UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Available with Sim Settlements 2 - 3.0.0
Chapter 3 adds new mechanics aimed at conquering territories and settlements from the gunners and other enemy factions. Currently, those mechanics unlock with chapter 3 as part of the story. They include repurposing some of your settlements to outposts, training and arming your own fighting force and assaulting key locations to turn the tide and get benefits to your empire.
| War Planner's Desk | About using the War Planner's Desk to manage your Outpost. |
| Managing a Soldier | About Manage Soldier Menu Options |
| City Manager Holotape War Settings | Customize your War Mechanics Gameplay |
| Assaults | Full breakdown of the dynamic assaults on locations |
Outposts are where you base and train your Soldiers.
You can convert a settlement to an outpost, or create a new outpost by placing a War Planner's Desk in the settlement. Outposts have some notable differences from regular settlements:
Many settings can be modified using the City Manager Holotape: Options > Gameplay > War
See link above.
Soldiers are effectively settlers that are ready to fight and can join you on assaults to take over and hold territory in the world. Soldiers have the same needs as settlers, but it’s expected their needs are met via Caravan Services connections.
In addition to Home, Job, and Leisure assignments, Soldiers can also have a Role. By default all soldiers start as the Warrior role, but depending on what plots they are assigned to their roles can be changed. In addition, you can manually change their Role from the Manage Soldier menu.
Warriors
Warriors will join you on Assaults to take more territory. After taking territory, they will be converted to Guards and tasked with holding that territory. You can give them a job, but since they may be called in to secure more territory, they are not going to reliably stick with that job.
Guards
Guards will remain at the location they are guarding to provide defense to it and prevent invading forces from taking over. Anyone assigned to a defense providing Martial plot will be assigned this role. Guards can be assigned to guard locations outside of the Outpost they live at, such as a Vassal settlement.
Support
Support will remain at their assigned job ensuring that service is available. Unlike guards, Support will not act as the last line of defense and so will retreat if they are the last remaining soldiers at an Outpost during a Raid. Anyone assigned to a non-defense providing job will be given the Support role.
Patrols
Patrols cannot have jobs, but instead they will travel back and forth from their home Outpost to another location your empire controls. In doing so, they will connect them so that they can reinforce each other during Raids.
Defense Boost: Soldiers automatically provide a boost to Defense.
This is currently calculated as follows: 20 * (SpecialStatTotal/70). So if someone’s combined special stats = 35 the formula would evaluate as 20 * (35/70) = 20 * 0.5 = 10, ie. +10 Defense.
The higher the special stats, the more defense they provide.
Conscription: You can recruit virtually any settler to become a soldier by equipping the Recruitment Clipboard and choosing the Conscript option. When you do, you’ll be prompted to choose an Outpost to send them to.
Auto-Recruitment: If there are enough caps available in the virtual resources, new Soldiers will be recruited each day automatically. By default you can recruit 1 new soldier each day at each outpost, so long as those outposts have extra bed space.
A regular Recruitment Beacon at the Outpost will recruit one per day, and you can increase Recruitment by building a Recruitment Office on a Martial plot at your Outpost.
As your Soldiers fight in combat, either during Assaults you lead, or Raids defending your territory, they will earn experience. Experience is gained in combat by being within 3000 units of a kill of an enemy soldier and not being "downed".
Soldiers can also gain experience by assigning them to a Training Yard (Recreational Plot) up to Rank 3. Experience is gained similarly to training stats, only rather than it only updating when they hit a new level like stats, XP % will be updated every day to show how close they are to next rank. As long as they are assigned to the Training Yard, they will gain XP, regardless of their location.
When Soldiers have earned enough experience, they will rank up, giving them health and damage boosts, and unlocking access to better loadouts. If the setting is enabled, enough supplies are available, and an Armory exists at their home settlement, Soldiers will automatically be equipped with the default loadout for their new rank. (You can turn off this auto-equipping entirely, or for a particular soldier on their Manage Soldier menu).
For flavor, rank names can be customized by activating the Quartermaster's Key on the War Planner’s Desk - this is also where you can change the default Loadout used by each rank. This customization only applies to your Default Recruits, Special Units will often have their own rank and loadout structures. (In a future build, we’ll introduce a setting to force Special Units to use the same rank names as your Default Recruits so you can have consistency in your army if you desire).
One of the primary things you’ll do with your Soldiers, is lead them on Assaults to claim more territory or capture resources.
During an Assault, you and a small squad of your soldiers will attack some target with the goal of taking out any opposing forces. If you win the Assault by defeating all of the enemy, you’ll win the Assault, receive Spoils for your empire in the form of resources, and depending on the type of Assault gain control of the location. If all of your Soldiers are defeated before they take out the enemy, the Assault will fail.
Note that I use the phrase “defeating” the enemy and not killing, as depending on the type of assault and various other factors, some of the enemies will be left in a “bleeding out” state where they will recover after the battle.
Assaults have a few requirements to run:
Running an assault can be done in two ways:
When marking a target and firing a flare, you’re effectively letting most of the planning of the assault be automatic - particularly with which soldiers will be sent to join you.
Currently, the Binoculars can use NPCs, settlement workbenches, Junk and Supply storage containers, and doors to mark a location. When you’ve successfully marked a location, the map marker will be made visible (though not fast-travelable) and a notification will appear in the corner. The first time you mark a non-hostile target, you will also start a quest called Operations Info, which will help you see on your map what you’ve targeted.
After you’ve marked a location, you can equip a Flare Gun and fire it into the air to attempt to start an Assault. A short time later, you will receive a return flare from your forces. If the flare is white, it means you lacked some of the requirements, and will see a notification in the corner explaining what was missing. Otherwise, you will get a quest pop-up for the Assault, music will play, and the return flare will be colored and from the direction your troops are waiting for you (the quest will provide a map marker to meet up with them as well).
Dynamic Assaults will always try and bring the maximum available Warriors, up to 15. If there are not enough Supplies to cover the max available, it will instead try one more time with the minimum count (5) to see if there are enough Supplies to cover that small squad. (While we could technically make it keep trying 14, 13, 12, etc - the code would be excruciatingly slow to test every combination of troops and costs).
There is one means of customizing these assaults you can do, which is to change the type of assault. By using the melee attack with the Flare Gun equipped, a menu will come up to allow you to switch which type of assault. Immersively this is you changing the flare type to a different color flare.
Using the Operations Board will bring up a menu to select the type of Assault, followed by selecting the location, and finally choosing which Soldiers to bring on the Assault. Choosing the Soldiers can be as simple as selecting which types of soldiers (ie.Default Recruits and/or various Special Units), or actually selecting the specific individuals you want to bring.
In both Dynamic and Strategic Assaults, after your Soldiers are in place, you then have two options, you can meet up with your Soldiers and they will follow you until you, or they, enter combat; or you can start combat with the enemy, in which case your Soldiers will rush into to join the fight.
There are multiple Assault types available, while all of them involve a battle of your Soldiers versus enemy soldiers, the end results are what change based on the type. Each type will only show up as an option if the marked target is valid, or in the case of a Strategic Assault, if there is a valid target in range of that Outpost.
After an assault, your efforts will be scored based on how well you did versus how well you were expected to do. This is calculated based on:
This will be shown to you through a score screen that will come up as a new interface while your camera is set to circle around the battlefield, similar to Cinematic mode when building a city plan.
This camera victory cycle is also used to process a lot of post-battle things like shutting down turrets and ensure all NPCs are neutral to each other at the end of the battle so it can actually end.
Almost any non-settlement location in the game can be made into a Territory. A Territory will provide passive benefits to your empire so long as you control them.
When you first take a territory, any Soldiers involved in the Assault will be put on Guard Duty at that location and will patrol around outside. (In order to limit the impact of this system on quests, soldiers will avoid going inside of locations since most base-game quests are done indoors.) Your soldiers will provide the same defense bonus they did at your Outpost.
The more defense a Territory has, the less likely opposing forces will attempt to take it from you.
If the Assault was Dynamic, the Territory will be parented to the nearest Outpost, otherwise to whichever settlement the Assault was started from via the Operations Board. This settlement will be known as the “Beneficiary” of any bonuses the Territory provides. For example, if the Territory provides daily resources, they will act as if produced by the Beneficiary settlement.
If you lose the settlement that is the Beneficiary to a Territory, the Territory will automatically reparent to another settlement in your empire.
When you first start an Assault on a Territory, a flag will be spawned near the center of that location. This flag acts as a controller for that territory. If you control the location, your empire’s flag will be displayed, and you can activate the flag to view information about it, such as the Beneficiary settlement and bonuses, and access a menu to do things such as reparent the Territory to a different settlement.
You can also activate the flag to enter Workshop mode in a territory. This allows you to do some basic construction in that area. This is limited to very minor things to avoid creating an unstable game, but also because there is not a dynamic navmesh in most of the world, so we don’t want to encourage players to build entire bases.
By default you can build the following things:
This list will likely expand in the future, and additional buildable options may be unlocked through gameplay moments.
A Vassal is effectively a settlement that is paying tribute to an empire. In Nukaworld, this was used as a form of subjugation, but it can also be viewed like civilians supporting the troops - imagine the real world example of people gathering supply donations during World War 2 to help fight back the Nazis.
Vassals will provide daily supply donations to your empire based on the plot building classes and levels. Settlers living in a Vassal cannot man defensive structures and will instead rely on your empire to provide Guards.
Unlike the other settlement classifications, a Vassal cannot be established, and instead occurs as the result of an Assault.