Fort defenses

Playing RTI

i had a single full native infantry in fort Oswego and it was assaulted by a force much larger. I didn't expect to win, but nonetheless, i was expecting the fort defenses to do something.

Enemy infantry advanced directly in front of the defending unit to well within musket shot, turned, exposed it's flank, stopped still for a moment, and proceeded to walk around the fort to climb up the side, raked by heavy and small arms fire all the while.

With the fort cannons and defending muskets blazing away at the hapless assaulters at point blank range, i was a little surprised to see that the total enemy casualties before they started to scale the walls were two.

There is little doubt in my mind that the defenders would have inflicted more damage if they didn't use the fortifications at all.

Is this a typical feature of fort defenses?

Yeah... the cannons do very little if the enemy is standing still and close. The balls just over/undershoot/don't bounch much. Now, if you could load those fort guns canister... then it might be something. Actually, most of the casualites seem to come from your men shooting down. I usually manage to kill quite a few with the musket fire.

Were you using firelock citizens or something?

At the end of the day though, its usually better to just set up line infantry defenses - trenches with cav protection in front of it is nice and garrison the structures inside.

PS. When are they going to fix that fort pathfinding bug where the fort seems to be turned 90 degrees from what the AI pathfinding is expecting?

It was Native Indian Muskets.

Not as good as line infantry, sure, but in open combat i expect them to hit more than two in about 6 volleys at close range

it should be easy to mod the fort cannons, no?

Did you get the unit to shoot the cannons before they closed in?

Select a unit to shoot at and they should be shooting the cannons well before musket range.

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With the fort cannons and defending muskets blazing away

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but if this event isn't widely experienced, maybe it was just one of them things - a chance happening

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Originally Posted by Marcus Caelius

Is this a typical feature of fort defenses?

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Yes. Forts are useless unless you shoot a hole in the wall and use it as a choke point.

Never lost a fort battle ... the Indian campaigns use them a lot.

Just need to get the cannons blazing away and have enough troops to keep them ticking over.

forts are useful in a certain way - you get a bunch of un-molested shots at the enemy infantry while they try to reach a point to scale the wall.

if you want to exploit the AI with forts, just make your stand inside the fort, garrison the buildings, etc. the enemy will scale the walls but largely come at you piecemeal.

well they do that anyways even in the open field, so i guess it's not that much of a help.

I've finally snapped and posted this on the bug list, the most/only effective fort is the lowest level wooden fort. Units in it fire the cannons at a decent range and us etheir muskets to decent effect as the enemy comes into range.

On larger forts (i.e. the first level of city defenses), the wall cannons and muskets do not always fire until at very close range (and only solid shot at that) with diminishing effectvieness -the more developped the fort is. A Star fort is the worst thing to defend from the walls.

The craziest thing about the implementation of forts is that infantry on the walls recieve a bonus to their firing range, but this somehow doesn't result in them firing anywhere near the horizontal range at which they do when on the ground. You can check this by viewing the unit card on and off the wall.

I also have a gripe about the general design of the forts: why on earth do they get higher as they get more developed? the whole point of the designs of the time was to decrease the target area they offered to enemy artillery (like tanks from ww2 onwards).

More developed forts should have more overlapping fields of fire -for both cannon and musket, but be no higher than the first level. None of the current designs of fort accurately depict the layout of an architypal 18th century European fort. Where are the beaten zones for enfilading fire? None of the wall defenses cover each other against attackers at all. The closest to this is the star fort, but it's frankly useless due to the range bug.

rant over.

Anyone from CA reading this, please don't feel I'm ungrateful given you've just released a patch with improvements to the campaign side, only now think about the battle side again! :)

Forts are not an area CA spent too much time on.

That's pretty clear. :egypt:

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Originally Posted by alh_p

I've finally snapped and posted this on the bug list, the most/only effective fort is the lowest level wooden fort. Units in it fire the cannons at a decent range and us etheir muskets to decent effect as the enemy comes into range.

On larger forts (i.e. the first level of city defenses), the wall cannons and muskets do not always fire until at very close range (and only solid shot at that) with diminishing effectvieness -the more developped the fort is. A Star fort is the worst thing to defend from the walls.

The craziest thing about the implementation of forts is that infantry on the walls recieve a bonus to their firing range, but this somehow doesn't result in them firing anywhere near the horizontal range at which they do when on the ground. You can check this by viewing the unit card on and off the wall.

I also have a gripe about the general design of the forts: why on earth do they get higher as they get more developed? the whole point of the designs of the time was to decrease the target area they offered to enemy artillery (like tanks from ww2 onwards).

More developed forts should have more overlapping fields of fire -for both cannon and musket, but be no higher than the first level. None of the current designs of fort accurately depict the layout of an architypal 18th century European fort. Where are the beaten zones for enfilading fire? None of the wall defenses cover each other against attackers at all. The closest to this is the star fort, but it's frankly useless due to the range bug.

rant over.

Anyone from CA reading this, please don't feel I'm ungrateful given you've just released a patch with improvements to the campaign side, only now think about the battle side again! :)

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Somebody in one of the old fort threads posted a vertical cutaway of a star fort, mostly focused on the trench system in front of the walls. Basically, it showed that only about 5-10 feet of wall was actually exposed above ground, the rest was basically hidden behind a giant earthen wall/trench system. Further, that trench system was angled so that enemy cannons effectively could NOT hit the forts walls.

My main problem with forts is their ultra-magical teleportation engines. It always amused me that my border forts around Dageistan would go from hillside to woodlands to open field all in a single year.

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Originally Posted by Sheogorath

Somebody in one of the old fort threads posted a vertical cutaway of a star fort, mostly focused on the trench system in front of the walls. Basically, it showed that only about 5-10 feet of wall was actually exposed above ground, the rest was basically hidden behind a giant earthen wall/trench system. Further, that trench system was angled so that enemy cannons effectively could NOT hit the forts walls.

My main problem with forts is their ultra-magical teleportation engines. It always amused me that my border forts around Dageistan would go from hillside to woodlands to open field all in a single year.

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I think that may have been me.

The basic problem seems to be that CA didn;t do much research into what made star forts so damned difficult to take. I looks to me as though they just made them look a bit like the photographs of whats left of them today, which is only about half of the actual fort. The glacis and counterscarps and ditches are all long gone and in most cases have been forested or built upon. So, you get a completely wrong impression of what a star fort really looked like from those photographs.

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Originally Posted by Didz

I think that may have been me.

The basic problem seems to be that CA didn;t do much research into what made star forts so damned difficult to take. I looks to me as though they just made them look a bit like the photographs of whats left of them today, which is only about half of the actual fort. The glacis and counterscarps and ditches are all long gone and in most cases have been forested or built upon. So, you get a completely wrong impression of what a star fort really looked like from those photographs.

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Well, even as they are now in the game, forts in general would be more effective if it wasn't so easy to get onto the walls, if the wall cannons actually worked and could hit things, and the defenders got some sort of bonus on the walls.

Sadly, as far as I can tell, it's still far more effective in the European forts to simply garrison the buildings inside, or stick a cannon crew on the flagpole and let them fire grapeshot at anybody who gets near. The non-European factions get a little screwed in that respect, since all of their buildings are too far from the center to fire on units taking the flag.

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Originally Posted by Sheogorath

Well, even as they are now in the game, forts in general would be more effective if it wasn't so easy to get onto the walls, if the wall cannons actually worked and could hit things, and the defenders got some sort of bonus on the walls.

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Well its a moot point really because if the forts were properly modelled it wouldn't matter. The main reason the artillery and musketry on the walls is so crap is because the glacis which was designed to afford them a clear and unobstructed line of site to the attacker is missing and as such the attackers have ample dead ground to avoid being hit.

Likewise the grappling hooks only become viable because there is no ditch, which means the enemy can just walk straight up to the walls without having to suffer the trauma of crossing a 20' deep chasm under massed enfilade fire, bombs and mines.

Plus of course enemy artillery are actually able to hit and breach the walls which was another thing the glacis prevented.

I'm guessing you've noticed the glaring blind spots on the corner of each fort too? I'm afraid I've exploited it all too often to breach the walls, even though it feels cheap as hell. It's quite absurd how easy it is to storm the larger forts with only 1 battery in support.

Yep! makes Vauban look like a complete idiot, when if fact he was one of the foremost military engineers of the era. Whole campaigns were focussed on reducing just one of his Star Forts.

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Originally Posted by Didz

Yep! makes Vauban look like a complete idiot, when if fact he was one of the foremost military engineers of the era. Whole campaigns were focussed on reducing just one of his Star Forts.

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Well, courtesy of a quick consultation of wikipedia on Star forts and Vauban (after your earlier post :book:), apparently vauban's defensive ideas were somewhat discredited by the repeated capture of some of his forts, his (greater) reputation for taking them being a more lasting legacy.

Nonetheless, I'm sure he didn't design any of the forts in ETW! It's not like we see anything like even this pretty basic plan:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...A4usel1680.jpg

Or the more elaborate ones like this:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped.../Coevorden.jpg

No all we get is the inner core wall and buildings.

It would be a bit like representing a Medieval Castle by sticking a keep in the middle of an open field, or perhaps a maze with a fountain surrounded by a hedge.

Yes I've wandered around a few period fortification, - i like them very much. I lived for a while in Freiburg, not far from Neuf Breisach which has some very well preserved Vauban fortifications.

But this time to add to an impressive tale of woe, i must relate the assault i recently performed.

RTI campaign, stage 3.

I attacked a strongly defended Philadephia with my main stack.

I made a breach in the wall easily enough (see earlier comments) and marched three regiments of Colonial line infantry to form a U at the mouth of the breach, safely in the dead zone (see earlier comments). There are other details to the events, but to keep it simple, what basically happened is one by one, the defending units left their positions and advanced out of the breach into the concentrated fire of my three line infantry.

One by one they exited the fort and got mown down.

By the time i got round to actually entering the fort, there were only 3 defending units left, an artillery unit, one horse and a line infantry that spent it's last few minutes of life going into and out of square formation (i had no cavalry with me in the fort).

The British did have one, albeit not the last, laugh. General Washington was killed. Although not by British gunfire. I ordered him to move somewhere without paying too much attention and he got mown down by his own artillery at very close range.

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It's not like we see anything like even this pretty basic plan

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Yes, frustrates the hell out of me.
The major features of star forts are:

• There is no dead ground where guns from the fort can't hit the attacker (at least in close anyway)
• The glacis & trench protect the main wall from artillery & infantry charges
• If they make it into the trench, infantry get mown down by artillery shooting in enfilade down the trench from the bastions

And they are all missing from ETW forts.

Just the last, having proper bastion enfilade cannon would make a massive difference to this game. (especially if the enfilade cannons shot grapeshot only)
Attacking infantry units would mostly get routed by the terrible casualties before getting any grappling hooks up.

The walls should be pretty much made invulnerable to cannon.
Artillery was used for trying to clear the parapet of defending cannon, with the angle used for that being doubly handy for also resulting in damage to the weaker buildings inside.

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Originally Posted by hoom

Yes, frustrates the hell out of me.
The major features of star forts are:

• There is no dead ground where guns from the fort can't hit the attacker (at least in close anyway)
• The glacis & trench protect the main wall from artillery & infantry charges
• If they make it into the trench, infantry get mown down by artillery shooting in enfilade down the trench from the bastions

And they are all missing from ETW forts.

Just the last, having proper bastion enfilade cannon would make a massive difference to this game. (especially if the enfilade cannons shot grapeshot only)
Attacking infantry units would mostly get routed by the terrible casualties before getting any grappling hooks up.

The walls should be pretty much made invulnerable to cannon.
Artillery was used for trying to clear the parapet of defending cannon, with the angle used for that being doubly handy for also resulting in damage to the weaker buildings inside.

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it occurs to me that this might be moddable, mightn't it?

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Originally Posted by Marcus Caelius

it occurs to me that this might be moddable, mightn't it?

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I don't think the core problems are moddable, but maybe I'm wrong. First, the battlefields are fairly small, so the forts have been scaled down in size from the real thing. That means the bastions aren't large enough to fit an entire infantry or artillery unit for enfilade fire. That's the first problem. The second is that each unit can only be told to fire in one direction, so you can't string part of a unit along the main wall, with one wing in a bastion firing in a different direction for enfilade. The unit size (and overall army size) just isn't a good fit for the scale of the forts, and I don't think the forts can be re-scaled to fit the cramped terrain.

What we get is sort of a sketch of the fort, and it can't be defended realistically. But then, the castle sieges in RTW and M2TW were simplified also. We couldn't station our own crossbowmen in tower slits, and there were no ditches or moat obstacles.

One thing the modders might be able to do, is maybe add the ditch defenses used in open field battles in a ring around the base of the fort walls. Infantry slow down a little when climbing over those, and if they're in the fire zone from defenders on the walls, they should take a little extra damage before scaling the walls. It would be a minor simulation of the deep trench, but maybe better than nothing. I don't know if that's moddable though. It would have to auto-generate when a fort is plopped down on the terrain for a siege.

I think a good first step would be to get forts as they presently are working. And to make it so fort cannons can fire grapeshot somehow. Possibly make them ONLY fire grapeshot, since they're worthless at long range anyway.

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Originally Posted by Zenicetus

It would have to auto-generate when a fort is plopped down on the terrain for a siege

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I'm not sure that's how the fort battlefields are generated. As in MTW2, they are always placed in the middle of a flat-ish "map" that may draw in features from the surrounding terrain (i.e. more/less hills/forests). But, I suspect that they are otherwise un-connected to their location on the campaign map. i.e. placing a fort on a hill on the campaign map doesn't mean the fort in the battlefield will also be on a hill.

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Originally Posted by Zenicetus

the battlefields are fairly small, so the forts have been scaled down in size from the real thing.That means the bastions aren't large enough to fit an entire infantry or artillery unit for enfilade fire.

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yes and no, the current bastions simply don't stick out enough to cover the walls, and (horror of horrors) there are no cannons to cover the walls either.

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Originally Posted by Zenicetus

The second is that each unit can only be told to fire in one direction, so you can't string part of a unit along the main wall, with one wing in a bastion firing in a different direction for enfilade.

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Not sure about this either. I'm pretty sure (maybe in versions prior to v1.3) that units on the walls fire in appropriate directions (not the same) even if they are not all on the same section of wall. If not, then this is clearly a bug -similar maybe to that of units not firing when in cover behind walls.

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Originally Posted by Zenicetus

The unit size (and overall army size) just isn't a good fit for the scale of the forts, and I don't think the forts can be re-scaled to fit the cramped terrain.

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I believe it would be possible to produce a functionning scale model of a star fort for ETW's battlefield dimensions. If not, then a section of wall could be modeled on the battlefield (although a siege would envelop a fort, the assault would more likely be concentrated on one area anyway).

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Originally Posted by Zenicetus

One thing the modders might be able to do, is maybe add the ditch defenses used in open field battles in a ring around the base of the fort walls. Infantry slow down a little when climbing over those, and if they're in the fire zone from defenders on the walls, they should take a little extra damage before scaling the walls. It would be a minor simulation of the deep trench, but maybe better than nothing. I don't know if that's moddable though. .

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That's a good idea -if possible, the trenches could also be scaled up to better resemble a glacis. Solid shot bounce off them suitably enough for them to work like a glacis too -enabling ricochet fire to take out defensive cannon.

I don't think the changes to the forts are unfeasible for ETW, they just need some attention from the CA team.

The glacis really ought to be almost as tall as the wall, so that would involve quite a major scaling up but it would make the forts more accurate if it could be done. Quite how the troops would negoiate the ditch with scaling ladders would be interesting to watch. Do grappling hooks work downwards?

How were the trenches negotiated? With infilling or ladders to bridge the gap from glacis to wall?

Edit: Does this look familiar to anyone?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

http://lechenet.free.fr/Reportages/v...es/ppage24.htm

Looks to me like the Fort design in ETW. As per usual, I should probably have given the game designer a bit more credit (providing this was a source, or there was another similar) for having sought inspiration from Vauban.

Nonetheless, i think it's fair to say that some of the most important features of this fort have been lost in the implementation of ETW's version. Not least the loss of scale between the two designs (e.g. wall height, bastion size compared to wall length etc) and lack of enfilading cannons.

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Originally Posted by alh_p

How were the trenches negotiated? With infilling or ladders to bridge the gap from glacis to wall?

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There are various detailed desciptions of the methods used to conduct a siege in the 18th Century, so I won't repeat them here. If you want to read a bit more detail there is quite a nice summary here: http://www.all-about-renaissance-fai...ng_a_siege.htm

Suffice it to say that just as the defences of a Vauban Star Fort were designed for mathematical certainty in defence, so the methods of beseiging such a fort were deisgned with mathematical precision to ensure its destruction and capture. Both the defenders and attackers were able to calculate to within a few days how long the fort would resist the attackers, as they knew exactly how long each stage of a seige would take to complete.

The moment of decision arrived when the attackers had driven their trenches up the glacis to within 200 yards of the outer wall and were now able to fire over the lip onto the top of the outer wall itself. This would enable them to suppress the enemy defences, whilst their sappeurs now used the forward parallels as a staging area for mining under the ditch and outer wall.

Having mined under the walls the mines would be charged with gunpowder and exploded to topple the outerwalls into the ditch, creating both a breach in the wall of the fort and partially filling the ditch itself.

At this point the attackers would call upon the defenders to surrender the fort, as a practical breach had been achieved, and usually the defenders would be allowed to march out of the fortress with their arms and honour intact and abandon the fortress to the beseigers. It was recognised that further resistance once a breach had been achieved was a futile, and a pointless waste of lives.

Failure to abide by these simple rules of conduct, and forcing the attackers to assault the breach would be punished by the massacre of the entire garrison and a 'Havoc' (e.g. uncontrolled rape, murder and devastation) upon the city itself, whilst achieving nothing of value in military terms.

If an assault was made necessary then the assault parties would drop into the ditch using ladders or facines (usually made from large bundles of wood and straw) which allowed the troops to jump down without injuring themselves. They would then scramble up the breach into whatever defences the defenders had left whilst their forward artillery tried to keep the defenders heads down.

Once the outer defences were cleared the fortress defences were effectively breached, whilst the attackers would lose a lot of men trying to storm the inner fortresses and citadels directly, there was really not much the defenders could do to prevent their systematic reduction by close range artillery once the assaulting engineers had built suitable positions on the outer wall to protect their guns.

Thus the fall of the fort became a mathematical certainty, as indeed it had been from the outset.

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Originally Posted by alh_p

Edit: Does this look familiar to anyone?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

http://lechenet.free.fr/Reportages/v...es/ppage24.htm

Looks to me like the Fort design in ETW. As per usual, I should probably have given the game designer a bit more credit (providing this was a source, or there was another similar) for having sought inspiration from Vauban.

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Unfortunately, it does seem that CA based their fort model on these modern ruins. The problem being, as I've said elsewhere, that these historic relic's are only about half the actual fort. The important defensive features, namely the glacis and ditch and outer defensive ditches have not been preserved and instead have been built upon or levelled. So, all thats left is the inner defensive wall which would not normally have been assaulted, as the garrison would surrender as soon as it was breached.

Point taken: no surviving glacii.

But what about this:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

http://lechenet.free.fr/Reportages/v...es/ppage53.htm

There is clearly a ditch and a double "wall", but the outer one looks a lot steeper than I imagined a glacis would be (approx same gradient as inner wall). The indentations also look like they could be firing positions for anything up to cannon, or just damage...

This view shows more of the overall design of the fort:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

http://lechenet.free.fr/Reportages/v...es/ppage54.htm

I had read the page on Vauban's attack tactics beforehand, it offers a tantalising clue as to his strategy but didn't satisfy my questions as to how the final breach or capture was made. Thanks for clearing it up!

We haven't had the option of mining walls since RTW... I guess cannon and trebuchets look cooler.

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Originally Posted by Didz

The basic problem seems to be that CA didn;t do much research into what made star forts so damned difficult to take. I looks to me as though they just made them look a bit like the photographs of whats left of them today, which is only about half of the actual fort. The glacis and counterscarps and ditches are all long gone and in most cases have been forested or built upon. So, you get a completely wrong impression of what a star fort really looked like from those photographs.

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I dispute this assertion. There are plenty of star forts that have most of those structures still in existance. An example from my own city, Halifax. Fort George atop citadel hill.
http://nouvelle-ecosse.com/site-ns/m...ax_citadel.jpg
As you can see the ditch and counterscarps are still there. The glacis is provided by the hill intself.

Also La Citadelle du Quebec in Quebec city. Although much of it's galcis is gone.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...da-2009-03.jpg

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Originally Posted by alh_p

Point taken: no surviving glacii.

But what about this:(see above)

There is clearly a ditch and a double "wall", but the outer one looks a lot steeper than I imagined a glacis would be (approx same gradient as inner wall). The indentations also look like they could be firing positions for anything up to cannon, or just damage...

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Its probably easiest to compare that picture with the typical cross-sectional diagram shown below.
https://img329.imageshack.us/img329/9990/starfort.jpg

In my opinion what you have left of that fort shown in the picture is the Curtain Wall, the inner ditch which has clearly been partially filled and the counter guard. What is missing although you can see faint traces of it is the outer-ditch the counter-scarp, the covered-way, the banquette and the glacis, The glacis alone would extend for over 500 yards in all directions and so I suspect it would encompass the entire of the town and in the near ground would extend beyond the bottom of the photo itself.