Building fortresses

[Crafty]

Wow, good comments. A lot of things might seem obvious to you, but not to me..

Here's a scenario, you are playing a double blessed strategy, leading an early charge. After clearing the provinces around your capital, you strike out, and very soon you run into a fort build by the AI. It looks poorly defended (the main enemy force is probably raiding elsewhere), you can probably beat it, but it will take a few turns to break the walls which is time you cannot waste in the early expanding stage. Or perhaps you should ignore it, and just take the other equally poorly defended enemy provinces.

What do you do? I always try to take the fort, which I think is a bad idea on big maps...

[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

[Jazzepi]

Something else to remember, you gain the income from any territory that you have any army in that the opponent has a fortress in.

Jazzepi

[Gandalf Parker]

For a large map against AIs I often take the province but not the castle. At least not for awhile. I can move armies thru that province and continue attacking deeper. As long as I keep a small force there I do not have to retake the province and I can still get gold and blood slaves from it. But the big advantage is that if another AI suddenly swarms up on me I can pull back. That AI will stop to try and take the castle from the first AI. I get an important benefit for a front-line castle (able to hold an attacker there while they seige me) without the expense of having to take the castle from whoever is inside. Once I no longer need to worry about a rush attack in that area, then I take the castle and the other provinces around it.

It might also be a worthwhile tactic in MP games. Using the province to move thru a beaten foes area but leave him there until you are sure that you can hold the area. If you get pushed back then let HIM defend it.

[MaxWilson]

Crafty said:
Here's a scenario, you are playing a double blessed strategy, leading an early charge. After clearing the provinces around your capital, you strike out, and very soon you run into a fort build by the AI. It looks poorly defended (the main enemy force is probably raiding elsewhere), you can probably beat it, but it will take a few turns to break the walls which is time you cannot waste in the early expanding stage. Or perhaps you should ignore it, and just take the other equally poorly defended enemy provinces.

What do you do? I always try to take the fort, which I think is a bad idea on big maps...

You can't ignore the fort, or else he'll pump in reinforcements through it. Take the fort, turn up taxes and blood hunt for a turn or so to get the unrest above 100, and *then* take the poorly-defended enemy provinces. Then come back and actually take down the fort.

Too bad you can't pillage until the fort is down, or else you could do that instead of blood hunting.

-Max

[Sleet]

Great info.. thanks everyone.