I too have had them die, but I suspect what is happening is that they are getting damaged by a hostile NPC, and then friendly fire from a turret kills them. Protected means: they can go to nearly zero health but not any lower, EXCEPT by damage from the player. Seems "turrets" count as player

As for the "Help! We're beign attacked by two bloat flies! Come save us Sole Survivor!" settlement defense issues . . .

I'm as annoyed by it as anyone else, but not knowing how much of an effort it was to bring this into their development in the first place I won't place too much criticism for its deficiencies. It is a pretty big step I think and it is effectively transforming this franchise from a character-driven largely static world game to one which has the elements of a builder/strategy or tactical game.

Hopefully they will remediate the deficiencies in a DLC, but even if they don't the mods that this opens up are bound to be astoundingly good. With mods now projected to be available (eventually) for both consoles that is good news for all of us!

I am not sure what I have done with my settlements but I have not had a defense quest for a long time. I _have_ had little "mini-attacks" that ended almost immediately several times while I was visiting a settlement but no popup "Settlment is under attack" for a long time.

I suppose it might be that I have ~150 defense ratings at most of them? Or it might be that I no longer live in Sanctuary and rarely interact with Preston or the Abernathys or Tenpines (where most of the "rescue, etc." quests seem to come from?).

For a while I thought it was the fact that I was keeping my settlement footprints really small, like literally turrets, shops, buildings, stairs, crops for 20 settlers all packed inside a palisade so densely it could almost not get any more packed in. But I've subsequently expanded the palisade on several of them and no obvious change in the frequency of attacks.

In other play throughs I was getting spammed with them alot, but not this one.

If we had a better notification alert then it wouldn't be so bad

The things I listed are just what I and many others found to work. If it works then you just do it. The spacing beds issue helps with the pathing, obviously. I am not in the business of programming the AI's pathing after all, I am a gamer trying to deal with game issues as best as I can. And giving good advice to others with similar issues - the things I mentioned will help people if they do them all till their issue appears to vanish. This is all we have.

No they are in fact protected. This is not an anecdotal claim. It's a very easy thing to open FO4Edit and see "EncWorkshopNPC..."s flagged as protected. Only you (or friendly fire maybe) can kill them, Anthropoid might be right but I haven't test that yet. I'm pretty sure if a car explodes because of you it will kill them but I'm not sure about turrets, easy way of testing it has to be with the missile ones.

Yeah, tried that already. Unfortunately it has yet to work, hopefully the next patch will sort it out.

Haha, that's crazy enough it just might work.

In my game Tenpines' happiness fluctuates between 30 and 80. Not sure what's going on...

There's a bed under a roof for every settler and one for me. There's excess food and water production. There's a few radios and a pool table for entertainment. And there's all four stores that are supposed to increase happiness. Defense is probably at 160 - 180.

I gave up on Tenpines...

Check if there are any TVs there and if there are try removing them, for some reason they tend to cause a bug that can drop your happiness levels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuKX7MvQYcc

Nope. No TVs.

Other than the radios the only other things I have placed that uses power is the recruitment beacon (switched off), lights and ceiling fans, and a spotlight turret (which does not seem to work).

No idea then, sorry. Removing TVs worked for me when I was getting unwarranted happiness drops. Hope you sort it out.

It may be a bit of a nitpick, but I don't think it's entirely accurate to say that the defenses themselves are useless. My defenses at Sanctuary are enough to utterly destroy anything that even tries to come close to it without my permission, and in a matter of a few seconds. What's really stupid is the game mechanic that requires you to actually be there for them to work. This was a bad move on their part in my opinion. I get that they think it would be fun to have to actually defend your settlements, and sometimes it is. I love getting to see my defensive system in action sometimes. But arriving there to protect it should be optional. The notification should pop up and you should have a given length of time to get there. When this time expires, you should get a notification saying "your defense network at Sanctuary has successfully repelled the attackers"...and sometimes even "your defensive network at Sanctuary has failed to repel the attackers" in the event of your defenses not being up to the task. I'm totally okay with having some kind of gamble involved in not showing up. But to be absolutely -required- to be there was a bad choice on the part of the developers in my opinion.

This requirement just destroys the realism of what I've built. Take the Castle for example. I have a defense rating of about 600 there. There are rocket launchers, heavy lasers, and spotlights lining the walls, and they're all connected to a terminal for even more effectiveness. There are heavy machinegun turrets, shotgun turrets, and more spotlights on the ground on the outside of the walls. I have (I think) 28 settlers there, who are all equipped with army fatigues, army helmets, full suits of sturdy combat armor, and an array of heavily modded combat rifles, combat shotguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles, and even one with a heavily modded rocket launcher. After the time I've spent with them, the Minutemen is undoubtedly the absolute most powerful faction in the Commonwealth. You're telling me that they can't repel a dozen raiders unless I'm physically there? This really breaks immersion for me.

Sometimes I'm just wandering around and exploring, collecting whatever random salvage I can find, clearing out random raider/super mutant encounters, and not really doing anything of actual importance. If I get a notification about a settlement attack while doing this, I'm generally glad to go help repel the attackers. It gives me something to do. However, if I'm at settlement A and I just finished gearing up to head out and tackle a quest, the last thing I want to do is put that on hold to go defend settlement B on the other side of the map. This is honestly one of my only complaints about the actual game mechanics of Fallout 4. It seems to almost defeat the purpose of having the defenses in the first place. If I'm there personally, I'm more than capable of taking down any attackers that could show up. If this was an optional thing in the way I described above, I would have absolutely no complaints about it.

For people looking on how to build a decent Settlement, this guy did a thing. On Imgur, search for Fallout 4: Guide & Tips for Settlement Riches!

Sorry, I can't post Links right now.

In regards to the 'Settlement X is under attack' stupidity, yes, it is stupidity. If the Settlement has the right defences, after three or four invasions, word should get around that Settlement X is impregnable and the Raiders and Gunners will decide to look elsewhere, or form a massive army to try and take over the Settlement.

Yeah, you heard me. Take. Over. The. Settlement. All those delicious turrets ... we can reprogram them, why can't the enemies?

Ideally, we'll either get a Patch or a MOD that will allow us to build 'Forts' in key locations, ideally Settlements or locations central to specific regions within the map where we can build a Settlement, but populated solely by Minutemen, BoS troops or Synths, and if a Settlement within the region where the Fort is located comes under attack, the troops can move out to defend on their own.

Naturally, this will cost resources, we'll have to supply all the weapons and armor for the troops as well as chems, meds and food.

Then it's not such a huge loss if the Settlement gets attacked. If you want to go defend and ensure a full 100% victory, no structures damaged, woo, go you. Otherwise, you're relying upon your defences and the equipment of your troops to see the Settlement through.

Also, having the Settlement able to repair their own damages by deducting materials from your stores, especially useful with the Local Leader Perk, would help keep the Sole Survivor adventuring to ensure there's always a small mountain of goodies for the Settlers to use for minor repairs and replacement of damaged crops.

The whole 'teleporting enemies INTO the Settlement' angle is also mindlessly stupid. If I surround my Settlement with Junk-Walls and fence-posts wedged into the gaps between those to force the enemy to funnel in through the front gate and the tiered ranks of shotgun-turrets I've built, then unless we're talking Institute Synths being teleported past my defences, the invading force should be forced to enter in the only gap in those defences.

The ball has really been dropped in a few key portions of this game, and the flaws in the Settlement Building system are sadly the most glaringly obvious.