Instead of losing most (if not all ( settlers, you should lose some turrets when you fail to defend an attack and maybe one settler. Then when you run out of defense, you lose settlers,

had my first attack last night

on sanctuary, only noticed cause was looking at quests and happened to notice it under miscellaneous quests, i never saw any notice for this? really need to make sure to tell us beth!!

anyways fast traveled back to watch my 178 defense and 19 very heavily armed and armoured settlers laugh at 6 bottom lvl weak as super mutants (i have mama murphy in power armour with mini gun, is funny and amuses me)

i didnt fire a shot was completely unnecessary, they got utterly slaughtered

if i hadnt "been there" would they have seriously lost against that weak pathetic attack? really need to fix that

I'm not sure I could do the first, but the next two are possible.

I've seen these values before on these boards. Where do you find them? I did not see them listed in FO4Edit as globals nor do I find them in the console as game state variables. I see you've said they came form the Castle, but where and how exactly did you find them?

One bug with I found was that when I was in sanctuary their was a raider just standing there he was green ( non hostile) walking around my settlement I went up to him and hit X to talk then he turn red and started to attack me but my turrets rip him apart it would seem that's how he got pass my defense when I wasn't there

I like that Idea, I made a new character because of my settlements being attacked. That one is level 80 and literally every 5 minutes a settlement needs help or is under attack and half the time I don't see the notification.

But as the other person said, how with almost 200 defence can my settlements never successfully defend themselves without me being there. They all have armour, they all have weapons, they have a stupid amount of defences. But an attack from a mere handful of raiders cannot be repelled unless I go there and kill them myself. >.<

All the attacks - it is annoying. So much so that I'm thinking of restarting and avoiding the MM completely. Just run straight to Good Neighbor or Diamond City right out of the vault.

The defenses have very few uses in settlements and in fact too many of them creates an awful chore.

I've got about 150 hrs in the game and have had around a dozen attacks, most I did not get any warning. All settlements have significant defense, walls, turrets on the walls, centralized rocket and heavy laser turrets, etc... It makes absolutely no difference what you put in there. But putting more in is more stuff you then have to fix when the "break script" runs which I think just stupidly codes "break everything in settlement".

The hypothesis floating around that high defense minimizes chance of attack is wrong. I have done tests and put a monstrous amount of defenses in a few settlements (600+) and they were hit in no time (with no warning message in 2 of the cases!). In each case, every single turret was broken, every single generator was broken, every single water pump and crop destroyed. In one I even enclosed some gens behind walls/ceiling with no opening and no way to get to the gen and every single one of them needed to be repaired also.

There are two very small uses for the defenses: (1) when the very infrequent two headed deer, raider, or scorpion spawns outside the settlement while you are there, the turrets will take care of them. (2) when you do respond to a settlement under attack, the enemies spawn INSIDE your camp, so any defense pointed in will help dispatch them. But any defense you set up on the perimeter pointed out or "choke-points" etc.... do nothing to help in that situation.

For me the settlement attacks are the height of anti-fun. There's lots of tedious repairing broken things and when I do get to respond and head off an attack, its a very uninteresting 5 second free-for-all battle that negates all the defenses I set up. I like the addition of settlement so I am hoping Bethesda makes some changes and look forward to mods that will fix this.

To answer the ops question, most definitely the defenses are almost entirely useless. A practical defense strategy would be to just put 4-8 very heavy turret guns high up in the middle of the settlement. That's all you need. Anything else is just for looks and may cause you lots of tedious work.

I think one of the problems is that the natural inclination is to point gun turrets outward. Obviously in the real world this is what would make sense, but given that enemies can spawn within the perimeter, it might help to point some turrets inward toward the settlement. Basically every time I've had to go defend a settlement the turrets have been useless because everyone is inside of their perimeter already. I might have to try that.