Unwalled settlement battles are the worst part of the battle experience. They offer all the downsides of seiges (no room to move, capture points all around the map that you cant defend) without any of the benefits of a siege battle i.e. walls. and to make it worse the AI always goes for this type of battle so you fight a million of them. I much preferred having walled minor settlement sieges.

Either the maps should be reworked to be more open or the maps should stay mostly as they are, but with an outer wall (a bit like a motte-and-bailey type castle). This middle ground of no walls, no room and all chokepoint is the worst

They already basically removed them from the game, what more do you want? I think in my 150 turn Ungrim game, I had 2 

I thought i wrote what i want XD

​

Loupi#8512 wrote:
This middle ground of no walls, no room and all chokepoint is the worst

Very true, thank god CA listened to me and my 4 friends.

Hard disagree, at least unwalled settlement battles have the advantage of not having gates. All these years and games and still gates are one of the most infuriatingly buggy parts of the game. 

"big open map without chokepoints" is just a land battle map

I wish they brought them back, at launch I used to regularly play defensive minor settlements all the time. Having a hero for the general, and decent garrisons made for some really fun defensive battles. Now defensive battles are nonexistent, and the garrisons suck so it's always an unwinnable auto resolve. Whatever CA thinks I can defend with a couple of blue horrors in an open field is beyond me....

Used to be able to choke point the enemy and rain magic on them, while holding on for dear life as the battle is no nail-bitingly close.

​

MODIDDLY1#9212 wrote:

"big open map without chokepoints" is just a land battle map

impressive use of quotation marks

​

RuOne#4844 wrote:

Hard disagree, at least unwalled settlement battles have the advantage of not having gates. All these years and games and still gates are one of the most infuriatingly buggy parts of the game. 

and if they fixed gate-related bugs?

Walls are almost completely useless and it's always better to defend the main point, so I don't see how not having walls is a downside. If CA were to rework it so walls are great again, then yeah, it would be a downside, but in the current version having a wall doesn't really change much. It gives you a bit more time to set up defenses and that's it.

You're not supposed to defend all points, you're supposed to pick a good defensive position and hold it. You just need to protect one point (any point). As for room to move, the maps are huge; you just need to be smart about it and set up good flanking positions. 

Loupi#8512 wrote:
and to make it worse the AI always goes for this type of battle so you fight a million of them.

I even checked if this was a really old thread. Since they changed it so only settlements with a garrison gets unwalled battles, it has been really rare to play those battles, mostly before the latest AI changes, since the AI would rarely build garrisons. Now the AI is better at developing settlements, but they still don't build garrisons in every settlements, and the AI has been developing settlements up to tier 3 quite often, so even when it builds garrisons, it usually ends up as a tier 3 garrison (walled). Not to mention you can easily auto resolve if the AI doesn't have an army there, which is the most common scenario. SO, yeah, I call BS on that one. Unwalled settlement battles are rare and avoidable.

A criticism that I would agree with is that these battles can require a lot of micromanagement, if you do more than just attack with your whole army on the same entrance. So, if you don't like to micromanage, it can get frustrating really fast.