This is my conclusion based on the fact that I got attacked only after it finished.
Take it with a grain of salt. ;-)

Wow you can't win an argument, so you resort to namecalling.
Thanks for removing any doubt from my mind that you might have a legitimate argument to make and actually care about the game! :-)

There is no argument. There is only you griping.

Without people to defend you will lose income to bandits.

I've always had people defending it.
You lose income even with high security and a full set of defenders.
Seems all that stuff does is shift the threshold for the dice roll. >.>

This is the only appropriate answer to post like this.

There isn't a real problem with the fortress attack. They're just something to provide extra fight from time to time.
They provide no extra experience, no special loot. I'm skipping those fight because fight without context just bore me but the damage from the assault are just nothing to worry about, seriously.

The game provide enough gold to do whatever you want (I ended the game with around 100k gold just to throw a number) and I bought any special item that just seems interesting to buy. Just selling the quality/excellent items provide a huge amount of money.

I can't see the point of this whine.

Destroyed buildings is not a big problem. But yes. 5 guys with knives cant destroy walls for sure. I think its just a side effect of Chuck Norris`s roundhouse kick. Its known for causing destructions and pain in many dimensions and worlds at same time :)

Well, it's a castle wall built in 2 days, when the real deal took month, or even years, to make. Sure, the warden was a castle architect, but you don't even bother to hire a master stoneworker and his qualified crew. So I'm imagining "impressive, but shoddy and hollow work, holding up by the power of magic and wet plaster, that no sane sentry would ever want to patrol on".

In this context, a ragtag band of marauders getting their hand on a barrel of gunpowder and digging a hole at the base of the stoneworks could bring down a good portion of the mess ^^

The barracks are not needed to be attacked, first thing I built was the Main Hall and the next day I was warned of an incoming attack.

Thanks for the clarification, the alternative would have been crazy. :D

That made me laugh :-)
Thanks!

No.
You see the speed is for game purposes. You never wait in real time in a game or it would be horribly boring.

As to the digging a hole... they are being shot by the defenders the entire time.
There's no chance for that!
As I've said before, there's no siege equipment in a ragtag band of bandits.

That's my point, actually. ;)
Both "building these walls is terribly easy" (in price, manpower and time) and "destroying them is terribly easy" (in number of attackers and their equipment) ARE for game purpose. If you wanted the game to be completely realistic about it, there's no way you could finish even one building before the game came to an end.

So either you accept it for gaming purpose and try not to think too hard about it, just like you did for construction (and which I tend to do too, because realism is often boring), or you justify it in your head like I just did ("there are really a fair number of bandits with good equipment, but we only see a small part of the battle", "the construction was old and crappy", "they managed to sabotage/infiltrate and detonate the castle's gunpowder reserve", etc...)

Although I agree that one full fledged siege battle (like the one in NWN2) where you can feel your castle's power in a less abstracted way would be nice :)

That was a fun battle.
It's also about the only situation I can see full stone walls getting knocked down. ;-)

You are stubborn. Really stubborn.

Naah, if you really want to get a wall down, bring a shovel and some flamable/explosive materials, not a catapult. Or don't bother with the wall and bribe a traitor to open a door instead. That's mostly how those things were done IRL.

But the "catapult, ram and siege tower" full fledged assault has a nice "hollywood" feel that I like in games, I reckon ;)