Walls

[behin]

Can you build walls in RoN?

[LordRikerQ]

I didnt notice it in the demo but if you cant build walls.. Thats really messed up especially for a game combining Age and Civ.. Both games had Walls in some form or another.

Oh and who wouldnt love a Great Wall of China Wonder that puts walls all around your borders?

[DarthVeda]

No. It is definately something I miss from AoK... Diplomacy games are going to be a lot harder.

Although I suspect you could just build a wall of lookout towers or something like that.

This is definately something that should be put into an expansion pack or a patch.

[Mahdimael]

Computer AI has notoriously bad luck with walls. It would be cool to be able to build walls around your city at different points. So if you do it in the classical age, it creates a wall around the buildings you have at that point, and then later on you can build walls again, and that would encircle the buildings to that point...giving you an "old city" and the "new city

[albiedamned]

Building walls requires a lot of micro, which is probably why they excluded it. Attrition should compensate the defender for the absence of walls.

[Frosted Qube]

I have missed the ability to build walls. But as was previously stated, attrition is a nice compensating factor.

I'm hoping, as I become more used to the style of play in RoN, the less I will miss the ability to build walls.

[Sarxis]

I prefer entrenched armies to walls anyhow- more interesting; more fun.

[One_Dead_Villy]

maybe someone wanna try to make a wall mod

[DarthVeda]

Well that could be done but it would be like aoe where you have to build it one section at a time...

[Snotty]

I think the walls are represented as being part of the town centre itself. It doesnt make so much sense for the library to be outside the wall, but it would truly be one mother of a wall to encompase farms, logging camps and far flung mines.
Of all the towns in the UK I have visited, the old town walls only surrounded a relativly small area. Any other fortifications were covered by castles, which we already have.
From a gameplay point of view, the current seige system seems to work really well, and I cant see walls benefically adding to it.

[DarthVeda]

Although it just occurred to me that you could also build a wall of military buildings...

[Darklighter]

"Although it just occurred to me that you could also build a wall of military buildings..."

Expensive.. And the towers don't provide much defense unless garrisoned. Artillery has greater range than the tower. Entrenched troops with a general work the best. You get something like +2 defense with the first general technology researched. It goes up from there.

[yin26]

RON is decidely anti-turtle, IMO. This doesn't mean that you can't sit back and defend, however: garrisoned towers are quite effective for instance. So is entrenchment. Artillery, though, will force you to deal with somebody pounding you from a distance...as it should be.

Walls had lots of problems in AoK beyond just the micro: one of the devs said it took a lot of CPU cycles to track the walls, and even then there would sometimes be a fluke on terrain such that you could walk through the wall anyway.

Perhaps a tech upgrade that actually puts a wall along your border? Once it's broken down you can't repair it?

Anyway, I don't miss walls.

[wilebill]

Attrition is much, much better than walls IMHO, even though walls are fun and attractive. You always have attrition, but may forget to build walls or only have them half finished when the enemy rolls in and then you wish you had spent your resources on units and fixed point defenses instead!

In RON the ages roll by so fast that by the time you get your ideal wall layout, they are going to be mostly useless anyway. Fixed point defenses combined with attrition work much better I think. Wooden palisades are an attractive idea in the earliest ages, but you would spend more time than they are worth building them, since they mostly provide warning that they enemy is about to be in your midst. Outposts and Explorers can provide much better warning if you keep a weather eye on the minimap.

Maybe the worst thing about walls of any sort is that they give you a false sense of security. Based only on playing the demo, it appears that this game is designed around the idea that the best defense is a good offense! Like General Patton might have said, (all expletives pre-deleted), "You may have heard that your job as a RON player is to defend your nation! That's "nonsense!" Your job is to make the other poor, miserable player defend their nation!"