Let's Change Forts

[Edi]

Modding wishes shortlist is up.

[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.

[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.

[Kamamura]

You are mistaken there. Peasants were allowed to take refuge, because they were not just mouths to feed - they helped the defense by extinguishing fires, and doing various support works. Moreover, it was the promise of security that made the feudal life less unbearable - a feudal lord that would not protect his subject in times would face desertion/revolts/loss of prestige. What's more, peasants, even if not free subjects, were source of income and wealth and well worth protecting.

[MaxWilson]

They're also a good source of blood slaves.

[TheMenacer]

It'd be pretty nice if the amount of troops a commander had attached to him altered the build time on a fort. Also it'd make it so that nations that relied on gradually-whittled-down armies of chaff would have a bit of an extra leg up over nations that build small raiding parties, allowing them to reinforce quickly and support assaults, which I think they probably need considering that large armies tend to be harder to replace and less efficient than small raiding parties.

[PvK]

Seems to me that the admin rating could be used to re-balance forts. Gold cost gets repaid by admin, especially if/when you have the time and willpower to invest in building them, and choosing good spots for them.

The weakest forts don't provide wall defenders or bottlenecks. This could also be developed a bit - it could be interesting if some fort types had multiple breakthrough points during storming.

Some modding might help this by giving crappy low-admin little-value forts to unthematic choices, so building forts out of your nation's element is more expensive, time-consuming and/or provides little value, to a greater degree than currently. I.e. maybe the problem isn't so much that Mountain Citadel sucks, as that the nations which have it thematically, have better alternatives in unthematic terrain. With mod commands, they could be given alternatives of questionable value in unthematic terrain, encouraging more use of thematically appropriate forts and locations.

[JimMorrison]

Also since for example Swamp City is 50 Admin, and it's in a SWAMP, perhaps some nations could actually get pretty nice forts in their preferred terrain. Give "nature" based nations better forts in Forest, but remove Fortified City, and give them Fortification, or Ramparts or something in plains. By the same token, boost production somewhat in mountains/caves for those nations who reside there (maybe wastes for Abysia?). Reason being that while the terrain is rugged and inhospitable to most, it is their favored habitat, thus you would assume they've put some thought into the engineering and infrastructure to make industry more lucrative in those terrains.

Also I'd think it wouldn't be game breaking to boost underwater forts a little in production. As it is, it's abnormal to see underwater provinces with >30 resources, and poor little Kelp Fortress is only 10 Admin. To balance that, maybe say non-aquatic races can built fortifications underwater (you can leave them down there for years if they have magic items to breathe), but either disable unit creation other than amphibious and indies, or just let people train troops and have them drown immediately.

And finally, I think that increasing the gold benefit of Admin would go a LONG way to at least somewhat altering the behavior of the players. Making the more costly forts generate a significant amount of gold compared to the more "outpost" style, would make it more of a strategic choice than it currently is now. As it is it seems most DO go only for the cheap fast forts, and if there is anyone else like me, I choose them for location only, regardless of type. Neither behavior places any value on the Admin rating, or any of the actual properties of the fort itself.

[Leif_-]

I'd like to see the fort's defense rating taking an active part in the battle somehow (bonuses to the defender's recuperation, morale, precision, range and defense, free garrison/PD size or something) and give the besieger the ability to storm the castle at any point after the first turn. That way the attacker can decide whether to take the hit of the castle defenses or spend time to lower them by besieging.

This would probably mean that high-level battlemagic makes forts moot in the endgame, but that actually strikes me as thematic. Fortifications ought to play their biggest part during the early game.

Also, it would be nice to the upkeep of garrisoned units reduced by the fort's administration value.

[JimMorrison]

The upkeep idea is interesting, that alone would provide some pretty huge incentive to build more expensive castles, so you could more affordably keep garrisons available in more locations.

Only problem that I see with it though, is the sort of huge disparity in home castles, and what that would mean for research costs, as well as the fact that mage costs are relatively well balanced already, and thus it would seem to make sense to make them more expensive in that case, and that would be painful in the first year or so.


As far as defense rating, it sure would be nifty if the better defended castles had better tower defenses at least. Currently if you get 8 xbows in your towers, you get that in every fortification type that you make. This would make early kills that much more difficult, and painful, as you'd be much more likely to lose expensive sacreds or expensive leaders in the assault.