Repairing damaged walls

[Ars Moriendi]

How can I repair fortifications ?

City walls of Paris are 100% on campaign map, but each time I get assaulted they're just a pile of rubble, exactly the way I left them after taking the city.

Any other way than demolish / rebuild ? Will it at least work this way ?

I've searched the threads but couldn't find anything related to this.

[Fisherking]

I have heard that they would self repair given time and the region free of enemies in earlier versions.

It could be back to broken in 1.5 or it may still self repair. Of course there is no way to tell after all the enemies are defeated.

I would just leave it and if you still have holes if you are attacked in 9 or 10 turns you know it is broken again...
:juggle2:

[Monsieur Alphonse]

The only solution is to demolish and then rebuild them. Which is a rather expensive way to repair something.

"Oh no someone broke in to my house and now my front door is broken. Please repairman can you fix it? Sure Madam we blow up the house and build a new one." :clown:

[Owen Glyndwr]

...and this is supposed to be the "finished" version of ETW?

[Ars Moriendi]

I'm calling in the demolition squads.

On second thought, better not - it's actually easier to fight assaulting enemies when there are holes in the walls - they tend to funnel through one of the breaches and head straight for the flag which makes them very easy targets. Good walls = costly melee, better to avoid.

[Fisherking]

A couple of cannon set to canister pointing at the hole are nice. They also get striped up quickly that way.
:laugh4:

[Zarky]

Canister shots at bottlenecks is always a good idea, and you can put regular line infantry on both sides of the hole (far away enough of course) so that they make mincemeat out of anything that survives the canister shots.

[nameless]

Actually for forts you can easily repair the damage after a battle. Just click on it and click repair for it.

Not sure how they intended to do it for cities, I suspect it's a bug.

[Dreadnought2]

I've had Amsterdam's Advanced Fortifications fix themselves between two AI attacks in the same turn yet had the same class of fortifications in India stay damaged for turn after turn...

I've used troops to deploy cheval-de-frise just inside the breaches or light infantry to deploy stakes just outside the breach with some success - wiping out the attacking cavalry just leaves the infantry to be dealt with...

Line infantry about 50 yards either side of the breach and garrisoned in fort buildings with arty in support firing solid & canister through the gap is also good.

I've had good results with two batteries, one firing canister and the other solid shot straight through the plug of densely packed attackers. Kills so many attackers that some units immediately break and try to turn around to flee, plugging the breach for even longer and allowing further shots.

Does wonders for the artillery crews XPs...

Cheers,
Dreadnought2

[Dead Guy]

Berlin level 1 fort doesn't repair itself either apparently. Defended it yesterday for the first time in at least 10 turns and it was broken, and now the damn swedes shot another hole in it.

I find the level 1 (artillery fort?) a little crammed sometimes, it can be hard to place howitzers so they don't fire into walls or buildings sometimes. Do you guys find it worthwhile to upgrade to star fort for that reason, because I can't really see any other advantage of a larger fort, I only keep flint locks on the walls for a while anyway. The larger space might also give you an easier time to place infantry around breaches or on the approach to the flag I guess?

The best defenses I've had are where there is a breach on the opposite side of the fort from the enemys deployment area, so they run past all my disposable citizenry on the walls and get shot up and exhausted by the time they go through the breach, but that's rather random if you don't take down your own walls at the back of your fort at the start of the battle.

[Nikko01]

I experienced this bug in ETW and unsurprisingly experienced it after in NTW. So I have successfully tested a modification of a NTW .save file that may work with ETW as these games are close. Below is what I did.

1) Install an editor. For my part, I used ESF Editor but SaveParser should also do the job.
2) Make of course a backup of the .save file.
3) Find the location which interests us by following the path below.


CAMPAIGN_SAVE_GAME
CAMPAIGN_ENV
CAMPAIGN_MODEL
WORLD
REGION_MANAGER
REGIONS_ARRAY[x]
REGION
SETTLEMENT
SIEGABLE_GARRISON_RESIDENCE
FORTIFICATIONS_BLOCK[y]
FORTIFICATION_DAMAGE_INFO

We can find an array of elements of type FORTIFICATIONS_BLOCK, each containing an object of type FORTIFICATION_DAMAGE_INFO with a set of attributes that I note "a ; b ; c" hereafter.

Example for undamaged city walls

array index 0 : 1 ; 0 ; 0
array index 1 : 1 ; 1 ; 0
array index 2 : 1 ; 2 ; 0
array index 3 : 1 ; 3 ; 0

4) Modify the appropriate attributes

For my part, I noticed that the array looked like that. The indices 4 to 7 of this array seem to correspond to those of the previous array.

array index 0 : 0.9 ; 0 ; 1
array index 1 : 1 ; 1 ; 0
array index 2 : 1 ; 2 ; 0
array index 3 : 1 ; 3 ; 0
array index 4 : 1 ; 0 ; 0
array index 5 : 1 ; 1 ; 0
array index 6 : 1 ; 2 ; 0
array index 7 : 1 ; 3 ; 0

Just modify the attributes of index 0 as follows and the walls should be repaired !
0.9 ; 0 ; 1 => 1 ; 0 ; 0

Note that if you delete array elements, ESF Editor seems to double the size of your .save file, as if it made a copy of the old content.

I didn't notice any corruption as a result of this modification in the new .save file but feel free to notify me if not.

Links
sourceforge.net/projects/esfeditor/
sourceforge.net/projects/saveparser/