Some tips for a newbie please. I notice the AI tends to build a lot of fortw, while I hardly build any cos they are so expensive.
I know like all things it depends on 1,000,0000 factors and variables but I would like your thoughts on
Reasons you build a fort. Strategic chock points? For efficient recruiting of good indies and/or nationals? Others? How do you decide whether to position them? Any rules of the thumbs.
I find that using forts for chock points is not very good. Mainly because it doesn't combo well with PD which is great for defense. Your commanders in forts have to be set to patrol to defend the province together with the PD right? Usually i got better things to do with the commanders (I usually have a lab/church there, so the mages are researching/forging/searching, priests preaching), so my PD gets wiped out over and over again, before i break the seige, sigh.
It's really irritating, when the Ai brings in a modest army that I can beat, but cos I'm not patrolling , he disrupts my recruiting for one turn, before i wipe him out, and he repeats it over and over. Sometimes I swear he sends out sacrifical troops just to siege my castle for one turn to stop me from recruiting... I really should set my mage commanders to patrol...but research is much better...
Do you guys really set your commanders to patrolling to prevent this?
Also forts don't really hold off the enemy, cos they don't have to seige your castle to move off to another province, they just got to defeat your PD plus any patrolling.
So it works only if you have 2 provinces side by side, one with a large army and/or high pd, and the fort province with a token force.
I don't really think forts are that worth while. They take a long time to build (6 months?) , so I have to remember to send a sucky commander to do it. Sometimes it is worth it, once I found a province that allowed recruiting of the elephants!!! another time i got sages. Build a fortress quickly, clean out the surrounding provinces, and lots of resources for recruiting!!!
But Most of the time i would be just happy to get archers
. Plus national troops of course, but the best nationals are usually capital only anyway.
I'm looking at the AI positioning of forts, it's probably just me, but they seem to build a *ton* of forts and they are very close together. It generally isn't a good idea to have 2 fortresses one province apart right? One time i thought i saw 2 fortresses next to each other..
In general how many fortresses should i be building on average (i know it depends), but when i play a medium map, i built only 1 fort, the rest i got from the AI.. Heck I sometimes even demolish the ones i get.
Somehow I think i'm using forts wrongly. Please help.
Building fortresses
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