I spent a night an built a wall around Sanctuary. The following day they got attacked by Gunners who spawned within the settlement. Ok, learned that building a wall around the settlement doesn't do anything. Does having successful settlements affect the gameplay beyond their immediate area? The only affect i've seen directly is if my water plant and generators get destroyed. I was planning on building out two more settlements and maybe developing the co-op area - but now I am just thinking i'll drop a few turrets and call it a day.

Thoughts on settlements?

Settlements are completely optional. You really do not have do anything beyond setting up Sanctuary with beds, food and water. Bethesda actually recommended players should devote much attention to settlements until after the main quest has been completed because they take a lot of resources to build especially if you (like me) want to surround your settlements with a wall.

Due to the size of Sanctuary, I decided to simply place two guard posts and around 24 heavy turrets at various locations. Apparently that was enough to defeat two deathclaws while I was focusing on crafting weapons not too far from where the fight was taking place. I heard the gun fight, but I thought it was just raiders.

I estimate that to develop Sanctuary that is fully walled in and have "proper" buildings I would need to devote about 2x more resources I have sunk into Tenpines, Outpost Zimonja, Abernathy Farm Starlight Diner and Graygarden combined.

It's not that it doesn't do anything. Walls are an excellent way to corral and funnel enemies. Sanctuary, in particular, seems to have a number of interior spawn points (the big tree, between you old house and the neighbor, near the river) as well as the usual at the bridge and down the hill near the bend in the river. Me, I limit my actual settlement to the interior section around the workshop building and close by and use the rest of the land for other purposes. I don't worry too much about the farm area as you can always expand that and I make sure that my turrets are well protected as well.

A trick I found that worked very well for me was to build gates just past the foundation next to the Workshop building and between my old house and the workshop building and use both defensive towers and protected turrets along with walls to make choke points. leading to those. Between the two towers on either side of the gate, the turrets and the choke points with well armed settlers, I'm doing allright. Yesterday, we had an attack by 5 Deathclaw that spawned near the bridge. They headed right up towards the main gate but ended up being funneled to the two sides since there was a tower in front of the gate as well as two on either side along with turrets and the walls that forced them to come in from the sides, between the two heavy turrets, both guards and 1/2 a dozen settlers with mini-guns and muskets, it was short work. I've also found that, as long as you can keep your enemies off balance, equipping your guards with Molotovs actually buys time for the other settlers to get in to place.

I do have to give a shoutout to Jun and Sturges on the towers and Preston for rallying the troups just inside the gate. The did a great job.

Settlements can make you a decent amount of caps but you do have to build up to it. Personally I have never seen attackers spawn inside my base however what I have seen is them glitch there way through my wall, gate, or building. Walls are useful if you happen to be at the settlement when it is attacked but seem useless if you are not there cause they will all be inside once you fast travel to the base. What I do now is point all my defenses inward and have them mostly around my food, water, and power. The worse is when one or more attackers get stuck underground, they can still attack and destroy things but I am powerless to stop them since I cant target them. I am looking forward to modders fixing the settlement system.

I put a wall around the majority of the light house. Went there once and the turrets were firing at the wall and though the gate I put there was wide open the glowing deathclaw on the other side just seemed to get confused and ran off.

I don't get this "if you're not there" stuff. My settlers are constantly leaving bodies about when I return to them. Just yesterday, there were the bodies of 4 raiders and a deathclaw just outside the gates of my Red Rocket compound. I'm assuming my paltry 4 settlers killed them, but it could have been my junkyard dog.

It is only worth it when one builds with the http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1478/?. I can not understand why people spend hours/days/weeks and a lot of effort, trial and error to build stuff that looks like total junk. Yes, it is Fallout, but it still looks like junk. The Institute set actually makes the settlement look like a civilised place to live in. Now, if only I can scrap all the buildings in Sanctuary easily without using the "click and 'markfordelete' everywhere" method.

I totally hate walls, because:

1. It takes too much time to do it.


2. Walls can not actually keep intruders out ingame.


3. Walls are invulnerable, when they should be easy to blow up or make a hole to create a gap for the invading force to enter.

I don't like turrets either because they're immobile and the turrets that're actually good take time to set up due to the power requirements. But they're much better than walls.

I use the http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/5787/? mod, however the robots themselves are not very good, especially Sentry bots that blow up when destroyed. The mod itself is great, and I'm very thankful to the modder because the mod cut down the time wasted on wiring stuff, etc.

ya know it's weird I rarely get any attacks on my settlements. The only ones that have any defense are hangman alley and sanctuary. now I really don't have allot of people in any of my settlements.

hangman is weird, i never did anything with it - yet it has around 11 residents. I added 1 small pump and a couple corn plants, happiness hangs around 15% But there are always people there.

Hangman's Alley seems to be the ideal recruiting spot, can barely go a day without a couple of noobs showing up.

I build walls anyway, cos they look cool.

Really? For the Love of God, remaining few meters to I finish my Sanctuary′s wall and now I'm aware of it.

Jesus Chirst....................all that work.

The whole "enemies-spawning-inside-the-town" thing only seems to happen at Sanctuary, perhaps due to the ENORMOUS build area (easily 2 or 3x the size of any other).

My other walled settlements don't have this problem. At Starlight, for example, they tend to spawn by the train bridge, about 100 yds. outside the build zone.

Nope, there are many more Settlements with that Problem. Hangmanns Alley, Sanctuary, Albernathy Farm, Zimonja, Tenpines, Coastal Cottage, Greentop....

I'm so proud of my new character's Sanctuary settlers. There are 9 beings living there, though only 8 are counted as residents. (Dogmeat or Codsworth probably isn't counted.) I've been building things up very slowly and there is much more to be done, but I had installed 3 guard towers with sirens near the Old North Bridge, near the bridge to Vault 111 and near the big tree. I have a settler guard that patrols all three and she is equipped with leather armor and a sub machine gun. I've given everyone else double barrel shotguns and most have road leathers and leather armor. (Eventually I will upgrade them but my character is still fairly low level.)

Well I came in one night to drop off some things when I heard gunfire and then the siren went off. A stunted Yao guai was attacking near the vault bridge! I've been replacing mailboxes with the smaller turrets and those started going off. Everyone in the town ganged up on the creature and the siren was still going. Then Jun Long started shooting at something and it was another one! They all ganged up on it too with turrets going off everywhere. It was so great!

I don't know if the second one spawned inside or it just ran past somehow and I'd missed it. It was night and dark, so was hard to see.

Two of the turrets got destroyed, though one of them repaired itself. I'm waiting to see if the other one repairs itself too before I spend materials on it.

I'm so happy that my settlers didn't let me down and really banded together to protect the town.

Hangman's Alley does seem to have the highest population growth rate, though this might be done to reflect the fact that Diamond City is literally just around the corner. Great place to ship out people to other settlements that have very slow growth rates. Building in this location is a PITA though.

Well, I thought I was putting up walls because I was living in the past. But using walls to create bottlenecks which can be covered by a fire corridor works almost as well as setting up a nice little crossfire covering the zones where hostiles tend to congregate if they get the run of the place.