[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Cohen:
(I suggest: if you "ovverrun" the PD/Patrolling Army in at maximum 5 or 8 battle rounds, AND your army can break the gate of the castle in that turn, the storm castle in the same turn.

Bad. Storming a castle often involves an entirely seperate spell preparation, such as rearming the gems of a caster. In no event do you want to arbitrarily attempt to storm a castle, as without proper preparations and arraying your army in a proper storming formation, a large army can lose to relatively small army easily.

But allows army to penetrate quicker in enemy territory, preventing the chance to trapeze/teleport some SCs in the besieged castle...

This is actually an advantage for YOU: Without a castle, an enemy SC teleporting into the target province attacks IMMEDIATELY.

If temples didn't explode the moment an attacker entered the province, I'd be building a lot fewer castles, because it would actually improve the defensive effectiveness of teleporting SCs: Instead of having to either hope the enemy storms instead of doing nothing, and thus tying you down for at least two turns, at high risk of not actually hurting the opposing force, you can teleport onto the province and force a battle instantly. The present situation is actually advantageous towards avoiding a sudden SC drop, as firstly, the defender must pay for the privilege of securing his temples, rather than having the attacker have to manually raze the temple, and the attacker is protected from the sudden arrival of a teleporting SC: As a result, an attacker who has just arrived in front of a castle can *ALWAYS* retreat unscathed, with the exception of Special Monster spells....which are easy to defend against.

If you attack with purely stealthy forces, then those can fail, as an attacking force that goes stealth immediately runs zero risk of being hit by anything.