IME, that’s only true of settlements with small build areas. Hangman’s Alley and Outpost Zimonja, for example.
This has been fixed. Settlements are much more capable of defending themselves but still sometimes lose, especially if some attackers get stuck where they can’t reach any targets and nothing can target them for long enough that the game counts it as a win for the attackers. Settlers also can’t be killed by NPCs unless modded so you’re really going there to prevent property damage.
I’ve not used it but there is a mod for this. There are also mods that raze settlements like the drive-in to flat ground.
Yeah, one of my compulsive desires is to fence in the settlement’s crop areas with metal fences. Uneven ground makes those efforts look fugly.
And even if you’re there, you still may have property damage. Crops and equipment like shops stalls and generators are famously easy to destroy in the crossfire, especially when settlers or raiders start taking cover behind it.
“NO, nooo, you dumbass farmer, get out from behind the fusion generator! You are indestructible, but that thing will take CRAPLOADS of material to get back on line!”
This is the reason I don’t use missile turrets that can fire into anything I actually care about. I’ve had entire huge stands of corn or mutfruit completely leveled by a couple of missile turrets tracking Gunner melee assholes charging into the settlement. (If I feel the need to add missiles to the defenses, I put barriers behind the turrets to block line of sight into the settlement.)
The chain link fences mod linked upthread can help with that. Unlike the vanilla wire fence, those can be placed to follow the land’s contour. I’ve put them around Abernathy Farm, Greygarden, The Slog, and Croup Manor, and mostly around Warwick Homestead & Sanctuary.
Well your experience appears to be contrary to mine, lots of people online, and mod makers. Not only are there a lot of settlements with spawn points inside the border, but if you have to travel a distance to the settlement then the game moves enemies closer to the center of the settlement based purely on time (walls and other defenses don’t matter) so even if you move the spawn points they bypass the walls.
“If you don’t show up your settlement will often lose and take a bunch of damage randomly, especially since the game will bug out and give attackers a win they shouldn’t have sometimes” still counts as “you have to show up to defend the settlement anyway” in my book. Also, I’ve seen settlers killed by NPCs, not sure where you’re getting the idea that they will never die even if you keep ignoring raids on a town.
If laying out defenses doesn’t make a difference, and picking arms and equipment for settlers doesn’t really affect fights since the only real defense for a settlement is for you to show up, then I’m not going to get anything out of laying out defenses and arming settlers. Especially since the UI for both is extremely annoying. It would be like if you had the whole system of picking different weapons and modding them, but at the end all of the weapons worked exactly the same in a fight, it just gets a ‘why bother putting thought into it’ from me.
I think it’s a significant design issue when there’s subsystem in the game that has as much to do as the settlement system and lots of graphical stuff going on, but that doesn’t really connect the stuff to gameplay. I’d really rather just have a spreadsheet that handles how much stuff my settlements produce and how much stuff to build in them and ignore the graphical part entirely, which just shouldn’t be the case - all of that building and outfitting a small army should be fun to do and result in something in-game, but it really just doesn’t.
There’s a mod that adds Covenant-style turret platforms but, sadly, is only for Xbone.
I always try to have a group of missile turrets aimed at choke points. Warwick’s entrance gate, for example. Ain’t nothing getting through there!
There’s a difference between the radiant quests that have you defending settlements (where the baddies come from outside the settlement) and the “Miscellaneous” quests that randomly pop up and tell you to defend a place (where they baddies are already inside). It’s still helpful to have perimeter defenses for the former, as well as for any ne’er-do-wells who randomly show up. For example, if you position turrets along the far western edge of the Slog, they will occasionally kill Forged raiders (particularly when they run out of the immediate area of the steel plant to attack provisioners).
From mods that specifically enable settlers to be killed by NPCs. That said, Deidre and Arlen at The Slog are marked unessential and can be killed.
You, however, can kill settlers with splash damage while attacking NPCs.
Me neither, for the exact same reason.
In both cases, I don’t recall seeing them already inside anywhere other than Outpost Zimonja and Hangman’s Alley.
ETA: Greygarden as well but that’s before surrounding the place with fences and turrets that can fire into the hills.
Every settlement has fixed spawn points for baddies in defense missions. In every one I can think of, at least some of those spawn points are within the workbench build area of the settlement. It’s more obvious in Zimonja and Hangman’s because the build areas are so small. Other settlements, you may never try to build something in the vicinity of the spawnpoints, even though you could.
Get the Settlement Management Software mod and mark the spawnpoints and you’ll see.
(Or don’t because really, that’s pretty spoilerish. I already kind of regret the fact that the baddies always spawn under the muzzles of dozens of laser and machinegun turrets, as long as I get there soon enough. Positively anti-climactic, and the spill fire repair bill is still pretty high.)
The game is supposed to take settlements’ defenses into account and plot attacks along the paths of least resistance. There have been times when I fast traveled to a settlement under attack and found baddies already inside the perimeter with turrets pointing in that direction and/or the generators powering those turrets taken out. Super mutants are good at that.
I previously used Spring Cleaning (because, really, someone could and should be cleaning up) and I just now started using this. Too early to rate it vis-a-vis Spring Cleaning.
Decided against Conquest, and War of the Commonwealth is still in ‘beta’, and I’m no playtester. Still have a few mods to add, but nothing big. Oh, and it wasn’t Ellen that I tried, it was Heather, and it was bugged. Now I have to go find Ellen.
Alas, PS4 
Though I will say that PS4 FO4 is a million times less crashy than any PC Fallout game I’ve played (all of them) before.
I played NV, 3, and 4 in the last year or two and don’t recall any of them being crashy unless I was careless with a mod.
They weren’t notably crashy relative to other PC games (though on my second and all subsequent playthroughs of FO3 I got stuck because the game would freeze in the elevator in the Washington Monument every time I used it). The point is that the PS4 version is admirably un-crashy.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s a mod at Beth.Net which gives settlers better equipment but I cannot recommend it because it also causes some settlers to spawn with power armor. Which makes those settlers buggy and the author evidently likes them that way. I’ve also stopped using Better Settlers + Leveled Settlers because it’s now bundled with a mod that makes all raiders female, which is dumb.
Oh, and settlers can be killed when moving to a new home. They’re fine again once they arrive at the new location.
The original Fallout is free on Steam through noon CST tomorrow (Sept 30th)
(Reposting from the free game thread since it seems directly related to this thread as well)