[Jazzepi]

It really depends. What you have to understand is that forts allow you to produce units. Unless there's a mine, or an extremely high resources neutral territory, fortresses provide the *only* source of troops that a nation can produce.

With that in mind, sieging a fortress prevents a nation from producing troops/commanders there. This is very important when it comes to seiging the capital, as they are often worth 2-3 times as much production as other fortresses.

I'm in a game where an ally of mine was able to completely shut down the opponent's production of his sacred units by sieging his capital for several turns. Even though he had lost over 80% of his provinces to that opponent's raiding forces, the fact that my ally had his home capital producing troops, and had sieged the enemy capital, meant that the opponent's troops defending, plus his mages were going to slowly begin to starve.

In this way, it made sense to lay siege to the capital. In some cases, it's more important to starve your opponent of resources. In The Boiling Ocean I attacked an Ulm player as Mictlan. I had a good bless rush strat, but they had a lot of archers. Instead of engaging them head on, I took as many peripheral territories as possible, leaving them with only about 5-6. I, on the other hand, was expanding 2 territories a turn to the north. This gave me a huge income advantage, and allowed me to amass an army and finally conquer their home territory. While I never laid siege to either of their fortresses until their main army was defeated, I was able to win the war by making their gold income, relative to my own, minuscule.

So there's basically two options. Raiding your opponent's lands and jacking up the tax to 200%. Or sieging their fortresses and trying to take them over. It really is a matter of circumstance and relative power as well as troop location that makes the difference.

Jazzepi