Let's Change Forts

[Leif_-]

Renojustin said:
Sieges can last more than a year. At that point, defenders of the fort are usually down to eating bugs, shoe leather, and each other.

All Saruman had to do was lock them up in there for a few weeks and Rohan would have died. Then wait for Gandalf on the fifth day, and kill his ***.

There has been real-world sieges, of cities, that have lasted for years -- and Saruman was on a deadline. Dawdling would not be appreciated by his betters ... worsers?

Besides, even if Saruman hadn't attacked Helm's Deep head on, he would still have lost the moment the Ents showed up on the field.

[Edi]

Just a heads up, the soon to appear modding wishes shortlist is going to have a slew of fort modding suggestions.

[JimMorrison]

Peasants - the other white meat.



Anyways, as you may or may not be aware, at some times, and especially in poorer weather areas, sieges were often broken for the winter, to resupply the besieging army. These sieges would in fact sometimes last years at a time. Honestly, I think the Dominions method of reducing supplies in the fort are harsh enough. Considering that a Roman legion typically consisted of ~10k men, and we are looking at armies of a few hundred, they should be able to live in there indefinitely.

[Renojustin]

A Roman legion consisted of 4200 foot and 300 horse.

EDIT: I knew that because in my youth I played a little Sega Genesis game called Centurion: Defender of Rome. One of the ancient spiritual precursors to Dominions, for sure. Actually, I think the graphics were a little bit better.

[Edi]

Modding wishes shortlist is up.

[JimMorrison]

The size of a typical legion varied widely throughout the history of ancient Rome, with complements of 4,200 legionaries and 300 equites in the republican period of Rome, (the infantry were split into 35 maniples of 120 legionaries each), to 5,200 men plus auxiliaries in the imperial period (split into 10 cohorts, 9 of 480 men each, plus the first cohort holding 800 men).

There were ten cohorts including the "prima cohors" in a legion. A full-strength legion contained 6,000 men though it was not uncommon for most legions to be undermanned due to previous battles. All of these numbers depended on the date


I also played Defender of Rome, on the PC (I have an emulator version kicking around here somewhere ). For some reason I remembered reading somewhere that a century was 100 men, and there were 100 centuries in a legion. Apparently those numbers are somewhat off.

But still, since an army usually consisted of several legions, and it was in fact not uncommon to see armies of 20k-40k or more, there is a bit of a scale disparity. Though one could say each of our troops represents 50 men or some such thing, but I find it odd that all 50 of them lost an eye.

And danke Edi.

[Ironhawk]

I dont think the answer is allowing people to select and/or modify forts during Pretender design. You could select forts in Dom2 and the only anyone ever picked was the cheapest/fastest one possible. Watchtowers, for the win!

IMO, the easiest fix would be to reverse the current costs for forts. Since the quality of the fort is basically immaterial, make the 5-turn forts cost 800 (to compensate for thier long times) and the 3-turn forts cost 1200. In this way, you don't force the player to always choose thier "worst" fort - but rather give them the option to build a cheap, slow, good fort, or a fast, expensive, bad one.