Castles

I know having an advanced castle helps prevent all your buildings from being wiped out, but so long as an enemy can invade you and destroy even 1-2 buildings by forcing you to your castle, advanced players will never consider using castles an attractive option.

Building up provinces takes alot of time and money, and given the frequency with which the AI attacks the provinces it wants, you'll definately end up with all your development in that province being wiped out despite the fact that it is wiped out piece by piece.

I still think it would be nice to be able to CHOOSE as the attacker and as defender to target buildings or not. As attacker it is nice to take a province without losing any buildings and as defender maybe you want to raze the province if you are facing defeat.

What would be REALLY nice would be some absolute protection to buildings. For example, if you have a level 4 castle, all buildings level 1-3 are protected and cannot be destroyed if you retreat to the castle.

This way you would be able to build with confidence, yet at the same time you would have to focus on castle development moreso than normal and slow progress in other areas if you wanted to protect higher level buildings. Of course you could never protect the highest level buildings because the castle would only safeguard buildings of lesser level, not equal level. Conceptually, the buildings would be inside the castle walls.

Im only really saying all this because I never used castles in Shogun and Mongol Invasion, ever. Even though this new game is supposed to feature castles as the central player, I think that unless building protection is improved, you won't be able to use castles in challenging games.

I was used to playing on expert in STW, and while it wasnt that hard to beat, if you let the AI do things like wreck your improvements, things could get ugly real fast.

I agree Kalt about the castles in Shogun. The AI almost always just starves you to destruction and seldom assaults. Unless relief can be gathered quickly you are better off leaving the province to avoid losses since buildings are wrecked anyway.

I'm curious about how often the AI will actually assault you in a castle in Medieval. If garrison strategic losses are slow enough such that the AI actually assaults with some regularity then ducking into the castles could work. Defending a castle has to be costly to the AI to make it worthwhile to the player. In Shogun it almost never is.

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CONITOERGOVINCO

[This message has been edited by Nelson (edited 08-07-2002).]

Lords of the Realms 2 had very good castle system. There weren`t any lame tactics where the computer just waited until the castle defenders starved to death. The enemy attacked your castles always, because you couldn`t take over the province when there was defenders left in the castle.

I liked LotR2 a lot. However, the starving tactic is a good one and shouldn't be left out.

The game has to work so that defending a castle buys us something or we never will defend them. I need to know that holding a castle will cost the AI big losses or lots of time.

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CONITOERGOVINCO

Remember, if a castle is well supplied it enough it will never fall.

Here we go. Here's something from the events notepad with the demo (same one with vices/virtues).


@["siege_time_txt_xzy"]
@{"It has already fallen! "}
@{"It is about to fall. "}
@{"It is likely to hold out for two years. "}
@{"Its supplies will probably only last for 3 years. "}
@{"It is likely to hold out for around 4 years. "}
@{"It is well supplied and likely to hold out for 5 years or more. "}
@{"It has large food reserves and could last out 6 years. "}
@{"It is well supplied and likely to hold out for more than 6 years. "}
@{"Its supplies are likely to last well into an eigth year. "}
@{"It is very well provisioned and will not fall in less than 8 years. "}
@{"It is under siege, but its huge stockpiles will probably last more than 8 years. "}
@{"It is currently under siege but its vast reserves will last for more than 10 years. "}
@{"Its vast stockpiles and modest garrison mean years of waiting. "}
@{"Although besieged, the garrison is not likely to become concerned for years. "}
@{"Although besieged, it will take many years before this small garrison starves. "}
@{"Although under siege, there is no prospect of this castle falling without an assault. "}
@{"There is no prospect of this castle falling without an assault. "}
@{"This castle will not fall without a direct assault. "}

Castles really aren't meant as an offensive weapon. By that I mean you don't capture a territory and start constructing a castle to launch your next attack from. The times I used enormous castles in Total War was at the chokepoints where it was the only way into my territory. That way instead of keeping a garrison in eight-twelve provinces I kept an enormous one in a single highly defencible province that had enormous supplies of many seasons. They never did actually /defeat/ my forces to warrant an attack on the castle but hey.

Another thing I always found useful about building castles were that as soon as I had them up I could build ports. Ports brought in a lot of koku. By the time I finish any game I have in excess of 35,000 troops and 50,000 koku.

Perhaps if an option to manually stockpile your castles were available...the defense of it would be more attractive...

erm castles are essential - if you dont build them and use them you wont win..no question there.

Size of castle determines provincial loyalty for one and as the game goes on you can only win by maintaining loyalty with big castles and minimal garrisons - by the time you ahve a fortress with add-ons retreating to the castle may not loose you anything at all... certainly never more than one upgrade or so and defiantley not ever a full range of buildings.

You also cant build up the tech tree without castles, so you have no choice im afraid.

Taking provinces without loosing a building is possible - just got to either a) work out how to do it or b) read my review out sometime this week ;-)

(which also discusses a semi-serious point on just this issue)

Yes Im reading it now. The thing is that I know you HAVE to build castles to tech up, and they might aid somewhat in dealing with unrest, but my only real concern was that castles dont offer complete protection to any of your buildings.

So lets say I have province A and you have province B. My forces in province A could easily resist a castle assult if your larger and stronger army in B attempted an attack.

Turn 1: you attack, a few buildings are downgraded/ruined. I retreat to castle.
Turn 2: you give up the seige after seeing my forces could hold out for years.
Turn 3: you return and attack the province again, I retreat into the castle and a few more buildings bite the dust.
Turn 4: you go home (again).
Turn 5: repeat steps 1-4 until my province is completely depleted of improvements.

The above sequence of events is exactly why I am frustrated with the fact that I cannot rely on castles to resist attacks: if I do, I might as well write-off any hopes of improving any province that shares a border with any enemy.

See my point? Now if the castles protected my buildings as I hoped/suggested, I could focus on castle development in my border provinces and build my level 3 castle before my level 2 buildings to ensure theyd be protected in the above scenario. It is a less-efficient way to tech up but thats the price you pay for the safety!

After reading your article, Dark, I see you agree with me generally.

You observed not only a significant detriment to your own efforts in the form of 'building attrition' from revolts and uprisings, but even more distressing is how the AI ends up gutted and impotent on high difficulty levels as a result of an inibility to deal with the building attrition caused by back-and-forth fighting as well as rebellions!

It appears as though the problem, which was an inconvienence in STW, is alot more significant in MTW! What does everyone think about all this?

(p.s. You really should spellcheck and grammarcheck your article. I am sure it is something you are proud of. I pasted the whole thing into Word and just finished spell/grammar checking it and it took over an hour.)

Thats also the reason rush games really hurt because sometimes the idea is just to go in and trash all the enemy capitals and then come back later and occupy them when you can hold them.

I would like to see buildings of equal size downgraded one level .... but ....

they can easily be rebuilt with a relatively small cost and maybe a year in total to restore. This represents time to regather all the specialists in and rebuild the damage done. Now this could be effected by the net number of like specialists. Have 1 other legendary armouries and the time or money to restore the damaged one is halved (1/2), have 2 and the cost is 1/3 etc... this represents having a strong nation of craftsmen and rewards teching up not just having one or two specialist centers.