[spirokeat]

I've been mulling this over and I'm not sure that there is an overwhelming advantage at all to castling.

I would build a castle for a number of reasons usually.

I need more forts to purchase larger numbers of national non capitol troops, not relevant to all nations.

I want to protect an important province for bloodhunting (the hunters etc), magic site or special recruitable.

Its in strategically good place to start producing new armies from or block the entry of another nation (peninsula provs etc)

So, on one level depending on how costly your castles etc are, you are going to build a number of them anyway.

A castle gives you essentially one turn (generally) of grace on the 'total' loss of a province. This has the effect of protecting a temple or unprotected magetype for one turn also.

Now without going into minute. The various outcomes would seem to be, wait and knack his temple, remaining defenders, fast response army

Move to avoid his fast reponse army, which regardless of their being a castle there will effectively revert back to defender ownership.

The defender can fast response army directly to seiged prov or second guess your next move as hes obviously prepared to face your invading force otherwise this wouldn't be even in his mind.

So, castle or not, your either cat and mousing or planning to nail his force. All thats saved is the temple and any squishies.

Even if you bring in the idea of relief forces or multiple strikes, you will still be facing an army thats built to defend a nation and your either ready for it, or not.

There is of course the immortal defender problem, but even if you take a uncastled province with a temple in it, you still dont reverse the dominion in it instantly so you would have to prepare in advance to cope with immortals regardless of castle or not.

And of course everytime you let a province slip, your opponent is then 'castled' against you. So it would seem that the main advantage is to protect non focal mage types like bloodhunters or site activators.