[Wendigo]

Originally posted by Boron:

you can't pillage before you stormed the fort or ?

There's no point in pillaging if you are going to storm the fort. You only pillage what you cannot hold.

i agree that getting attacked at 5 forts at the same time is bad . BUT it would be even worse if you had no castles around there because the 5 provinces would have been lost immediately + in mid / late game you probably have in most of them a temple anyway + pd which is lost immediately so - 300 gold or so .

Not necessarily worse. If you have no fort in those provinces you can teleport/cloud trapeze your pretender or a small mage force on one of those 5 armies & waste it. Full castling is not always the optimum choice, definitely not if you cannot defend vs a multipronged attack.

with a fort you only need 1 point = 1 gold in defense in order to see the attacking force
and perhaps of the 5 besieged forts you can retaliate on 1 or 2 immediately and at the others the enemy marches further so no damage at all.
even if he besieges perhaps you are lucky and in one of them he doesn't break the walls at the first turn .

If you can only retaliate in 2 out of 5 forts you will lose the other 3 (remember, paper walls) vs a competent opponent if his force is big enough to breach. If it's not the provinces will be unusable for income & blood hunts for a while after being pillaged.

finally for blood nations it is especially important to castle .

I'd rather say that castling works better for nations with magically mobile mages that need also multiple recruitment spots (say, Caelum or Pythium), and worst for those nations depending on capitol only troops.