[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Well, presumably, forts are only difficult to build and repair when enemies are actually shooting at you. If nobody's around to stop you, a fort can be built from scratch in a single turn by a lone scout, apparently assisted by contracted peasants, the undead, etc.

Er - name me a fort that can be built in a single turn. Even the watchtower and mausoleum take two turns (as can the wizard tower, but that's presumably assisted by magic).

Since the attacker only destroys gates of forts, rather than levelling the entire place to the ground in the process of attacking it, the timeframe involved for such a repair certainly cannot be greater than constructing an entirely new fort to begin with!

Thus, the present system works, and seems to be applied in most games that have sieging: The effects of sieging tend to disappear quickly after the siege is lifted.

Bah. I've studied medieval warfare, sieging et al : they did _not_ only damage the gates. Catapults , onagers, trebuchets, etc, damaged the walls mostly, and the buildings when they overshot the walls. Even greek fire, tossed via catapults, was aimed at the city in general - not the gates, because they couldn't target the gates well enough. That's why they used gauntlets and battering rams. (Once they had half decent cannons - well past the renaissance - they could better target something specific like a gate, but that was _well_ past what is represented in the game. Maybe if Ulm had siege engines.)

Damage was wide spread, and in general, it was easier to build something with a friendly population working for you. Invading and conquering a fortified city, unless the previous masters had been very unpopular, you were more likely to have sabotage than progress in rebuilding the walls, towers, parapets, gates, cisterns, and other things that all played a vital part in castle defense.