Talk:Fort Defence Tips/@comment-33763020-20180108115320

The battlements suggestion could be improved. I agree it looks much more stylish and follows lore in the way it looks, but it's not the best for gameplay due to game (NPC) mechanics. I generally do not recommend building this way, unless you have a moat that is within bow distance and the enemies cannot come any closer, but even in that case your loot will have much less value, as bows have no "Blessed" (or any loot) modifier. In which case this battlement defense makes no sense either, as you need free line of sight to shoot. Here's my 2 cents:

The enemy NPC's target the player by moving in as fast as possible, with the exception of ranged attackers. In case of melee, this means that if you're standing on the battlements, you can only shoot as long as they are visible. Your hired troops will become obsolete as soon as the enemy is out of sight (perhaps within 6-10 blocks from your wall if you built it 4 high), as troops have no AI to move to lower levels. Very quickly, especially at an invasion, the enemies have moved underneath your battlements to your wall and thus your line of sight is blocked by the battlement and you cannot kill them from the wall. From that point on, you would have to move down to lower levels, possibly a window to poke them with a pike, then move back up to shoot those further off to lure them in, making battle tiresome. You can of course have your hired troops downstairs to shoot them or poke at them, but that means no alignment points and much less valuable loot (as a Blessed melee weapon provides you with much more loot, in addition your weapons become "Earned" category after a while and Warg- and Orcslaying weapons are much more powerful, but you need to make the kill with your own weapon to achieve those merits, so the best thing to fight off invasions is doing most of the work yourself), in addition they can be poked/shot at at ground level and that's an expensive way to uphold hired troops. Not to forget: an invasion close to your base has a "logical" from-to distance of spawning: to prevent your walls from being blown up by bombardiers, you need banner protection, which means invasions will not spawn within that range. The invasion will also not spawn too far from you in my experience, I noticed it's mostly within reasonable distance, but just outside of sight distance for enemies (except Wargs or Trolls). As a result, most enemies will not see you and you would have to move closer to them to lure them in, so shooting distance is not a given. This makes the location of a moat (as a barrier to hold them back while you shoot them) quite tricky, as they need to be close enough to see you to move in, but far enough so you can still shoot them..

My suggestion is like in the screenshot: don't build solid battlements that block your sight! Use (steel) bars that line your walls 1 block to the outside, this enables you to poke down from 4-high at any enemy with a Blessed pike,while keeping full line of sight. Every once in a while you will be shot by a projectile, but you can withdraw at any time to heal and shoot the shooter from above much easier through the slit between the wall and the bars. This is the perfect way to gather alignment, especially if you have hired troops from all aligned factions within chunk distance, as all the kills add up to all factions at the same time, so you don't have to travel to their areas for alignment.

An additional advantage of the bar-system is that as the blocks are semi-transparent, you can see everything that happens, but all arrows are blocked by the bars :). So the slits are your killing point, with a minimal damage you get from projectiles. To be 100% protected and retrieve your loot immediately, you could also build the bars 1 block above an empty space on the ground instead of on battlements level and poke at enemy feet, but this provides less overview over your surroundings, as well as no chance for your hired troops to shoot them (plus getting killed easier by being poked at). It saves you time though with not having to run down from your walls each time to collect loot, as the open space under the bars lets you retrieve your loot immediately. A disadvantage again is that  this additional outer circle means both building and moving around your keep becomes more complicated.

After you've built this routine, you can play around with its benefits: you can use your Earned Warg- or Orcslayer if you want to have faster kills to finish off an invasion force quicker or put the Earned ones aside and use new pikes to gather kills so you can make as many Earned ones as you can from new weapons (though it may take a long time as I have only managed to have 1 Warg- and 1 Orcslayer pike so far after thousands of enemies killed). This way you will always have spare ones in case you loose a battle and you cannot retrieve your old Earned weapon. I would definitely recommend to make sure you have the best possibly forged weapon for this, as once you have an Earned weapon which has no feature you want (e.g. it is only Fortunate instead of Blessed), you would have to choose between using the Earned one with lower modifier versus the non-Earned one that has higher modifiers.. It may take a really long time, but ideally you would have a number of Earned weapons to choose from, especially with the Swift modifier to finish battles quickly or a Blessed one to have optimal loot in case you cannot sell enough warg fur and rotten or flesh, combined with Legendary to kill faster and Enduring to save on reforging cost. I understood that you can always reforge even the Earned ones without loosing the Earned feature, but I wonder whether you can actually change ALL of the separate features (as there can be three of these and the order of appearance may determine which one you can alter, if I'm not mistaken), not to speak of the cost involved of reforging that one feature.

One question I would have: if I give Blessed weapons to hired troops, does that provide the same value loot as if I would be wielding the weapon? Or do NPC's not get the same benefits as me at a kill (beside the obvious lack of alignment points)?