So Ive been having this problem. Its not as simple as the gaurds wont assign. The gaurds will assign themselves but when I enter into workshop mode they unassign themselves from the plots. BUT it gets SO much weirder. I took all the gaurds and sent them back to my main outpost and reassigned new warriors as gaurds. This time I did not go to the workshop which is Sanctuary built with plots by me being used as a vassel and I am in control of my vassel settlements. I was bouncing around between my other settlements at the time trying to meet soldier needs so my I can do more attacks. During this the new gaurds were upgrading the plots (seen the pop ups) I was happy I had found a work around. So I finally meet the soldier needs and my army builds rapidly. This causes crashes at my home base Starlight Drive Inn. I figure its because the game is trying to make 18 new warriors pretty much all at once. I tried to do an attack and CTD, I take a nap to save (survival) CTD as soon as I get up. OK I decide I gotta just let this place do its thing for a little while because Ive been bouncing around between my newly founded empire (whole left upper quarter of map). I load into a save from before the latest CTDs and head off to finish the story (Im at end game wipe out Railroad and BoS) on my way out of Diamond City (my house is Aloots Homeplate) I leave the city and all of my Sanctuary Hills settlers are standing in the entry way. I get a big laugh and head out to finish the game without really thinking about what I just saw. 2 hours later the Commonwealth is firmly under Institute control I decide to head back to my Raider empire. I go to Starlight and try to run attack and I literally fell asleep before the quest triggered. Im like Ok crap my warrior problem still hasnt fixed itself or a script is hung up or something. Its late I go to bed and forget. Next day I load a save from before the attempt at an attack. I decide to go back to my settlements and manage all the resources. I go to Sanctuary and nobody is there except the raider gaurds. Theyre assigned though, so I go into the workshop mode to see if the settler plots were still assigned and they were and even upgrading while nobody is there (except I should mention Marcy Jun and Sturgis were still in Sanctuary). I decided to go back to Diamond City and theyre all still standing there. At this point I just went back a few hours in the saves and found one before all the stuff went nuts.
OK my mod list is pretty light its well under 100 and most are SimSettlements mods. Ive used the majority of the mods Im using for quite some time and I trust most of them the only thing thats new and uses scripts is Better Location Damage and I am using the full thing. I can share the whole list once I am at my home pc if your interested.
The problem is in the workshop system as I had spent the prior couple hours just doing conqueror and settlement building any time I spent away from settlements worked perfectly even on my prior playthrough using the new Depravity mod (not using this time this was supposed to be just a conqueror/institute playthrough). I would say the game is not a fan of me wanting to be in control of vassel settlements. I also had turned off in the conqueror section in the pip boy auto assignment in an attempt to remedy the issues I was having. I noticed that anything that wasnt a raider in my outposts causes a problem. Enslaved would constantly unassign themselves and I even had the raiders attack them as soon as I enter a settlement. Robot farmers seemed to work without issues though.
Last night I had found a save prior to my Sanctuary settlers running away to Diamond City. I decide to move a defense plot I placed poorly and as soon as I enter workshop mode I see the raiders assigned to the defenses (3 near bridge to vault 111) unassign from them and not just the one I moved but all 5 of them. So I scrapped all those plots and built 5 new martial plots and assigned them. This save is before I took Tempines as a vassel I believe so tonight I planned to do that again and see what happens. I did keep a couple saves from during the time my settlers had gone rouge just in case anyone was interested.
I also forgot to mention another rather strange problem I had right before this. I was dying in workshop mode, what I mean I was at 80% health and as I was in the workshop mode I would lose health and when I exited the workshop I would die. I am using BLD mod so I thought it was bleed damage sickness or lack of sleep. I had applied a dirty bandage and couldnt sleep because of the rads I figured ok BLD is killing me. I wait it out, antibiotics, bandage, water, food and sleep Im back to 100% and nothing showing in pip boy under effects. I go back into workshop mode and lose health, so Im thinking I have perk that allows me to regain health and that must be conflicting with workshop plus and the invunerabilty somehow so I turned that off and it seemed to solve the problem.
Id say though that the next 4 hours of the playthrough after this is when I start having all the other problems. I had already formed my alliance with the institute and had pretty much pushed all the way to the end of the main story so I was just forming my raider empire. FYI I had saved the settlers in Concord and done Minuteman quests as I was following the main story. I left Jammer in Concord until after getting to the institute with the help of the Minuteman. I did this because it seems in order to clean the castle you must do the minutemen quests, I took Preston with me on some settlement stuff after retaking the castle and once I maxed out his affinity left him at the castle where he cant see me taking over the upper left quarter of the map as a raider. Once I had this all set up Jammer and I finally take our first outpost, Starlight. Then GrayGarden as my first vassel, then Red Rocket (empty except Dogmeat) as a second outpost. After that I took Abernathy as a vassel and then Sanctuary as a vassel. Marcy, Jun, Mamma Murphy, and Sturgis are the only ones there and they lived in the yellow workshop house in beds and were assigned to corn tatos and mutfruit in the backyard. Mamma had her chair. My first trip back there and I find the raider gaurds I had assigned had somehow assigned themselves to my crops. It was during my attempts to reassign them and build new things at Sanctuary to build up a good vassel that I was dying in workshop mode.
I know this was a lot of stuff to try and take in and it sounds like my mod list is probably a big mess. I would at least think that. I started with a clean install of the game and this is my first time using Vortex. All the mods were downloaded fresh into Vortex as my first attempt at moving my mods over caused none of them to be properly linked and therefore updates didnt show (I noticed this during your previous update to the mods). My last playthrough had gone very similarly with the conqueror system but I thought my use of the Depravity mod and the mods accompanying it might have caused extra stress on my system. So I started clean and my plan was BLD and Conqueror, I have none of the Creation Club stuff installed even though I do own a good bit of it just to try and keep things as simple as possible. I also started this right after the last update to the SS mods hoping the fix to my issues would have been patched out.
What I think is that when Im going into and out of the workshop mode trying to find unassigned raiders and properly assign them as guards or whatever is where the problem stems from. Like I said when the problems started I was bouncing around my empire doing a lot of stuff like that. I think somewhere along the line I get everything confused (meaning the scripts) as I enter workshop mode run around looking for someone who is unassigned and then exiting workshop mode to change them from a worker to a guard or maybe an unassigned worker into a warrior. Ive noticed as I do this a couple times in a settlement the scripts lag and then the pop ups come up multiple times cause Ive hit the button and nothing happens till I do it again and then Ive got 2 pop ups and I gotta cancel out of one.
Honestly the mod is incredible and the amount of stuff youve gotten it to do is amazing but I feel like maybe your trying to let us control too much through the settings. I feel like, and I have no way to back it up, that all the options are where the trouble is. It seems when I want to build in a vassel that is screwing it up. I havent tested it but I wonder if the cities were built from plans and I just left everything as default if everything would work as designed flawlessly. The problems with unassigning are clearly triggered by me entering into workshop mode as I have seen it happen in real time but I have to enter workshop mode even just to find who is assigned and who isnt.
Last thing I promise, raiders sent to become guards usually show up in the settlement when assigned to most of the martial plots become workers. I would then change them to guards and sometimes they would then unassign themselves from the martial plot they had been working as a worker. I figured this was likely due to some martial plots not being correctly identified as defense but as things got more and more strange this seems more like a bit of extra info then the actual problem. I do hope something Ive written here is helpful I know its too much but I was hoping that something in the details I left here would be helpful.