You’re Probably Building Legacy of Sin All Wrong – City & Defense Tricks I Wish I Knew Earlier

Why Your Cities Keep Dying (And How I Stopped Losing Runs)

After spending about 40 hours and restarting more campaigns than I want to admit, I finally stopped watching my city crumble in Legacy of Sin: Ill-Boding. The breakthrough came when I stopped treating it like a pure city-builder or a pure tower defense game, and started respecting the fact that it’s both at once. If you try to “sim city” your way through, the orcs erase you. If you build only walls and towers, your economy starves and collapses a few nights later.

This guide walks through exactly how I now approach early, mid, and late game: what I build first, how I lay out my city, how I structure defensive lines, and what I do in the real-time battles so my towers and troops actually work together. I’ll also call out the mistakes that wrecked my first runs so you can skip straight to the fun part: holding the line against ridiculous odds.

Step 1 – Master the Turn-Based vs Real-Time Loop

The single biggest mindset shift for me was realizing that every turn-based “city” phase is just preparation for the next real-time defense. You’re not building for some abstract future; you’re building for the specific raid that’s coming in 1-3 turns.

• Turn-based phase: You place buildings, assign workers, queue research, and reposition your army. This is where you decide whether you survive the coming wave.
• Real-time phase: Orcs (and later, nastier things) attack using pathfinding that actively looks for weak spots. This is where you cash in on your planning – or realize you messed up.

What finally worked was always asking myself one question before ending a city turn: “If they attack from the worst possible side next, what actually stops them?” If I didn’t have a clear answer – a wall, kill zone, and a nearby response force – I kept building defenses, even if it delayed something “nice to have” like extra gold or fancy tech.

Early Game (First 10–15 Turns): Don’t Starve, Don’t Get Rolled

My first three campaigns died the exact same way: I either ran out of food trying to rush defenses, or I had a great economy with no walls and got flattened by the first serious raid. Here’s the build order that finally gave me consistent early survival.

1. Secure Food and Wood Before Anything Else

On turn 1–2, ignore the temptation to spam walls.

• Build 1–2 food buildings (farms, hunter’s lodge, etc.) close to your city center, but slightly behind where you plan to place your first wall.
• Drop a woodcutter/lumberyard near a forest, even if it’s slightly exposed. Early wood is life.
• Immediately assign workers via Settlement → Workers → [Building] instead of letting them idle.

Rule of thumb from my runs: if your projected food is negative within the next 3–4 turns, fix that before you lay a single stone of wall. A starving population snowballs into abandoned buildings and zero ability to train troops.

2. Throw Up a Cheap but Complete Perimeter

By turn 3–5, start a full loop of basic walls around your core (city center + food + wood). Don’t worry if it’s flimsy – incomplete walls are much worse than weak ones, because enemies will just walk through the gaps.

• Use Settlement → Build → Walls and drag a rough ring; avoid sharp corners that are hard to defend.
• Place 1–2 gates max. Too many gates = too many breach points.
• On the most likely approach side, plan space for your first tower cluster behind the wall.

This usually takes me 2–3 turns of focused building. Don’t make my mistake of leaving a single “temporary” gap so your workers walk faster – the AI will find it and pour through.

3. Train a Tiny but Disciplined Army

Before the first real raid (usually around turn 5–8 depending on difficulty), I aim for:

• 4–6 melee units (militia, spearmen – anything cheap that can hold a line).
• 2–4 ranged units (archers/crossbows) to stand on or behind the walls.

Train them via Military → Recruit and immediately assign them to a “city defense” group so they don’t wander off guarding random roads. I use two control groups in real-time: one melee group to plug breaches, one ranged group to shift behind towers.

Mid Game: Expanding Without Collapsing

Once food and a basic wall are stable, the mid game (roughly turns 15–40) is where most players, including me, used to implode. You push out to new resources, but every new mine and lumber camp is another thing the orcs can burn.

1. Grow in “Slices”, Not in Every Direction

What finally worked for me was expanding in a single wedge of the map at a time.

• Pick the side with the best cluster of resources.
• Extend your outer wall in that direction only, creating a “bulge” rather than a big, thin circle.
• Drop new resource buildings just behind that new wall, not miles out in front.

This keeps your defensive line relatively short and lets your towers and troops cover more of your economy. Sprawling in all directions gave me too many weak points to ever reinforce in time.

2. Build Overlapping Tower Nets, Not Lone Sniper Towers

In the current balancing, single isolated towers are gold sinks. The damage is fine, but they get overrun because nothing supports them. I now think in clusters:

• Place a tower every few tiles behind the wall on the chosen “threat” side.
• Make sure their range circles overlap; if you can, cover each gate with at least two towers.
• Prioritize upgrades on towers that can cover both a wall segment and a resource road.

Use Settlement → Build → Towers and rotate the camera while checking range indicators. Once I started thinking in overlapping fields of fire instead of “big towers = good”, my attrition losses dropped a lot.

3. Protect Your Resource Routes With Escorts

Mid game introduces longer routes from mines, quarries, and trade posts back to your city. Raiders love ambushing these.

• Open Military → Routes / Escort (name may vary depending on your build).
• Select key caravans (usually the ones bringing in stone and gold).
• Assign 2–3 mobile units (cavalry or fast infantry) as permanent escorts.

I used to try “free roaming” patrols, but they always seemed to be on the wrong side of the map. Dedicated route escorts are boring but incredibly effective.

Late Game: Layered Fortress and Controlled Aggression

Late game is where things get wild: siege units, bigger hordes, and multiple attack vectors. My early instinct was to turtle forever, but that usually led to getting slowly outscaled. The sweet spot I found is a layered defensive city with a small strike force handling external camps.

1. Two Lines of Walls, One Line of Death

Once your economy can handle it, aim for:

• Outer wall: Absorbs the initial hit, buys time.
• Kill zone: Traps and heavily upgraded towers between outer and inner walls.
• Inner wall: Protects your actual city core if outer defenses fail.

Use Settlement → Build → Traps to lay spike pits, slowing fields, or flame traps in narrow corridors between the two walls. The goal is to make enemies path through a predictable “funnel” where everything you have is shooting at them.

2. Field a Small, High-Quality Strike Force

Instead of bloating your garrison to 60 weak troops, I’ve had better success with a compact elite force:

• 2–3 heavy melee units to tie up elites and protect your mages.
• 2–3 casters or artillery to delete clumps and siege engines.
• 2–4 fast cavalry for flanking and sniping support units.

Between waves, use Military → Raid to hit nearby enemy camps or siege staging areas. Just don’t overcommit; if a major wave timer is less than two turns away, I keep everyone home.

Real-Time Defense Tactics That Actually Matter

Even with a perfect city, you can still lose fights by misplaying the real-time battles. Here’s what made the biggest difference for me.

• Use tactical pause (if available): Constantly hit pause to reassign groups, focus fire siege units, and re-target towers. I play on PC, so I bound pause to a convenient key and spam it.
• Let walls tank, not units: Keep melee just behind the wall and only open the gate or move them onto the breach once the wall section is almost down. Trading stone for blood is almost always worth it.
• Focus siege and shamans first: I manually select my ranged group and right-click enemy siege engines or casters, then let towers clean up the rest.
• Drag enemies through trap lanes: If part of your wall falls, retreat your melee slowly through your trap corridor instead of standing your ground in front of it.

This part is tricky, but stick with it – learning to calmly pause, assess, and reassign instead of panic-spamming commands was probably the biggest single skill jump for me.

Common Mistakes and How to Fix Them Fast

• Problem: “I keep running out of food mid game.”
  Fix: Cap your military size until you have at least two fully staffed food buildings and one tech that boosts production. Check Settlement → Economy every few turns instead of building blindly.
• Problem: “Raids bypass my main wall and wreck remote buildings.”
  Fix: Either pull those buildings back inside your current wall, or extend your wall to include them and add at least one tower covering their access road.
• Problem: “My towers feel weak.”
  Fix: You probably have them too spread out. Delete or ignore isolated ones and double down on a few dense clusters with upgrades.
• Problem: “Units never seem to be where I need them.”
  Fix: In the city phase, park your army in the middle of the side you expect to be hit next, not in the absolute center of town. In battle, rely on control groups and rally points, not manual clicking everywhere.

Platform Notes and Final Thoughts

I’ve played mainly on PC with mouse and keyboard, which makes camera control and tactical pausing very comfortable. If you’re on a platform with touch or limited buttons, I strongly suggest simplifying your layout: fewer control groups, tighter walls, and more reliance on static defenses so you’re not microing half a dozen squads at once.

Once you get past the “everything is on fire all the time” early hours, Legacy of Sin: Ill-Boding becomes a really satisfying puzzle of balancing greed and safety. Build food and wood first, throw up a complete (if ugly) wall, cluster your towers, protect your routes, and use tactical pause like it’s a superpower. If my repeatedly-doomed settlements can turn into a stable bastion, yours can too.