A Nova Roma raid becomes expensive when the fighting reaches systems the city cannot pause: water, food storage, the road behind a district, or the workshops that supply rebuilding. Defense therefore starts with deciding where a landing force is allowed to spend its time, not with scattering towers around every valuable building.
The plan below covers the first Outpost militia, a wall-and-tower delay line, the transition to professional units, and the repair sequence after a breach. Patch boundary matters: the July 20 research pass used v0.7.2278, the July 16 Update 14 build. Update 12 changed invasion scaling, while Updates 13 and 14 changed several logistics, repair, and troop recovery behaviors.
Read the warning as a labor deadline
Early invasions arrive after the settlement has had time to grow. A warning precedes the enemy landing, then a ship approaches and raiders move inland to damage buildings. Difficulty changes how much pressure this creates, so use the live settings and warning rather than an old claim about a fixed year or guaranteed wave size.
Click the Outpost and check militia recruitment immediately. The first militia comes from the available population: those fighters are citizens who are not producing food, hauling materials, repairing structures, or building the wall. If the city has filled every job, pause low-priority work before recruitment so the defense does not create a famine before the enemy arrives.
Do not spend the entire warning on construction. Form the unit, move it once, and confirm the route to the expected approach. A theoretically perfect tower that finishes after the landing is less useful than militia already standing between the raiders and the granary.
Find the approach before buying a tower
Watch the coastline, bridges, and gaps between cliffs or existing buildings. The best defensive location is usually a narrow route that can be closed without trapping ordinary traffic. Leave the civic core one layer behind it: homes, granaries, raw stockpiles, Water Towers, and aqueduct junctions should not form the first contact line.
Guard Towers automatically fire within their displayed area, but they cost gold to build and maintain. Place the first one where its full range covers the chosen approach. A central tower that begins firing only after raiders enter storage streets has protected the wrong space.
Fund the line through a stable tax district rather than an emergency maximum rate. The Tax Office should cover useful housing, and the jobs, food, and happiness behind that housing must remain viable. A defense that stops the landing but triggers emigration through labor loss and upkeep has only moved the crisis.
Build delay in front of damage
Palisades and later stone walls do not need to encircle every future suburb. Their first job is to close easy side paths and make raiders spend time inside tower range. Use terrain and structures to create a short defended gap, then keep a road behind it for militia, haulers, and masons.
Check these relationships in placement mode:
- The tower range begins outside or at the wall, not behind it.
- The wall sends enemies toward the intended gap instead of around the final segment.
- The militia can reach the lane without walking through warehouses or homes.
- A raw-material stockpile with wood and stone sits behind the line, not on it.
- The nearest water, food, and aqueduct structures are one failure layer deeper than the wall.
Do not seal a gate beside a bridge and assume the bridge is expendable. Update 12 fixed a case where a bridge could collapse when a contiguous gate was destroyed, but the sensible plan is still to keep a second movement route or repair access when terrain allows.
Use militia as the movable stop
Select units and right-click to move or attack. Towers supply steady ranged damage; militia intercept enemies that pass the wall, hold the lane, or chase a group that has turned toward infrastructure. Terrain can provide combat advantages, and units gain experience from kills, so a controlled position is better than meeting the landing party on open ground.
Avoid sending militia so far toward the ship that another group slips past them. Fight where tower coverage and the wall already improve the exchange. If the raiders change direction, pull the unit back across the inner road rather than letting it become separated from the city.
After victory, militia can be disbanded into ordinary citizens and the city receives a celebration happiness benefit. Check housing first. Active military units are treated differently from ordinary population; disbanding into a full city can create a bed problem exactly when damaged homes and jobs are already under repair.
Graduate only when iron and wages are stable
Infantry and Cavalry arrive after Iron and Armament production and their military buildings are unlocked. They require armaments, wages, and population. That makes the professional army a supply-chain decision: mines, processing, weapon production, storage, tax income, housing, and food must all tolerate the recurring cost.
Do not close the militia route the instant a Barracks appears. Prove that armaments reach military storage and that wages remain positive through a quiet period. Professional units are most valuable when they can survive multiple attacks, gain experience, and recover without stripping the civilian economy every time a ship appears.
The official guide directs damaged units back to the Barracks for replacement. Update 13 added clearer Barracks health information and a command to send troops back for recuperation; Update 14 fixed legion recruit or recuperate state failing across save/load and removed a case that demanded a completely new weapon set. If a unit still does not recover on a newer build, confirm its Barracks, armament stock, wages, and the current patch notes before rebuilding the formation.
Fight the breach by protecting uptime
If raiders break through, the target priority changes. Do not chase cosmetic damage while the core is exposed. Intercept the group nearest a Water Tower, aqueduct junction, granary, central stockpile, or road that serves several districts. A damaged workshop can wait; losing the distribution point for every workshop cannot.
Keep expansion paused and close nonessential jobs. The labor released from entertainment or luxury chains can move food, repair materials, and replacement armaments. If two buildings are failing, protect the one whose loss would disable more downstream systems.
Update 13 fixed the inability to pull troops away from combat in some cases. Use withdrawal deliberately when a unit is being dragged beyond tower range or when a second group threatens the core. A retreat into a prepared lane preserves both the formation and the defense geometry.
Rebuild in dependency order
Once the last enemy leaves, keep the simulation slow and inspect integrity, jobs, inventories, and roads. A recommended recovery order is:
- Movement: reopen the road, bridge, or gate that workers and units require.
- Water: restore the intake, aqueduct, tower, well, or fire protection serving occupied homes.
- Food: repair granaries, farms, fisheries, and the routes that move food to residents.
- Raw repair supply: confirm wood and stone can reach Masonries and rebuilding sites.
- Housing and essential jobs: give returning civilians beds and restore the production chains that keep the city alive.
- Outer defense: rebuild the wall and tower after the core is operating, then correct the path that failed.
- Amenities and luxury industry: reopen them only when labor and upkeep have recovered.
Update 13 made Masonry repair output more consistent and instructed masons to prioritize the lowest-health buildings. That helps only when a Masonry is staffed, inside working range, and supplied. Use the integrity overlay to find the damaged cluster instead of assuming the most visible ruin is first in the queue.
Update 12 can restore logistics routes when destroyed buildings are rebuilt. Rebuild the correct facility, then open the Update 13 logistics overlay and verify its suppliers, assigned carts or ships, and citizen deposit or retrieval restrictions. A restored arrow is not enough if the destination rejects the resource or the vehicle belongs to another building.
Run one rehearsal before the next ship
Save the city, then use the quiet period as a checklist. Select the Outpost and confirm militia availability. Select each tower and inspect its range and upkeep. Trace the wall for an unplanned gap. Move the active unit from its resting point to the lane. Confirm that the rear stockpile holds wall and repair materials, and that disbanded citizens would have beds.
Finally, compare the installed client to the official update history. Update 12 explicitly tweaked invasion scaling, so March launch guides cannot establish a permanent wave size, year, or force requirement. Keep the layered method, but size the force from the live warning, difficulty, terrain, and the performance of the previous attack.
Sources and credits
Identity, Early Access status, current screenshots, and the Update 14 boundary were verified through the official Nova Roma Steam listing and official Steam update history. Military systems and patch-sensitive recovery behavior were checked against the official Steam-hosted Nova Roma guide and multiple readable community defense references. Screenshots are unmodified official Steam JPGs from Lion Shield and Hooded Horse.