Dog Pants wrote:Gary Busey makes the settler stuff difficult by being an asshat and refusing to help anyone with anything. I've had to make a few concessions or else nothing will ever get done.
Troll them by building the beds at the top of several spindly flights of stairs. Then delete the stairs while they're sleeping.
The other settlements you find usually ask you to do something before they align with you, but fortunately you can often just kill everyone there and take them instead.
I think you can go up about five "levels" - that is five of the cube-shaped prefabs - before running into pathing/out-of-bounds issues, but there's also a limit on the number of objects you can build. I haven't done much in terms of extreme experimentation, but have had people able to get up to beds built on the second level and guns able to shoot down from above three of the big stairs, which is about six cubes high.
The stairs with two floors built in in the "floors" section Roman mentioned are much easier to use successfully than the ones in the ladders section, as settlers flat-out refuse to jump even if they're being chased by ghouls. I observed one of my provisioners walk directly into a knee-high wall and bounce off about five times before teleporting behind it and carrying on - right off a cliff.. which gave her no apparent trouble.
I've decked out a few places using the end-of-hallway metal cubes (which use the least overall resources), with a metal doorway (but no door) in front and one nice bed inside, it's tight but if you can get to either side of the bed, so can they. One electricity connector on the back will power lights in three connected cubes and normal lightbulbs don't take much power, but they and the connecting wires do need copper. I like the notion that all my settler's rooms are effectively live with electricity.
Sometimes exclamation points show up in the Data/Workshops section of your Pipboy where your settlements are displayed, the most common early on being against defenses. You need, I think, a higher defense than your food and water score combined to stop this, but it won't completely stop you being attacked, just make it less likely. One person usually starts farming automatically and further people can be ordered to farm - each can take care of six plants, but having a lot of food will make attack more likely.
I found it hard to plan against attack without knowing what they would be like, so can share a few tips having had it happen a few times. I've had raider scums mostly but also a few bloatflies and once, super mutants plus I also kited in a sentry bot for a laugh. The critters typically wander in accidentally and don't count as a full attack, but their behaviour is the same, organised attacks usually occur from several points at once surrounding the settlements. You get a message if you're away and it becomes a quest you can fail if you don't go there quickish.
The machine guns have a pretty good range, and a 360° firing arc, but they can only shoot the closest one thing at time, so one on each corner is a minimum plus one on each side on the bigger lots should cover you - unless the settlement has natural borders protecting it, but they are mostly useful more for alerting you rather than destroying everything. They don't run out of ammo, but they can get damaged.
All enemy types will try at first to attack the sentries which attack them, pathfinding through buildings to get there if necessary, so it makes sense to build them above ground to make attack harder for meleeing enemies, and use your tower defense skills to make sure they get shot a lot while trying to reach them. When I was attacked by bloatflies they dutifully ran the gauntlet along the ground and used the stairs to reach the upper level. If they get damaged they will need to be repaired, either by you using almost as many materials as it took to build them, or automatically by a settler over time - so I think there needs to be a way a settler can reach them, so having them on unreachable platforms isn't a good option, but a zig-zag maze or a long corridor would be great.
Once they've taken out the sentry gens they will start on the settlers, I only had the sentry bot get that far, so I don't think it's representative, but it only knocked them and a passing merchant out and then angrily hung around looking for me (I was hiding in a shack) - it didn't damag any of the infrastructure. That
can be damaged as I had a sentry accidentally shoot some food plants once.
