Hearth and Hamlet Raids & Military Guide

What an army costs

Recruiting is the smallest part of the bill. At base values:

  • Each soldier consumes two food and one iron per second.
  • Training takes sixty seconds.
  • Base post-battle survival is 40% - most of a force that fights does not come back.

Soldiers also come out of the same population pool as workers, so every recruit is someone who has stopped gathering. Panic-recruiting a large force to survive an incoming raid frequently works and then wrecks the economy immediately afterwards: you win, food collapses, iron disappears, and workers get pulled off everything else to recover.

This is why the recurring verdict in the Steam discussion boards is that military is not worth over-investing in. It is not that defence is optional - it is that defence bought in a panic costs several times what defence bought in advance does.

Preparing instead of reacting

Build defence when the economy is stable, not when the raid warning appears. In practice:

  • Keep a margin in both stockpiles and workforce. Not half your population idle, but not every villager committed with exactly enough food for the next cycle either.
  • Have iron banked. Guards need it, and iron is often the resource nobody thought about until a raid.
  • Get the walls up. Stone walls are a proper progression gate - Walls of Stone sits at 60.6% of owners - and infrastructure defends without eating food every second.
  • Check your policies before the fight, since governance affects resource generation, population efficiency and defence together.

Losing a raid

A defeat is not a game over. It drains resources and applies temporary debuffs, arriving exactly when your economy is least able to absorb them. The real danger is taking that hit with no reserves, which starts a chain: production slows, construction stalls, recovery drags.

Think of a standing defence as insurance with a premium, not as an investment with a return.

What fighting gives back

  • Happiness. Winning a battle raises it, and happiness scales global production - so a raid you were ready for is a net positive.
  • Military research improves rewards from defeating raiders and speeds training, worth taking if you are fighting regularly.
  • Achievements. Standing Strong (47.2%) marks surviving a major assault, and Flawless Victory (10.5%) requires an entire run without a single defeat - which is a planning achievement rather than a combat one.

A patch note worth knowing

Patch 1.0.04 fixed a bug where you could fail to defeat an enemy army for a quest but proceed as if you had succeeded, and fixed a rare crash when an enemy died. If you are on an older build and a combat quest behaves strangely, check the patch notes before assuming you misplayed it.

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