Building fortresses

[Crafty]

Some tips for a newbie please. I notice the AI tends to build a lot of fortw, while I hardly build any cos they are so expensive.

I know like all things it depends on 1,000,0000 factors and variables but I would like your thoughts on
Reasons you build a fort. Strategic chock points? For efficient recruiting of good indies and/or nationals? Others? How do you decide whether to position them? Any rules of the thumbs.

I find that using forts for chock points is not very good. Mainly because it doesn't combo well with PD which is great for defense. Your commanders in forts have to be set to patrol to defend the province together with the PD right? Usually i got better things to do with the commanders (I usually have a lab/church there, so the mages are researching/forging/searching, priests preaching), so my PD gets wiped out over and over again, before i break the seige, sigh.

It's really irritating, when the Ai brings in a modest army that I can beat, but cos I'm not patrolling , he disrupts my recruiting for one turn, before i wipe him out, and he repeats it over and over. Sometimes I swear he sends out sacrifical troops just to siege my castle for one turn to stop me from recruiting... I really should set my mage commanders to patrol...but research is much better...

Do you guys really set your commanders to patrolling to prevent this?

Also forts don't really hold off the enemy, cos they don't have to seige your castle to move off to another province, they just got to defeat your PD plus any patrolling.
So it works only if you have 2 provinces side by side, one with a large army and/or high pd, and the fort province with a token force.

I don't really think forts are that worth while. They take a long time to build (6 months?) , so I have to remember to send a sucky commander to do it. Sometimes it is worth it, once I found a province that allowed recruiting of the elephants!!! another time i got sages. Build a fortress quickly, clean out the surrounding provinces, and lots of resources for recruiting!!!

But Most of the time i would be just happy to get archers . Plus national troops of course, but the best nationals are usually capital only anyway.

I'm looking at the AI positioning of forts, it's probably just me, but they seem to build a *ton* of forts and they are very close together. It generally isn't a good idea to have 2 fortresses one province apart right? One time i thought i saw 2 fortresses next to each other..

In general how many fortresses should i be building on average (i know it depends), but when i play a medium map, i built only 1 fort, the rest i got from the AI.. Heck I sometimes even demolish the ones i get.

Somehow I think i'm using forts wrongly. Please help.

[thejeff]

I'll position my forts based on chokepoints, resources, etc, but the reason I build them is mages. More forts -> more mages -> more research/more battle mages -> more effective battle magic/summons.

More national troops are good as well. More accurately, being able to recruit national troops close to the front line is good.

Protecting labs/temples so you can research/summon etc without worrying about raiders.

No real problem with setting forts one province apart. Just don't try to recruit from that province. Just don't put a fort next to your capital if you're relying on resource heavy capital only troops.

All that said, against the AI, I usually only get one or 2 forts built before I start taking them from the AI as fast as I need them. Can't think of any reason to demolish them, except to keep them out of enemy hands.

[SlipperyJim]

I agree with thejeff. The main reason I build forts is to protect my mages. Nothing sucks like having a whole team of sages wiped out by Call of the Wild/Winds or (worst of all!) a random unlucky event. Say, for example, that Caspar finds the deepest cave in the middle of your research lab, and then your sages all get trampled by Troglodytes....

The OP is right that fortresses aren't much good for defending chokepoints. It's ironic, but true. It's usually much easier to defend a chokepoint by purchasing a load of PD (especially if your PD is decent) and a lab, then send in a couple of mages to summon new (cheap) beasties every month. For example, if you have E2 mages, Clockwork Horrors are nasty & cheap.

Another good reason to build a fort is to maximize the income of a rich province. Any province with a high population and a good income will get a substantial boost from a fortress. After several turns, that fortress has paid for itself, and the rest of the game is pure profit.

[Loren]

I've demolished a few when they appear on their own next to my capital and thus suck resources away from building capital-only troops.

[Jazzepi]

SlipperyJim said:
I agree with thejeff. The main reason I build forts is to protect my mages. Nothing sucks like having a whole team of sages wiped out by Call of the Wild/Winds or (worst of all!) a random unlucky event. Say, for example, that Caspar finds the deepest cave in the middle of your research lab, and then your sages all get trampled by Troglodytes....

The OP is right that fortresses aren't much good for defending chokepoints. It's ironic, but true. It's usually much easier to defend a chokepoint by purchasing a load of PD (especially if your PD is decent) and a lab, then send in a couple of mages to summon new (cheap) beasties every month. For example, if you have E2 mages, Clockwork Horrors are nasty & cheap.

Another good reason to build a fort is to maximize the income of a rich province. Any province with a high population and a good income will get a substantial boost from a fortress. After several turns, that fortress has paid for itself, and the rest of the game is pure profit.

It's important to be careful if you're trying to build fortresses for increased income. They never really pay for themselves in the short run. A fortress increases the income of the province that it's built in by a % value equal to (admin value)/2. If you have a 1000 gold fortress Citadel with admin of 40 and you build it in a plains that rakes in 200 gold a turn. That means you get 20% more gold each turn (40 gold a turn). You aren't making any profit off of this investment until *25 turns* have passed. 25 turns is a long time to earn back no money on your investment. If you put 1,000 gold into troops you'd be more likely to invade a neighbor, take a territory, and see a quicker return.

That doesn't mean that you should never build a fortress to increase income, in some circumstances, especially if you have great scales, it's a good idea. Especially with some of the higher admin fortresses. Just keep in mind how slow the payback will be.

Also, it's important to note that I completely ignored growth scales in the above calculations, which would make your return come back faster. If someone with more time would like to add that in, feel free to!

Jazzepi

[thejeff]

But if you're building forts anyway, for recruiting mages, and don't care much about resources, you might as well go for high income provinces to get back some of the cost.

[Jazzepi]

Right. There are definitely secondary benefits to building fortresses beyond the gold income. These have to be considered as well.

Jazzepi

[Gandalf Parker]

Castles are good for choke points but they do not have to be ON the chokepoint. They might be better for you if they are within REACH of the choke point. Like 1 move away from it. I find it more important what indepts it can get and to hit the "8" key to look at how many provinces it can draw additional resources from.

For maximum effectiveness keep in mind that a castle uses the provinces it is connected to. And another castle will use the provinces connected to it. So build them two provinces away from each other if possible.

Check the different terrains which can give you different fortresses that you can build. Do you want the cheaper one? Or the stronger one? the one that has a higher admin rating?

Of course my suggestions are from playing solo on pretty large maps. Playing fast blitz games on small maps would probably change the suggestions

[Crafty]

Wow, good comments. A lot of things might seem obvious to you, but not to me..

Here's a scenario, you are playing a double blessed strategy, leading an early charge. After clearing the provinces around your capital, you strike out, and very soon you run into a fort build by the AI. It looks poorly defended (the main enemy force is probably raiding elsewhere), you can probably beat it, but it will take a few turns to break the walls which is time you cannot waste in the early expanding stage. Or perhaps you should ignore it, and just take the other equally poorly defended enemy provinces.

What do you do? I always try to take the fort, which I think is a bad idea on big maps...

[Jazzepi]

It really depends. What you have to understand is that forts allow you to produce units. Unless there's a mine, or an extremely high resources neutral territory, fortresses provide the *only* source of troops that a nation can produce.

With that in mind, sieging a fortress prevents a nation from producing troops/commanders there. This is very important when it comes to seiging the capital, as they are often worth 2-3 times as much production as other fortresses.

I'm in a game where an ally of mine was able to completely shut down the opponent's production of his sacred units by sieging his capital for several turns. Even though he had lost over 80% of his provinces to that opponent's raiding forces, the fact that my ally had his home capital producing troops, and had sieged the enemy capital, meant that the opponent's troops defending, plus his mages were going to slowly begin to starve.

In this way, it made sense to lay siege to the capital. In some cases, it's more important to starve your opponent of resources. In The Boiling Ocean I attacked an Ulm player as Mictlan. I had a good bless rush strat, but they had a lot of archers. Instead of engaging them head on, I took as many peripheral territories as possible, leaving them with only about 5-6. I, on the other hand, was expanding 2 territories a turn to the north. This gave me a huge income advantage, and allowed me to amass an army and finally conquer their home territory. While I never laid siege to either of their fortresses until their main army was defeated, I was able to win the war by making their gold income, relative to my own, minuscule.

So there's basically two options. Raiding your opponent's lands and jacking up the tax to 200%. Or sieging their fortresses and trying to take them over. It really is a matter of circumstance and relative power as well as troop location that makes the difference.

Jazzepi