I said stragglers. Not a second wave of attackers.

The bloatflies engage everybody, so that doesn't help the scattering situation all that much.

Enemy base doesn't have to respawn right exactly at that very moment. Just has to be populated some time before the attack so they join in when the fighting drifts near to them.

And what are those "stragglers" exactly? Part of the original group of settlement attackers? Or nearby raider groups? Someone else? If my settlers go chasing fleeing attackers and leave the settlement open, there will NOT be any enemies nearby to attack it. That's because if they were near, my settlers would've detected them and dealt with them already before leaving the settlement open. You're asking me to believe that some enemies out there are so far away that my settlers can't detect them, and when my settlers are away, they come right in and attack the settlement. That's just an impossible scenario that I've never seen happen. If my settlers can't detect the enemies, those enemies can't detect the presence of my settlement either.

To your point about the respawn of nearby enemy camp, I would say those respawn may not be nearly as tough as the settlement attackers. Settlement attackers level up with you, but those respawns don't. So it should be a lot quicker for settlers to deal with the latter than the former. That means when the settlement is attacked, the nearby enemy camp is usually no longer populated -- and even if they are populated, they don't pose a great danger. Again, all of this is predicated on having a large and well-armed population in your settlement.

OFFS. I'm not asking you to believe any such thing.

STRAGGLER: Someone who has strayed or become separated from the group.

1. Any personnel, vehicles, ships, or aircraft which, without apparent purpose or assigned mission, become separated from their unit, column, or formation.

The Map Never Lies:

You're wrong. I had a vanilla game spawn ghouls inside and outside of the house near the bridge and seawall.

I tested houses at the end of the Cul de sac with settlement raiding mods, and literally the houses were jam packed with synths, raiders, BOS, Mutants, and Gunners.

Currently, there is no CK, therefore, the maker of settlement raid mod could not have placed independent spawn points there now could he?

You're obviously too busy being a smart-alecky to answer my question: what GROUP do these stragglers straggler from, pray tell? The original group of attackers, or some other attackers that come in later? We have long established that settlement attackers spawn near or inside the settlement. So how likely is it for your settlers to lose track of them, since settlers can detect enemies hundreds of feet/meters away? If they are busy fighting enemies near or inside the settlement, then they simply WON'T move away from the settlement. Thus, the scenario you described simply won't happen (unless, of course, you have too few settlers). And if that won't happen, your central theory of an unguarded settlement left "open to attack" has been dunked. And that the mobility of the settlers is not a negative, but a positive.

Ok, now you're just trolling.

You know exactly what "straggler" means by now, even if we assume that you didn't before. Yet you insist on repeating your "second wave" strawman and making settler AI sound like they're perfect super soldiers.