Yeah, I'm to the point where I move or "eliminate" settlers that can't be move from smaller settlements just because of this. I only focus on the big ones. It's sad that it has come to this because I like the settlement idea overall. Hopefully Bethesda takes notices. There's no reason for having your settlements thrashed if you're not around if you have more than enough defenses.

Apart from defense, which seems to be only number crunching, it does make sense to develop certain settlements. Such as Sanctuary, the Castle or Starlight Drive in. In Sanctuary you can have a massive water production and that goes a long way towards keeping your caps flowing.

Also, the higher the defense rating, the lower the chance to be attacked. At least that's what it seems to me.

Yeah, Im a water mogul in Sanctuary as well. But, my point is that, even on my main settlements, I dont plan defense anymore. All those thoughts pre-release of the game about doing nice security perimeters, walls and mazes dont work. As I said, now I just place turrets here and there, next the generators and water mostly, and move on.

I also leave a set of PA in settlements that get attacked a lot. a settler will hop in and kick some azz. occasionally they do run off with it, but PA is a dime a dozen.

It pays to set up a scrapping station in each settlement to feed the pipeline with random junk regularly, but, yeah, the whole 'build 30 towns up' thing really just dead-ends.

Um power armor and mini guns on every settler solves every defence problem I have, the turrets are only there to start the raids without waiting.

turn off recruitment beacon. no more attacks. that has been my experience.

Which would make sense if you think about it since the beacons would also allow attackers to find the settlements as well as settlers.

Someone wrote that his settlement with 600+ defense would auto-lose if he didn't show up. If that is the case, then that is bad.

I know that I had a settlement with 132 defense and went there to fight off an attack. All the ghouls were cut down before they got within the "green" zone of the settlement. I was wondering why my turrets were not firing. All of them (including indoors, and unreachable on the roof) were disabled and needed repairs. I must have missed an attack notification, as well the failure! I then had to parkour all over the place repairing all my crap.

Edit: As far as the recruitment beacon, I can debunk that. I have a settlement with 2 people (actually man + dog) with no beacon in it, (32 defense, 12 food, 12 water). It got attacked!