[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Cainehill:

quote:

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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.

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Don't forget tunnels. They were likly at least as eficient as all other siege machinary together in destroying castles defenses.

If done right, the tunnles could collapse castle's walls completely, at several places at the exactly the same time, totally unexpected for defenders (it was typically done by replacing stones in different parts of the walls basement with oiled wood blocks, than setting them all on fire at the same time). Not to mention using different expolsives in combination with tunneling, long before age of cannons.

Unlike castle siege machinery, that could be destroyed by defenders machinery or during succefull raid (sometimes during the night) by the fortress defenders, tunnels were very difficult to destroy, or even detect. And unlike complicated siege machinery you don't need any resourses to do it, all you need to have is a lot of time and manpower, as well as few engineers to direct these efforts. And time and manpower is something that siegers usually possesed in large quantities.

[ July 11, 2004, 06:27: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]