All those Walls...

[Arbogast]

In the default3...
City Walls, City Defenses, Star Forts are a new thing.
As the help descriptions are identical I wonder if the protection is cumulative or not.
I can not make much sense out of the buildings or effects *.ruleset
Should one build all three of them or just one? Which one?
Default3 should be a default ruleset, me thinks...

[HanduMan]

Should one build all three of them or just one? Which one?

Don't forget the Great Wall wonder...

Great Wall gives +200% defence bonus against Basic Land, Helicopter, Gunpowder Land and Armored Land units. In other words, triples the defense strength of the units in the city.

City Walls give +200% def bonus against Basic Land units and +50% def bonus against Gunpowder Land units. These bonuses are not effective if the city has any other defensive building (Star Fort and/or City Defenses) built or the player has built the Great Walls wonder.

Star Fort gives +400% def bonus against Basic Land units, +200% def bonus against Gunpowder Land units and +50% def bonus against Armored Land units. These bonuses are not effective if the city has the City Defenses built or the player has built the Great Walls wonder.

City Defenses give +400% def bonus against Basic Land units, +400% def bonus against Gunpowder Land units, +200% def bonus against Armored Land units and +200% def bonus against Helicopter units. These bonuses are not effective if the player has built the Great Walls wonder.

That's what I read from the effects.ruleset file. The definitions are a bit confusing because it seems as having built a wonder would nullify the seemingly higher effects than what the wonder gives. But then again, Great Wall is obsoleted by inventing the Metallurgy technology which is the requirement for Star Fort building. So, if 'obsolete' means that the wonder has no effect then it probably will not have it's counter-effect either?

So, the answer is: All of them as soon as you have researched the required technology. And as soon as you have built the City Defenses you can sell the Star Fort because it will not have any effect and costs 1 gold upkeep. City Walls are free from upkeep so you can keep them as a tourist attraction if you wish.

[Arbogast]

Thanks a bunch!
Read it, studied it, printed it and hanged it on the wall!

[NotAnyoneSpecial]

Hey, there sorry about the confusion - originally the walls would obsolete although this posed and an immediate problem, where pretty much everyone would lose their walls upon completion of Metallurgy. Even while the old city walls provide a fairly substantial +50% bonus to defense against superior gunpowder units on top of the automatic defense bonus units get simply for being in a city (in total an extra +100% to their defense). As the game currently stands, there is no way to disallow building the improvement without having it being auto-sold and therefore leaving cities defenseless.

The Great Wall acts a temporary but super effective wall, capable providing a traditional all around 3x defense bonus for ground+helicopters - the reasoning behind giving all land classes including helicopters a defense bonus even if during normal game-play they're never encountered, is in case someone mods the great wall to last beyond Metallurgy.

The general rule of thumb is that each era's city wall acts like a traditional city wall from the default ruleset, if a unit is more advanced than the wall its meant to counter say cannon against city walls - then this 3x bonus is reduced to 1.5x. Furthermore, if a very advanced unit such as Mech Inf or Armor attacks the same wall, the wall provides absolutely no bonus since for all purposes it should be completely trivial for modern tanks and mechanized infantry units to overcome.

I'll be sure make it clear in the helptext for future revisions how their effects are not cumulative, thanks for the feedback.