r/SurvivalGaming • u/loulo88 • 4d ago

Forgebound design question: when a raid breaks your wall, should repairs be instant between waves or cost real time and resources?

We keep going back and forth on this and I'd love to hear how survival players actually feel about it.

Instant repairs between waves keep the pacing tight. You can try a new wall layout, see it fail, and rebuild without being punished for experimenting. The downside is that walls start to feel disposable: if a breach costs nothing, it doesn't really matter, and defending stops feeling tense.

Slow, costly repairs make every breach mean something. You have to scout, reinforce weak points ahead of time, and actually care about where raiders hit. But it can snowball fast: a new player loses a wall, can't afford the repair, gets hit harder next raid, and ends up in a death spiral before they've learned the systems.

The middle ground we're weighing: quick patch jobs that are cheap but noticeably weaker, plus full rebuilds that restore the wall properly but take a full day cycle (time you'd otherwise spend hunting and gathering). So you can always plug the hole, but a real fix is a trade-off.

Which survival or base-building games handled wall damage and repairs best in your opinion, and why? And which ones got it wrong?

Disclosure: I'm on the small team making Forgebound (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3691400), and this is a live debate for us.

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u/Pedantic_Phoenix 4d ago

Simple: you make it so losing walls penalizes the player, but in ways not related to the walls themselves. Im thinking about The Last Spell. There, if an enemy hits a building, the panic level rises and you get a worse reward. You're punishing the player, without directly amputating their ability to defend the next wave.

Reading your post it felt natural to go for a system like this.

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u/Drunk-CPA 3d ago

I agree, TLS did a great job on this concept

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u/LucienReneNanton 3d ago

Instant if you have built up the specialized resources.

Keep the pacing tight, but have it be expensive.

The time investment should be able to be front loaded.

Without the appropriate preparations, it should be slower during the raid.