For Sanctuary Hills in particular. I naturally built SH as my first settlement. I didn't build a surrounding wall until a couple hundred of gameplay hours later. In that meantime, I was relying on automated turrets positioned on the rooftops and at the main entrance. It's now 300+ hours later and SH has yet to be attacked. I have had a half-dozen "We need your help!" missions, but no assaults like my other settlements endure.

Sanctuary for me is actually enclosed in a building, it was tricky but I managed to get a perfect wall around your house and the one across the road that has the workbench I then build it up 3 stories high and put a roof over it and built everything inside. the doors (at either end of the road) are covered by 6 rocket turrets a piece, and this has never not been enough.

but on my next playthrough I would like a more casual approach, so I have been trying to nail down the spawns for sanctuary. its tricky because I'm not always there and rocket turrets tend to toss bodies. but these are the locations I am SURE of:

-the path from vault 111 the leads into sanctuary.

-somewhere near the roundabout at the end of the road.

I have never seen any spawn "right in the middle" as others have claimed. and actually have never seen any use the main bridge into sanctuary. anyone that has any concrete spawns so I can update this or we can narrow it down feel free to chime in.

Someone's going to release a mod eventually that moves all of the spawn points outside of the settlements so walls actually have a legitimate use. I'm waiting for that.

Because Fallout 4 is an RPG and people are roleplaying.

Diamond City is the largest, safest settlement in all of the Commonwealth because of the walls around it.

Same goes for the major settlements in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. Guess what they all had in common? Walls. Or, in the case of Rivet City, a metal hull that's essentially still a wall.

I like walls because they actually work when placed in the right spot.

Take the Warwick(sp) location. Decent farm built on the grounds of an old sewage treatment center. It has plenty of water, plenty of dry ground and a very decent structure for people to live in. And its very defensible. Its only open from one direction and that is from the front.

I got tired of getting alerts stating this settlement was under attack. So I took note of where the enemy was spawning from when I fast traveled there. I then built a big steel wall and lined it with turrets.

Soon enough I got a message saying the settlement was under attack. I travelled there to find myself behind a row of spawned super mutants all lined up against the wall. Couldn't have been easier then if they were blind folded and tied to posts. It was like a firing squad. Them all lined up against the wall and me with my trusty rifle.

Walls work and are not just for show.

I've seen one attack inside, but that was radscorpions, so that made sense. What surprised me is that all attacks come from the south I think, not the ruin walls, but from the only working doors to the outside.


Now have 1 missile, 1 heavy laser, 2 heavy mg and 2 mg, (all mod 7 on mg) guarding that approach.


Last attack notice I got, arrived, waited, then heard a burst of fire that lasted about three seconds. Was, WTF?


Investigated, far down the path, found a pile of dead gunners, they didn't even have time to spread out.

Very nice on the bridge, I never paid attention to that area and didn't realize I could build that far out. Have to look at upgrading my bridge. With lights along the railing.

Walls correctly done can be really useful to the defense. For smaller settlements like Tenpines, I build a square of shack foundations around the settlement and then put wooden walls up around the perimeter. It's easy, it all snaps together, and NPC enemies can't cross it. There's no gate - instead there is a landing at the 'entrance' to the settlement on top of the wall. There are stairs that lead up from the outside and the inside, you can enter and leave.

I re-position the fast travel point to a safe spot within the walls, and then I festoon the entrance with turrets pointing directly at it. Raiders, supermutants, et al have to clump up and force themselves through a hail of bullets, lasers, and missiles. I rarely have to do much during a defense aside from loot.

Walls, pfff... Just try to attack my base raiders!

http://imgur.com/FuCrrUb

He said it was PS4 so I'm guessing no.

Damn dude (nibbles) that is fricking INSANE!

WELL-DONE

Unless you do it for aesthetic reasons, walling is a waste of time, resources and buillding space. If you're not physically present when an attack happens, the game provides you with an auto lose function, regardless of defences. If you're there, it's more or less a cakewalk without walls.

Unless you enjoy it, in which case it is time well spent.

You are also failing to understand how walls are useful to restrict movement and force enemies into kill zones, though your point about it being a "cakewalk" when you arrive is well taken.

The dynamics here could do with a bit of 'tweaking' to be sure. However, I'm not sure an "auto-defense" algorithm would be popular. There are plenty of strategy games that represent such things at both the tactical, opertional and strategic levels. But these algorithms, as far as I know, ALWAYS reduce down to a small set of quantitative arguments (or variables as I would call them in my past life) which get used in mathematical calculations (with some random numbers added in as moderators).

Beyond what is in place right now, I do not think it would be possible to "quantify" the defensive properties of a settlement as it is altered by building. A perfect Star shaped fort with elevated firing positions, interlocking fields of fire, and well-defined range markers should be many times as effective in defense as a ramshackle palisade with few turrets placed willy-nilly and very limited overlap in fields of fire, but one could use just as many "pieces" or materials to build the latter as the former, and how is the game engine supposed to know any different?

That's what I meant with aesthetic reasons. Everyone should do what they enjoy.

Not the point I was trying to make. There's no big strategy behind these attacks. So trying to fiddle with your defenses is rather useless - again, unless you do it for a different reason. You lose, if you're not there. You win, if you are there.

My weakness is rather happiness than defense ratings. Having learned that the game doesn't calculate your actual defenses and their placement, I concentrate my efforts on civilian structures.

Wow, that is one really short settler.

Very true. I get what you are saying now and I totally agree.

The problem though is, as I argued in my previous post, I do not think there is any way (any efficient way that is) to "quantify" the value of player made defenses, other than to "add up" the numeric values from the defensive items.

You could build the most brilliant fortress ever, with a design that allowed it to be effectively defended with a bare minimum of weaponry or troops. Ingenious fields of fire, the most elegant geometry ever seen in a fortification. Apart from some extremely complicated spatial anolytics, the game engine would have no way to discern the "value" of your brilliant fort and would be forced to assign it an equivalent "defense rating" in the auto-defense algorithm as an absolutely dumb design fort which simply used the same amount of materials and defensive items.

An "auto-resolve" defense algorithm is doable, and I could probably even write one myself if I learn how the FOSE works (which I will eventually). But an auto-resolve algorithm that actually takes account of the full defensive benefits from player ingenuity? Seems very unlikely.

Armored garden gnome. Very dangerous.

Walls I use, I stopped using gates as soon as I realized they are useless in an attack, they take up space and just get in the way. Of course in real life a gate could be shut and secured but in the Fallout world they are useless.

I really wish I could clear the surrounding area of tress, brush and debris. When setting up a fixed defense it is always good to completely clear an area around your fixed fortification so an attacker can be easily seen and has no cover when advancing on you. Also walls should be able to have murder holes etc in them. In real life walls served very well for centuries for protection and generally were only defeated by sieges, well until artillery made them easy to knock down.

As I said in another thread about defenses. This game, as it is, faces the same problem as Pillars of Eternity. Different genres, but in both cases, you are encouraged to build your own strongholds and make them work. And in both cases, it's ultimately meaningless what you build, since the game expects you to handle each and every trash mob by yourself. Otherwise you're losing something, since any mob, you would do away with in seconds, is able to destroy at least a few structures. So, go there and win, stay where you are and lose. The autocalculation simply isn't up to it's job.

Tear down this wall! If this game was online and I had to face other players, then yeah, I'd wall up every single settlement in fear of ninjas sneaking their way into my base. Otherwise, say no to walls, they only obstruct your aim.

Am I correct in assuming that the Defense rating does not reflect any of the residents' defensive capabilities?

I think I have Sanctuary set up with the formula of the Defense rating being slightly higher than the combined Food and Water ratings. However, I also have Strong and Codsworth there, plus Preston with his laser musket and at least one or two settlers to whom I gave some of the guns that I wasn't using any more. Similarly, the settlement with all the robots farming doesn't have that many turrets and an insanely high Food rating, but I'm assuming that the robots would all be able to use their lasers if anybody attacked them.

LOL. "Real life" gates and walls would simply be blown away. The whole "shut the gate and lock it" crap is for peacetime only.

Anyway, the command you are looking for is:

lock 1000

This thread has actually got me wondering now . . . WOULD it be possible to somehow quantify the defensive value of a particular arrangement of walls, weapons and defenders? I've been a strategy and tactics gamer for decades and in the course of all that play time I've read a good bit of military science. There certainly are a lot of "general principles" of good defenses freely at hand, but I don't recall ever encountering something like a rank ordering of what would comprise the "ideal" versus "less ideal" defensive arrangement (within any given technological context).

I suppose a rudimentary list could be dreamt up though:

1. Relative cover (defender vs. attacker) (not difficult to imagine, but how the game engine would "know" how to count up the cover available to attacker and that available to defender I cannot guess. I suppose one way would be if, the player has to define a perimeter, which would probably generally be a wall or some other sort of boundary. All the possible objects that obscure fire inside that perimeter [but only ones where firing outside the perimeter is possible] could be tallied up and same for all objects outside that perimeter . . .)

2. Relative firepower (overall) (actually pretty easy to calculate, add up the FPS for attacker and defender)

3. Some sort of measure of the distribution of firepower (if they have two heavy hitters and you have 20 pea-shooters, the 20 pea-shooters might just 'outclass' the heavy hitters by simple reason of fire coming from so many different sources at once)

4. Accuracy (a mean value for both sides, and including effects for weapons or other modifiers could probably be worked up)

5. Damage Resistance (again like accuracy, could be pretty easily tallied)

and then we come to the difficult one, which I'd call "geometry" for lack of a better word (the military scientists probably have one for it)

6. How well does the geometry of the defensive structures facilitate defense and impede attack? (murder holes being on example of that, overlapping fields of fire being another I think)

7. Morale or cohesion, something along those lines.

8. Flexibility and coordination.

I could see applying numbers to these things, maybe even reasonably 'judicious' numbers within the framework of the limited context of defensive combat in FO4. But how on Earth to stir up all those numbers into a concoction that would give satisfying results from auto-resolve combats?

Sheeze, how you guys got me talking strategy gamer nonsense!

It all depends on what parameters the game uses to calculate and what the engine actually allows.

As it is, it seems to be only relying on number crunching. And not in a good way, since I only encountered one real assault force worthy of that name. Legendary Super Mutant Masters. Five of them, deciding on raiding an outlying settlement that didn't even have it's own food production.

Because historically, a settlement or city fared better with walls than a city/settlement without walls.

In ancient times. Like when people use bow and arrows, swords and spears.