Fortress to Province ratio

[dirtywick]

What do you think your ballpark ratio is on average, and in SP or MP? I'm probably at about 1:5 or 1:6 and play almost exclusively SP.

[MaxWilson]

1:10 or lower, until the endgame when I'm steamrolling all the AI's forts. I play with the BI mod so forts are the main "factories" for unit production, but I don't really use them for guarding territory. Thus, they're often three or four provinces apart, which means one per 10 or 15 provinces.

-Max

[moderation]

Getting that 2nd fort up early can be useful though.

[MaxWilson]

Absolutely. My goal in the early game is usually to get enough forts up that I can spend 50% of my gold or more on mages. I'm not happy until I can buy 3 to 5 mages per turn.

-Max

[JimMorrison]

MaxWilson said:
1:10 or lower, until the endgame when I'm steamrolling all the AI's forts. I play with the BI mod so forts are the main "factories" for unit production, but I don't really use them for guarding territory. Thus, they're often three or four provinces apart, which means one per 10 or 15 provinces.

-Max

...

Absolutely. My goal in the early game is usually to get enough forts up that I can spend 50% of my gold or more on mages. I'm not happy until I can buy 3 to 5 mages per turn.

-Max

So..... Your early expansion encompasses 30-50 territories?


I generally saturate my forts over time so that few provinces lack a fort on their border. I still tend to be a bit slower at getting them started, but once I do, I consider them invaluable for stopping raiding strategies, and protecting against barbarians.

[das123]

Forts seem to serve two purposes. 1: They increase the production amount that can be taken from the surrounding provinces; and 2: They slow down attacks on your territory.

I tend to build forts behind my front-line so that each fort is two provinces apart to maximise the production. My front-line is usually forts next to each other to slow down attackers.

The biggest problem I have is that by the middle game I usually only have 1 real army with all my attacking forces in it (around 8 commanders). If the AI attacks my territory with two or three armies they can basically take the whole lot in short time and I am just playing catch-up but never make any real in-roads. Question I have is how many armies do you guys build in relation to the number of provinces you own? And how much do you rely on province defence?

Also, by having just one army, when it gets wiped (and it always does) I am in a lot of trouble. That's why I try to build forts instead. How do you guys cater for this?

[JimMorrison]

Well it's for that reason that I think it's easiest to learn the game using nations that have strong PD. So, you raise the defences on provinces that you aren't keeping active forces. The AI likes to minimize the forces that it needs to take a province, sometimes attacking with 8-9 soldiers in a force (not strongly blessed sacreds, like if it were a human ), so you just need your borders protected enough to stop that. However, the sooner you train yourself to manipulate smaller mobile forces, the better off you will be. Not just because mobility will win you a war that brute force can't, but because if you stick yourself only taking 1 province per turn, you won't grow very quickly.

And likewise, as you progress in the game, if you find that even a massive amount of your forces gets crushed, then you are not keeping up with the arms race. Start developing your use of mid-game magics and summons more deeply. Some of them aren't that big a deal, or worth spending gems on. But some of them can easily mean the difference between an embarassing loss, and a heroic triumph.

Also, with most nations, you'll end up looking at your excess castles not as troop factories, but as mage training facilities. Even if you are using a nation that has fairly weak mages in its noncapital castles, look at the limited paths you are getting, then explore the spell lists. You may find that there are 1-2 buffs that you can cast like crazy with enough cheap little mages, that all of your mediocre mundane infantry suddenly performs very very well in combat.

[MaxWilson]

JimMorrison said:
So..... Your early expansion encompasses 30-50 territories?

I generally saturate my forts over time so that few provinces lack a fort on their border. I still tend to be a bit slower at getting them started, but once I do, I consider them invaluable for stopping raiding strategies, and protecting against barbarians.

You're nitpicking, of course. Yes, my early expansion tries for 2-3 provinces per turn for the first year and a half or so, and 20 territories by the end of year 1 is probably a fair average. No, I don't have 3-5 forts by the end of year one, and I may or may not even build 5 forts by the end of year 3. It depends on a lot of things like whether I'm having to pour resources into a war with somebody or just buying mages and expanding, but especially early on I may build more forts than the 1:10 ratio indicates. The 1:10 is my guess at what my stable ratio is. I'm positive I don't have less than a 1:5 ratio because then all my forts would be practically touching.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

das123 said:
Also, by having just one army, when it gets wiped (and it always does) I am in a lot of trouble. That's why I try to build forts instead. How do you guys cater for this?

Depends on the situation. I never have just one army, but if I'm in a war of attrition I may have only two or three. (The Army of the Potomac and Army of the Tennessee, as it were.) If I'm not fighting someone through a chokepoint I will probably have five or six that sometimes merge temporarily or permanently. The problem with having one big army, of course, is that when you lose it's usually because the enemy pulled out a surprise that you weren't ready for (like a pretender or a second army or a new spell or a battle that turns out to be in severe cold and a swamp so all your units get fatigued to death by his chaff). By using one big army you have a better chance in any particular battle, but you also have no way to recover if things go sour. (Well, there are still usually survivors that you can gather up.) You're also not forcing him to split his forces, and finally you have no mobile reserve in case somebody else attacks you along a different border.

The only really helpful thing I can suggest is to be 1.) constantly massing reinforcements at your forts that you can ferry occasionally to wherever they're needed, 2.) researching spells so that your librarians can defend the base (together with the PD) when needed, thus holding a border at the cost of slowing down research. It really depends upon your nation.

-Max

[dirtywick]

MaxWilson said:

You're nitpicking, of course. Yes, my early expansion tries for 2-3 provinces per turn for the first year and a half or so, and 20 territories by the end of year 1 is probably a fair average. No, I don't have 3-5 forts by the end of year one, and I may or may not even build 5 forts by the end of year 3. It depends on a lot of things like whether I'm having to pour resources into a war with somebody or just buying mages and expanding, but especially early on I may build more forts than the 1:10 ratio indicates. The 1:10 is my guess at what my stable ratio is. I'm positive I don't have less than a 1:5 ratio because then all my forts would be practically touching.

-Max

Not really. It's 4 forts in 20 provinces, which isn't a whole lot if you think about it. I'd load a saved game and do a rough count.

I'm just saying, usually when I play, at a 1:5 ratio apparently, I have a lot of extra gold even after recruitment. Since it's not like you're collecting interest on what you're banking or there's any reason to save up to buy something nice, it's probably best just to spend it all. But I can't seem to do that, so I was thinking maybe I'm not building enough forts?