I did a settlement experiment and set a few of them up with 600+ defenses, building a perimeter with heavy gun turrets and putting some up high in the center, like heavy laser and rockets along with inaccessible generators to power them.

I prefer to actually fight the battles but the game doesn't give me the chance most of the time. I either don't get the alert or miss it since it is a micro-second long popup box. Sure enough and soon enough on one of my experimental settlements, I get the dreaded "Abernathy defense mission failed" popup. I must have missed the mission quest on that one. When I went there, despite massive amounts of defense, I got the same result as having little to no defense - every single turret broken, every single generator broken, every single water pump broken, every single crop burned. Having a large defense is not only useless in defending a settlement for auto-resolved battles, it creates a large chore to repair everything when it inevitably gets 100% torched.

Another buggy behavior I notice is that the "break script" or whatever breaks all your equipment and crops seems to be lazy. Sometimes I arrive and everything is working even though the pipboy says 0 defense, 0 water, etc... Then as I do the rounds on the perimeter, I notice equipment I had checked a moment ago and was working, does not work now. Worse, I notice as I go around the perimeter repairing everything, when I get back to where I started some of the turrets are broken again! I think the "break script" is lazy and kind of continues on in the background even while you are fixing things.

Considering when I do get the opportunity to defend a settlement and fast travel there, the attackers spawn inside it in the same place every time, a robust set of defenses seems a waste.

I suspect all those issue will be fix by modding community

I put a generator in the middle os an entirely closed off building I made.
Then constructed another entirely enclosed building around that one.
I would have had to use the workshop to take down two wall section to reach the genrator.
I did all this "just to see" what would happen if the town was attacked, and ignored.
You guessed it...When I went back after the attack, the genrator that could not even be seen, heard, or accessed, needed to be repaired.

This was when I lost the urge to build settlements.
They are nothing but useless filler.
There for only decoration.
And, all they do is keep taking up space in my mission log.

Death to the Minutemen! (lol)

Honestly, I almost ALWAYS help out settlements that get attacked, just because.

I wish I could! I think a lot of the times I don't get a notification, I just see on the workshop pipboy menu that a settlement has all 0's that shouldn't. Sometimes when I go there it is fine, the pipboy is wrong for some reason, but other times the settlement is actually torched.

The few times I either get the alert or notice it and fast travel in, I find the battles aren't that fun. The band spawns inside the camp right next to where you fast travel in and it is just a basic free for all fire-fight at that point.

I do look forward to the mods to fix the problems and extend the capabilities. These settlements are an interesting idea.

i travel with preston garvey as a companion and this seem to be the only way to know if settlements are being attacked or not or need help it gets really frustrating, wish they could have just made a mission to create a transmitter for the settlements you could carry around on your own.

and the biggest question of them all is where are the rest of the minuet men???? i cant be the only one in the entire common wealth capable of protecting one settlement with 2 people in it with a couple dozen tatos growing...........

It's called Radio Freedom >_>

Yeah...IF you like to have a fiddle blaring in your ear the entire time you play.

I think that person meant a radio more like a military/police radio for dipatching the player to where they are needed.

I'm in two minds about this.

On the basic programming side it feels a bit buggy. It seems you just get a destroyed settlement if you fail to turn up, and like several I have missed a few alarms. On the Data>Workshop tab you get some misinformation on settlements so it can be hard to see where the danger lies.

On the other hand, the? Commonwealth is a dangerous place and I, a lone sniper, can decimate a Gunner encampment in seconds, it only seems fair that settlements suffer the same fate at the hands of my enemies. There's something about returning to a settlement to find it a smouldering ruin that's strangely fitting to the Fallout setting... even if you have given it a 600 defense rating!?

Exactly! I like Diamond Radio even if it is repetitive. The fiddle music is fine for a 20 minutes or so but would be torture to listen to 100% of the time just to get your alert.

All valid points. From a practical perspective though, the repairing is tedious. Above all, the game should be fun. And it would seem rather brazen for a band of raiders to consider hitting a compound with a turret every few feet. I think there should be a lower probability of attack with more defense, as well as less damage (e.g. the attackers got wiped before they got too far). But that would be for the mods I guess.

I in house all my one it looks like one big house I built walls all around it and then roofed it all with one door at the beige and as you walk in thay meet about 16 turits fireing at them so I simply bottle neck them so thay only one way in and one way out off the place works well

Touch wood, I've never had this problem in the 3 settlements I've worked on so far, not even had a single turret or generator need repairing. Got about 200 defence in my big one and at least 100 defence in the other two so not mega amounts.

Also never seen raiders or whatever inside the settlement walls, just bodies outside. When I am there, attacks only last seconds. I've put about 150 hours in so far.

It takes a while, I didn't see any when I had just a few. I think it is just random chance but if you have more settlements, there is a greater chance one of them will be hit. Thankfully it has not been frequent, maybe 1 every 10 hours of play time with 20 settlements or so going.

I have had plenty of occasions when my carefully-planned defences turned out to be useless after one of those "Failed to defend a settlement that you didn't even know was under attack" messages, but on the other hand there have also been times when I've returned to Sanctuary and the settlers started saying things like "we showed those raiders that we aren't an easy target," even though I wasn't aware of any recent attack. I have also found dead raiders near the big tree in Sanctuary, so I think that there are auto-resolved raids where the defences do work but without any notification you'd never know.

The whole thing is implemented very badly though, and as I've said before, the teams who developed the settlement/building side of the game should be jumping up and down about their hard work being so badly compromised. Unless this is the best that they could do, in which case they should be outsourced.

One time, after I got up from sleeping in the castle, a squad of nothing but charred feral ghouls attacked. It was around 12 or so of them.

WTF??? Charred feral ghouls? I thought those were only in the glowing sea or other high level areas?

Also, even when I "fail" to protect a settlement, when I go there, everything is perfectly fine. Although I have noticed something, I'm missing supplies in my workshop when I try to build crap even though I have 20 supply lines all connected ultimately to the castle and all my settlements combined have over 30 people working on scavenge stations.