may as well play the game as if this aspect of it does not exist or matter. Play it as if it were a new Fallout 3!!

It doesn't even matter. If you completely ignore the warning, the next time you go there, everything might be leveled... But, give it a few days, and everything fixes itself. The only thing that changes is that you might hear a settler comment on how the "super mutants really handed it to them this time". Who cares, it's broken anyway. I just like to play builder, and dress 'em up. Everything else is so under-developed they shouldn't have bothered.

I'm on my third playthrough and I have yet to see one settler die. (unless the were an infiltrator) I've seen them go missing due to kidnapping, but only go into bleedout. The pipboy counter shows that the settlement has less people, but as we all know, the pipboy settlement interface is worthless.

I disagree that they "shouldn't have bothered," and have some 'sympathy' for the situation they find themselves in. They saw what modders did with FO3 and also Skyrim (FONV I would think too, though I'm not familiar with any of those mods) with plugins that allowed some degree of player input in "shaping" the environment. Tundra Defense being a prime example.

Until they released a working model of this "settlement" system in a large release, they had no way of knowing for certain how it would be received by users. It has taken all of us quite a while to come to the realization that . . . while the thing is very neat and shows great promise, as well as great core design, it needs tweaking, it needs additional features, and perhaps most importantly, it needs functions added that reaffirm to the player the "game play value" of all that building and fortifying they did.

It is far past an "alpha" version and at worst I would say is an advanced beta version, but the thing is: it is part of what is otherwise a gold version of a game, i.e., the one that was in truth ready for release. I think it was a very ballsy way to go about introducing it but the sort of "relatively high risk" strategy that had a high pay off. The settlement building is obviously, on the whole GIGANTIC hit.

Rather than getting lippy and derogatory about it being "less than beta" or "obviously broken" etc., I think the best attitude any of us can take is: "Wow, this is so cool but it really needs to actually work all by itself once you've set it up (and by that I mean, not just the defense, but possibly some other things too like repairing stuff, expanding crops maybe, MAYBE even adding some additional beds or rooms!). Could you guys do that for a DLC?"

I wasn't being lippy or derogatory from MY OWN personal viewpoint, but from the many viewpoints of others that I have read. Hence I said 'SOUNDS LIKE' to make that point.

I was using "Conjecture".

I was also hoping for some thoughts from other console-only players.