Wood Wall

In-game Description

"Walls keep the colony defended from nearby enemies."

General Information

Wood Walls are the fundamental defensive unit of the game and are available from the start of the game. Walls are relatively inexpensive and have no maintenance cost aside from costs incurred to repair them if damaged. A wall cannot be infected and must be destroyed. Most infected cannot bypass a wall, and will tend to attack any wall within range of their attacks to the exclusion of other activity. Most units on the other hand can fire over walls to attack infected on the other side. As such, walls are the most effective way to slow infected and at the same time protect your units and buildings.

However, walls have no watch radius and can on their own do nothing to stop an infected from eventually breaking through. Worse, a wall not only will attract infected that stray close enough that is in their watch range, increasing the number of infected that discover your settlement, a wall that is being attacked produces significant noise that will lure yet more infected to investigate.

The maximum amount of walls which can be directly adjacent in 3 directions is two. It is not possible to build a 3x3 block of walls, or even have two rows of walls more than 3 long meet at a right angle. If you attempt to place a wall that would violate this rule, the message "Too many walls in the same area. Three rows of walls are not allowed" appears. Thus, while you can build a double row of walls, you cannot build a three rows of walls without placing a gap between them.

Walls going straight vertically or horizontally appear to be three wide, but do not in fact violate this rule, as they are actually not straight walls but a series of short walls zig-zagging across the map.

Wooden Walls can be upgraded to Stone Walls.

Tips & Strategy

To prevent Wood Walls from degrading your ability to defend your settlement rather than increasing it, they should be defended at all times by turrets or units.
The Lucifer is the only current unit that cannot attack over a wall.
Most new players, after a few losses in which a small number of zombies infiltrate their settlement, prioritize building elaborate defenses around their initial settlement. This is almost always a mistake for several very important reasons, and usually is the underlying cause of a player becoming 'stuck' and unable to advance on a map past a certain point. First, in the first 5-7 days of your settlement, resources are both extremely scarce and extremely valuable because any investment during this period has an exponentially large payoff in the total strength of your economy in the long run. Building 20 or 30 wood wall segments during this period can permanently cripple your economy, or at least delay it sufficiently that you are unable to keep up with the exponentially increasing size of later swarms. It is much better to invest that gold and in particular that wood in resource producing and economy boosting improvements like Mills, Quarries, the Wood Workshop and a Soldiers Center. Secondly, building a wall you cannot defend only invites more attacks rather than reduces them. Without units to patrol a wall or turrets to oversee it, a wall is just a source of problems and not actually a defense. Thirdly, your initial settlement during this period is far too small to be actually viable in the long term. By walling yourself in, you are committing yourself to defend an area that is too small to sustain a settlement. And finally, during the first 5 days of your colony, significant zombie aggression is rare anyway, and walls are not really needed before the first or even second scheduled horde. As a general rule, large stretches of wall should not be built prior to obtaining units or turrets like the Great Ballista to defend those walls.
During the first 10-15 days of development, more experienced players try to use what they have learned with respect to predictable infected behavior, to get away with as few of walls as possible, building only very short lengths of wall in only those areas that they can cover with units poorly. These tend to be areas near the edge of a unit's patrol area or vision, which are thus overseen for the shortest period. It is typical to therefore build walls that are only 1-2 segments long, directly adjacent to buildings along the perimeter of the settlement and between the building and the nearest zombie horde. Any infected that strays close to the building will attack the wall first, rather than the building, giving the player time to route a unit to the trouble spot and destroy the infected before it can attack the vulnerable building or break the wall. Within the community, these minimal defenses are commonly called 'scratching posts'; whereas, long stretches of undefended wood walls are referred to as 'bongo drums'.
A wood wall will gain 26.67 hp per second when under construction, which means if infected don't deal more than 26.6 damage per second, an unfinished wood wall can tank as much damage as a finished wood wall.
It is highly recommended to build a single wall at corner around your colony, so you will know it whenever any (not-harpy) infected want to pass.
If you want to upgrade your defenses to Stone Walls and need some wood, you can demolish your old Wood Walls, getting 2 Wood and 5 Gold back for each, therefore costing you 5 gold more per wall, but providing valuable wood.