Star Forts Useless?

I fought my first battle in a star fort last night, defending with a full balanced British army, against a similar French one. So, I deployed my men around the fort, put Grenadiers on the wooden bridges thinking that would be awesome, and kep the cavalry/artillery in the center.

Now, I expected the French would bombard me with their artillery to break the walls, but instead their army rushed towards me. I thought "great, this will be a slaughter, watch out Paris!". However, few of my Line Infantry actually walked up the wooden steps to fire over the walls. When they did, they inflicted minimal casualties. Similarly, only some of the infantry used the fort's mini-cannons, which were useless anyway. I had wondered how the enemy would get into the fort without a breach, it turns out any infantry unit can throw up ropes and climb up wherever it likes, apparently with no combat penalty on the walls as in M2TW. Worst of all, my Grenadiers wouldn't fire from the wooden bridges, and they couldn't even go into the outer forts, so what's the point in them?

The only useful things were the buildings I could garisson in the centre, they routed a lot of enemies, and I won in the end.

But really, forts seem pretty ineffective.

fort battles are one of the things that needs to be fixed, especially the AI.

It was your first fort battle. Let us know how the second and third go since you learned a few things about the mechanics of the game.

It could be that the infantry that didn’t man the guns was already in melee before they could get to them…just a thought.

I have had some luck with small fort battles (defending)...

you place your troops on the section of wall you want them to defend and must make sure they are stopped. If they are doing anything else they will just stand there. But if stationary they will, on their own, move to man the walls and cannons on their section once the enemy gets close.

You are right that you will cause few casualties. On average I find the small cannons and you defenders will kill around 20 men of a 120 man unit by the time they have the grapples on the wall.

You have to be prepared for a significant amount of melee combat on the walls.

You should view a fort as "better than nothing" and not a means for 4 units to hold off a full stack army... :2thumbsup:


As a further discussion of the issue I would point out that the fairly easy defence of walls in M2TW put the AI at a serious disadvantage in any siege assault. It could be that the sieges have been specifically balanced this way to give the AI a fighting chance (not that it doesn't still act oddly with it's peicemeal attacks).

I've found out that the smaller the fort is the easier it is to defend it. There to much wall to cover in a star fort and you can't defend all of them even with a full stack. There so many spot where you can't fire from. I prefer normal fort where you can spare a few unit to garrison the inside building for a last stand and still man all the wall decently. I hope they will improve the star fort in future patch because right now they are indeed a waist of income.

I agree totally that the smaller fort is easier to defend, but I have had good success with the star fort as well. I dont know why a previous poster was unable to get to the outer 'star' portions of the fort as I was able to get my men across the bridge to the outer area. I tend to spread out my lines thin going around the edge. As long as my men are there before the enemy comes and I keep them from moving they will man all cannons that they are near and will get a couple rounds off on the enemy with their initial advance and my men seem to go to the edge like they should and shoot down. Id say the enemy is losing about 25 to 50 percent of their army from me shooting over the wall with guns and cannon and loose the rest routing after they climb the walls. If you set your troops up correct they should be pretty effective in any fort no matter the size.

I guess I should also mention that I have typically have had a full stack or close to it when I had sucess defending forts and I had very few calv/artillary units. A star fort is easier to defend with 17 to 18 ground units on the walls. When the enemy throws the lines up to climb your wall, meet them head on with one unit ready for hand to hand and have at least one unit to the side shooting down on the people climbing the ropes and the enemy usually routes before half their troops can attempt to climb up. Also the AI tends to pick one point where they throw most of their forces. Use the advantage of the star fort to triangulate fire on this focus point. I will move men to shoot from every angle possible and this usually starts a route.

The fort wall sections really HAVE to be garrisonable, at the moment, all your men standing sideways on the walls (cause you cant get them to even face the enemy) cause massive issues, making them fairly silly. If you could just garrison and the AI had simple techniques to deal with it (advance in formation, then attack garrsioned/unmaned sections) would be much better.

I usually just forget the walls, garrison the buildings then form a square around the flag in the middle. If he has cavalry deploy stakes and viola. I turned back three full stacks with one of my own.

There should be defense cannon that shoot canister shot paralell to the main walls from the corners.
Standing at the base of an enemy star fort should be a good way to cop lots of balls of lead unless the fort has been heavily bombarded to put much of the defensive cannon out of order & reduce the garrison.

Also, I wonder if grappling hooks should be restricted to certain elite types like Grenadiers who historically led assaults.
That might help reduce the need to actively defend the whole wall because there would only be attacks in a few places.

I have a burning question about forts: How to repair city fortifications?!
My fortification in Bagdad needs some repairs... or is it just possible to uprade them or to destroy them completely and to rebuild them afterwards :help:

I did well defending forts so far, but sieges does not really make fun

- way-finding is a great issue in my game so far: when I want to send a unit from a wall to, say, the centre, it often happens that the unit climbs down the ropes the attackers put on the wall, and so ends up beeing out of the fort and charged by the enemy. Worse, they may continue running to the centre when outside of the fort, and by doing so opening the gate for the enemy.

- the AI often attacks with units who are not able to attack a fort efficiently, meaning a lot of cavalery and pikeman. Also, if the cannons are fixed, it happens that they are out of range so that they can't attack the fort
Battles often ended up in a "draw", meaning that they did not attack me any longer (only cavalery left) and I didn't wanted to counterattack.

I've found keeping some heavy cav units outside the fort and then charging through enemy units as they attempt to climb the walls really hurts em.

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You should view a fort as "better than nothing" and not a means for 4 units to hold off a full stack army...

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He's right, you still can take out more men with a fort then without one but i'm glad to see they are not the be all end all that they were in MTW2.

The biggest problem I see with fort battles is calvary. As the AI calvary dosn't seem to know what to do if you don't have calvary. They just kind of meander around the center and get shot alot.

Forts should be a bit more affective though, I just watched the Old Alamo over the weekend (The one with John Wayne) although slightly different time frame, it is pretty impressive how many they manage to kill. Even if it is a movie.

I agree. Defenders need to be able to shoot more attckers as they climb the walls. Maybee even cut the grapling hooks rope and send attackers falling. Only one unit should be able to climb each set of hooks thrown up and attackers should get blasted with grape if they bunch up near the front of the fort. This will cause the attacker to assult the fort on all sides. Defenders shoot down at attckers climbing the walls, attackers climb grappling hooks and give covering fire to the men climbing. It should even be deadly for the attackers to stand within grape shot distance of the fort. If the attackers make it to and up the walls, they sould be able to fire down inside the fort and across the walls. This would definatly make fort battles more interesting and Alamo like. I hope that a patch or mod can fix it.

Well this goes back to game mechanics versus reality argument.


I mean in reality your fort has a cannon on almost every flat side of the wall, yet your unit can only seem to man 1 or 2 at a time. In reality you would split up a unit and have one person man each cannon. Especially if they surrounded the fort like they often do.

It does lead to alot of wall fighting and garrison fight which I like, but it just seems, like has been said, that the defender should get in a few more shots.

Of course if the offenders wants to sit back and take cannon shots at you all die he can, but charging a fort with infantry should be at very least, slightly damaging.

Lol, kinda makes me miss the awsome siege battles of MTW2. Somthing needs to be fixed.

I'm confused about star forts and city walls in particular. I've never had an army try to seige my forts or cities, they always attack straight away. And also, why, when I have an army in a city and the enemy attacks, does my army suddenly appear in a star fort nowhere near my city?

The simple ideia of climbing using grappling hooks and rope is by far the most absurd. Climbing invasions were always considered to be a desperate move when the attacking general had overwhelming forces, and usually improvised ladders were used.

I can easly imagine that against a grappling hook and a rope you could use your bayonet to cut the rope and prevent them from moving up.

Ladders should be implemented for invasions, then units carrying them would move slowers giving defenders more time to rip them to pieces with musket fire.

A breach on the wall should always be the best way to win over a fort when the option is a wall climb.

Sieges also seem very hard to control both on offense and defence. On offense is just amazingly hard to make your units move inside the Fort once you open a breach. On defence it's simply too hard to predict where the enemy will come from and how to hold him back.

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On offense is just amazingly hard to make your units move inside the Fort once you open a breach.

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I haven't really thought this is too much of a problem in my experience. One of the best ways to move them inside is just to have them garrison the available buildings inside the walls of the fort. The AI in my experience never occupies them and once your men are inside they have basically a 360 degree firing radius, not to mention they decimate the AI units standing in the center square.

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On defence it's simply too hard to predict where the enemy will come from and how to hold him back.

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I agree fully on defense. You spend a lot of time with units sprinting around the top just to watch a unit of the AI go and stand at one of the corners and not do anything. Defense isn't difficult, but it is annoying at times.

The attacking AI is really weird. Does it tend to do a full circuit of the fort before assaulting for anybody else?

I had one unit of AI cavalry that apparently decided to reenact the Illiad minus dragging Hector behind a chariot.

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Originally Posted by Polemists

He's right, you still can take out more men with a fort then without one but i'm glad to see they are not the be all end all that they were in MTW2.

The biggest problem I see with fort battles is calvary. As the AI calvary dosn't seem to know what to do if you don't have calvary. They just kind of meander around the center and get shot alot.

Forts should be a bit more affective though, I just watched the Old Alamo over the weekend (The one with John Wayne) although slightly different time frame, it is pretty impressive how many they manage to kill. Even if it is a movie.

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That movie is more inaccurate than Braveheart which is something to almost be proud of. I wouldn't take anything you see in that movie as an accurate representation of that period.

You're right in a sense though. Forts do feel a bit underpowered.

After well over 10 battles in forts, i've noticed two useless things. Defending the walls first of all is utterly pointless. When your units fire a volley the bullets always go over the top of the enemy units heads and hit the ground behind them. And second, the cannons on the wall never hit any enemy soldiers. I always fire them in every battle and have literally never seen a cannonball hit or kill a single enemy, even when all are fired.

Kind of pointless that forts even exist as the game is now, what with the wall cannons and the ability to fire a volley from great height behind the main selling points of even building a fort.

I fought a similar fort battle to my first one (well a bit of it until if CTD'ed on me). Abandoning the walls, and instead garissoning the buildings and forming a circle around the centre is much more effective, especially when your units can deploy their defences.

I actually find the star forts pretty useless I've had more success defending the city as is without the fort. With a fort you have to hold the damn center and of course since the walls and the cannons are useless almost every fort battle is a huge melee. They should be fixed

I don't know what the problem is, because my guys man the cannons and the ones who arent on the cannons are musket-firing the living dog crap out of the people coming to and up the wall. Even if they arent facing the wall or evenly distributed they still do this, although the longer the line the more muskets that fire.

Deploying in the star segment is tricky there are only a couple small spots you can do it and it must be a small, squarish formation. Otherwise you have to run them in.

When the attackers breach the top of the wall all nearby units will leave the guns and move in to fight if you change to melee. MAke sure fire at will is back on before you put them back on cannons.

I'm actually having the exact opposite problem as you.... they aren't coming up my walls, they are running their horse artillery up close and battering down a door or wall and coming through in a giant horde of melee while i still have people defending on the walls. My last few defenses i've actually run my horses outside to get away and made them take the walls from the inside out, which makes for some pretty intense stairwell fights

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Originally Posted by Monk

That movie is more inaccurate than Braveheart which is something to almost be proud of. I wouldn't take anything you see in that movie as an accurate representation of that period.

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It is innaccurate in its sequence of events (and events that never happened).

However, in the sense that it shows the Mexicans suffering significant casualties, it is more or less accurate. In fact it is quite interesting that the Mexicans suffered as badly as they did (around half the attacking force killed or wounded), considering they attacked at night and in fact achieved nearly complete tacical surprise.

Of course, on the other side of it, US Army attacks against Mexican forts/fortified cities, conducted about a decade later, generally carried their objectives with much more favorible casualty ratios while attacking in daylight.

In terms of forts in game, it does not really matter how you deploy them (in terms of facing, etc.) Just put the soldiers at a section of wall, and they will man it the best the can.

Forts are buggy and silly sometimes but I haven't have a problem with offense or defense. With offense, I just blast them to hell, then bait enemies into eating a cannister shot sammich. Mop up what's left. If arty is short, there's so much fort to defend, the AI can't cover it all. For defense, I cover what I can on the walls, just to inflict some casualties, then defend the square.

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Originally Posted by Dayve

After well over 10 battles in forts, i've noticed two useless things. Defending the walls first of all is utterly pointless. When your units fire a volley the bullets always go over the top of the enemy units heads and hit the ground behind them. And second, the cannons on the wall never hit any enemy soldiers. I always fire them in every battle and have literally never seen a cannonball hit or kill a single enemy, even when all are fired.

Kind of pointless that forts even exist as the game is now, what with the wall cannons and the ability to fire a volley from great height behind the main selling points of even building a fort.

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Yea the cannons and your guys on the walls will shoot over the head of any unit running full speed at the fort. Once they stop though, they start causing big casualties. How do you make them stop? put a few cannon fodder infantry units right outside the wall so they can't climb up until that unit is defeated. You'll generally see a bunch of their units bunch up right under the wall and those cannons, while it won't cause many casualties when firing at the line of men, WILL kill alot of men bunched up in a big ball.

Keeping cavalry outside the fort works if you outclass/outnumber enemy cavalry.

Another thing: once the enemy gets on the walls, you can micromanage your infantry on unengaged parts of the wall to shoot that breached area. I also like to keep some light infantry in the courtyard, they shoot any enemy on the walls, and usually get a lot of kills if you can keep them out of the courtyard for a good amount of time.

Vauban style forts of this time period were formidable obstacles and extensive sieges were often the only way to defeat them. At least the attacker of a fortification should be forced to wait a couple of turns to prepare an assault or suffer severe penalties. These fortifications were very effective and hard to conquer, right until it was more common to avoid fixed defensive positions and simply bypass them.
So please make them more effective, at least in stalling the enemy`s advance.

I can only assist my previous speaker. Contrary to CAs descriptions sieges formed a large part of 18th century warfare and fortresses were considered very important tools of defence also by the most battle adjunctive persons (Frederic II. of Prussia f. e.). Defence battles should be a bit more easy or, better spoken, a bit more historically correct (because defence is easy if you don't use the forts defence facilities but instead the buildings inside and square up in the middle). No rushes with ropes please. Fortresses should however be more expensive and need longer building time.

One suggestion to a simple solution would be to only allow light infantry to scale the walls, while line infantry should need at leat a turn to prepare ladders and other siege equipment like in MTWII. I find it to be totally unrealistic to be able to storm a fortification without preparation or siege artillery. An all infantry army should only succeed if the fortress is poorly garrisoned.

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Originally Posted by Marquis of Roland

Yea the cannons and your guys on the walls will shoot over the head of any unit running full speed at the fort. Once they stop though, they start causing big casualties. How do you make them stop? put a few cannon fodder infantry units right outside the wall so they can't climb up until that unit is defeated. You'll generally see a bunch of their units bunch up right under the wall and those cannons, while it won't cause many casualties when firing at the line of men, WILL kill alot of men bunched up in a big ball.

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Perfect use for those useless civilian militia. They live here, they should be the ones dying to defend it.:smash:

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Originally Posted by NimitsTexan

It is innaccurate in its sequence of events (and events that never happened).

However, in the sense that it shows the Mexicans suffering significant casualties, it is more or less accurate. In fact it is quite interesting that the Mexicans suffered as badly as they did (around half the attacking force killed or wounded), considering they attacked at night and in fact achieved nearly complete tacical surprise.

Of course, on the other side of it, US Army attacks against Mexican forts/fortified cities, conducted about a decade later, generally carried their objectives with much more favorible casualty ratios while attacking in daylight.

In terms of forts in game, it does not really matter how you deploy them (in terms of facing, etc.) Just put the soldiers at a section of wall, and they will man it the best the can.

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The Alamo was a pretty poor excuse for a fort, and was almost impossible to properly defend--given the layout and the sparse number of defenders. I have the DVD's of both the John Wayne version from 1960 and the more recent 2004 release with Billy Bob Thornton in the Crockett role.


If you can, rent the later version for comparison. It is by far the most accurate depiction of the battle (massacre would be more descriptive) from all the accounts I have read. The later movie accurately depicts Santa Anna's final and only real attack beginning in the dark well before day break along with Travis being killed at the very start to showing Bowie pretty much in a coma during the attack. It also the depicts the controversiol Mexican record of Crockett possibly surviving and being executed after the battle. Of the 1800 or so Mexicans troops actually involved in the final attack, most historians estimate that 400 to 600 were killed, or roughly a 3rd of the force.

Unfortunately, the 2004 movie was not nearly as entertaining as the John Wayne version, and it bombed at the box office. Originally, Russell Crowe was supposed to play Travis, and at least one other big name was on board to play Bowie plus Ron Howard was to have been director. However due to budget cuts and other conflicts, Billy Bob was the only one of the original choices that made the final movie plus Howard became one of the producers. Thornton as Crockett and Dennis Quaid as Houston were the closest to big name stars they could get and they just couldn't carry the movie. It also did not help that the movie released opposite Mel Gibson's "Temptation of Christ"

On the other hand---with veteran stars like John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Lawrence Harvey, and Richard Boone, the first Alamo had plenty of star power plus many popular character actors for the era like Chill Wills and Ken Curtiss,

While the Duke's version is typical 60's cowboy action B.S., filled with so many inaccuracies that most Texas historians threw fits at the time, it is by far the more entertaining of the two movies. ---And even knowing it's total Hollywood BS, I would always rather watch it if I had to choose between the two.

Back on subject:

The star forts in the game, or more correctly as Superteal mentioned, fortifications built in the Vauban system style, are missing one important component and it is the same component that was missing in Medieval 2. All of these forts had moats and/or ditch systems---sometimes wet, sometimes dry, and sometimes a combination of the two; especially if there was more than one concentric ditch, which was the case most of the time.

Also, the whole purpose of the geometric designs of these forts was so that there would hardly be an exposed wall that could be assaulted without subjecting the assaulting forces to fire from the flank or rear from one of the other walls of the fort. Attack by infantry without first establishing a breach through either artillery bombardment or mining would be suicidal. Army mobility and artillery technology advances are what eventually made such forts obsolete sometimes even in the same eras that they were built.

The French military didn't figure this out until after the Germans had simply danced around their magnificently obsolete Maginot Line

The game designers evidently just could not implement the feature of moats or the accurate use of intersecting fields of fire from the walls of such forts into the game. I can understand time and money constraints on game design, but to leave these features out makes such forts hardly anything more than window dressing, and almost not-functional compared to how they were in real life.

IMHO, If they could simply improve the defending armies' proper use of the walls in future patches it might go a long way to correcting this. An attacking army would simply have to use artillery or mining before attempting an assault or it would be a slaughter.

HOW TO MAN A STAR FORT

I think I have a little insight on the proper way to have your men "man" their posts and use the cannons in a star fort (at least in the corners). select the unit and double click on the tiny little tower on the tip of the point. repeatedly dbl clicking on the tower seems to get your men to take up positions on the walls, and at the cannons. :2thumbsup:
Other than this, i have been unable to figure out how to put ANY infantry at the walls, facing the enemy. When I try the method that has worked in previous TW series, of clicking and dragging, facing the enemy, I invariably end up with a long column of men facing down the wall, towards a corner.
:furious3:

I quite like the auto manning feature which causes the troops to man the walls when the enemy is near as long as they are deloyed on the wall and stopped.

However I agree it would be much easier to place your men on the wall in the first place if you could place them facinf outwards like you used to as opposed to along the wall. At present you men stand too many rows deep on the wall with most of the unit being useless. It is the awkward shape of the Star fort that causes even more of a problem...

I had the AI in one defence park a foot cannon unit inside the gap between the star poins and the may wall (to one side of the bridge) and start firing point blank at the gate. However I setup my men they could not effectively fire at this with artillery or give personal weapons.

In the end I had to march out to deal with it...

really?! I have yet to see my men do this...or maybe i just don't trust them to... is there a secret to having them fire at the enemy like that? or is it really as simple as just letting it happen?

It should be possible to deploy field artillery at least on the side-bastions. Louis XIV demanded field pieces to be installed on fortresses and did not allow the type naval artillery we see now.

I think it was a good thing to move away from siege battles to field battles, since sieges became repetitive after a time. But that doesn't excuse making sieges this easy. It removes the nessessity to plan your strategy to include sieges as well as field battles. Like, who needs artillery anyway?

After all, the sieges in the period would provide a new type of challenge, if they were properly implemented. The idea of combined arms operations really comes off in the sieges: artillery, infantry and in some cases the navy all had important tasks in the siege. Bastions needed to be bashed or the cannon crews destroyed before the fort could be assaulted. After all, in the later periods they built batteries inside the bastions to both provide more massed artillery fire (to or more levels for cannons) and to protect the cannon crews from sweeping fire and explosive rounds. A fort should also be a good, well protected firing position for the defenders, not a place where they muck about with a couple of soldiers manning on of the few 6-pounders.

I'd imagine being out of breath after climbing down to a dry moat (or pushing an assault raft/bridge), throwing a grappling hook and climbing up several meters (i.e. a lot of fatique). Not to mention disheartened, seeing my friends fall when the defenders cut the cords, and shoot my friends from point blank ranges. Nor does the idea of getting clubbed with a musket while I'm trying to climb over the parapet sound pleasant, not to mention a spear-like implement stabbing my hands, head and shoulders (i.e. a morale minus). If I got on the wall, I'd be winded, but now things would be on a more even ground (i.e. I don't mind the "no extra bonus on the walls" bonus at all).

Even obsolete castles, partially updated in the 17th century, could take several weeks to breach with heavy artillery. Careful preparations for the assault would be carried out. If there were as few as 350 defenders versus 1300 attackers, they'd bash a hole in the walls, prepare ladders and assault rafts/bridges, and make sure they'd be flanking the castle from a direction that deployed a minimum amount of artillery. Even if they had managed to whittle away half of the defenders by burning the defenders' buildings, killing them with riflemen, and starving them for a month, the casualty rate could be expected to be quite high. They'd still have to cover the moat, which takes time, and then climb over the rubble in the breach. All the while under the fire from the surviving defenders. After that things would turn medieval. Naturally there wouldn't be enough defenders left for the melee.

Anyone guess which battle I'm talking about?

It's a steb backwards from making the sieges interesting. After all, there has been constant development into a more varied and interesting set of sieges since Shogun. Medieval ones were a chore, Rome sieges were repetitive and you'd have to do it constantly, and in Medieval they were pretty easy, yet different settlements gave a bit of flavour to them. I don't mind simplifying the layout, removing the glitter to make the game less heavy on the computer, but removing aspects of the siege itself is sad. I like the new field battle maps, but the sieges just make me sad, and a lot of flavour is lost.

The forts look good, though! Sorry for a long post...

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Originally Posted by Forward Observer

Back on subject:

The star forts in the game, or more correctly as Superteal mentioned, fortifications built in the Vauban system style, are missing one important component and it is the same component that was missing in Medieval 2. All of these forts had moats and/or ditch systems---sometimes wet, sometimes dry, and sometimes a combination of the two; especially if there was more than one concentric ditch, which was the case most of the time.

Also, the whole purpose of the geometric designs of these forts was so that there would hardly be an exposed wall that could be assaulted without subjecting the assaulting forces to fire from the flank or rear from one of the other walls of the fort. Attack by infantry without first establishing a breach through either artillery bombardment or mining would be suicidal. Army mobility and artillery technology advances are what eventually made such forts obsolete sometimes even in the same eras that they were built.

The game designers evidently just could not implement the feature of moats or the accurate use of intersecting fields of fire from the walls of such forts into the game. I can understand time and money constraints on game design, but to leave these features out makes such forts hardly anything more than window dressing, and almost not-functional compared to how they were in real life.

IMHO, If they could simply improve the defending armies' proper use of the walls in future patches it might go a long way to correcting this. An attacking army would simply have to use artillery or mining before attempting an assault or it would be a slaughter.

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If the terrain at the base of the walls were considered difficult terrain it could model the effect of a ditch or if it took the attackker significantly longer to scale the walls they would also be more vulnerable to enemy fire.
These forts were not obsolete in ETW`s time frame, but they became increasingly more obsolete when rifles artillery appeared as rifled artillery outranged the fortifications`own guns.
However they should be perfectly possible to defeat after a siege or as a surprise assaut if the fortress is too lightly garrisoned, but to my knowledge there has never been a successful storming by line and light infantry on a prepared bastioned fortress without a successful siege in advance and without support of siege artillery.
In ETW there`s absolutely nothing to gain when you lay a siege.

Yes, that's a pity. Sieges should be necessary. The single most important feature of the modern fortresses was to refuse the artillery a valuable target. Infantry could not attack the fort because the walls and first of all the ditch with its special defense facilities made it a nightmare. Scaling could be used but against determined defenders was near suicidal. Artillery could not break a fortress from the distance because the important structures, the fundamental walls opposite to the ditch could be only seen and reached with fire when you had arrived the top of the first glacis. So you had to destroy forward bastions and ravelines and bring your artillery near to the walls to create a breach. Otherwise your precious iron marbles were wasted in the fortresses earthen upper walls. All of this took a lot of time. This time and the inevitable fall of the fortress could be even calculated very properly in this new age of scientific siege warfare. The problem was that this time was often not available for the attacker.

Couldn't it be easily accomplished by mounding the earth up around the fortress so shallow arcing cannon shots won't be able to work?

okay so now after a few more siges i have noticed some funny things:

enemy uses ropes to go up your wall on main base near the bridge that leads to a star section and ropes on the star section....you try to send troops to the star section to shoot them from the rear....since the ropes are closest to your boys, your men try to go down the ropes of the enemy and up the ropes of the star section to get whereu want them to be....obviously this ends in disaster

another funny one is when u want to send troops outside the gate for a counterattack and there are ropes by the door....rather than goinf through the door your troops go down the ropes...hilarity ensues

lately with base sieges vs superior numbers i have just been sticking every last soldier into the big buildings and focused more on holding the center than holding the walls....a couple of cannons with canister and a bunch of men in the buildings by all the approach ramps seem to do the trick as long as i have some rifles remaining in the center to take out stragglers who get past the library snipers

I just hold the center, screw the walls. I put those armed civies in the buildings and have my line infantry deploy anti-cavalry defense or trenches or both and just huddle in the center. But that being said, I haven't run into an AI that has deployed mortars yet.

Worse than Star Forts built over the Build-Option of the General are City Defense installations. They are really worthless. I hope CA goes to overthink the entire concept.
The direction should be:
a) structures around a settlement on the map
b) structures that slow down an enemy approach
c) structures that allow to deploy infantry and artillery units from the army stacks in it
d) structures of they types:
- trench
- rampart like walls (the simplest form and typical for european and colonial american fortifications is the Dutch redoubt going back to the 16/17th century or other types much less frequent, so called French and the so called German school); the building materials are determined by their accessability (soil, brick-stone, stone).
- bastion
- casemate
- counter-mine (that includes of course sapping and mining abilities on the besieger side)

Remark:

City fortifications were normally rather simple mostly with the goal to create a defensivible deep, uninterrupted! perimeter around the place. The artillery to defend such a place was normally field artillery.

Literature:

Christopher Duffy, Siege Warefare Volume,The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494-1660,
1979
Christopher Duffy, The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great 1660-1789, Siege Warefare Volume II, 1985

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Originally Posted by Liberator

I have a burning question about forts: How to repair city fortifications?!
My fortification in Bagdad needs some repairs... or is it just possible to uprade them or to destroy them completely and to rebuild them afterwards :help:

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It's like repairing any city/town structure: on the strat map, selecting the fort will show the damaged "red stripe" next to the building's icon. When you select the '+' widget (assuming your faction has the $$$ for repairs), the icon gets a green overlay.

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Originally Posted by Superteale

Vauban style forts of this time period were formidable obstacles and extensive sieges were often the only way to defeat them. At least the attacker of a fortification should be forced to wait a couple of turns to prepare an assault or suffer severe penalties. These fortifications were very effective and hard to conquer, right until it was more common to avoid fixed defensive positions and simply bypass them.
So please make them more effective, at least in stalling the enemy`s advance.

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I agree, although the consensus opinion seems to be that making all the 'TW titles more realistic (by making sieges much more necessary) would be too boring ... :Zzzz:

Even Napoleon's Italian campaign featured a few key sieges, and quite a few casualties from disease during them.

A nice feature of the R:TW system (lost in this release) was being unable to assault a settlement -- only being able to lay siege -- if your attacking army didn't have any bombardment units -- you were forced to spend a turn or two building the necessary equipment before being able to assault. It would be nice to see this return (not the siege equipment construction, but the need for bombard units), to slow down region conquest a bit. Currently, it's possible to steamroll region after region in continental Europe with a force of all dragoons ...

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Originally Posted by Forward Observer

Back on subject:

The star forts in the game, or more correctly as Superteal mentioned, fortifications built in the Vauban system style, are missing one important component and it is the same component that was missing in Medieval 2. All of these forts had moats and/or ditch systems---sometimes wet, sometimes dry, and sometimes a combination of the two; especially if there was more than one concentric ditch, which was the case most of the time.

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Yeah, that's a pretty important beef of mine : the Star Forts aren't, well, *stars*. Vauban forts were built so that anyone trying to climb one wall would be shot in the back from another. It's semi-possible to do that ingame with the smaller forts by manning the corners, but the large ones are pretty much undefendable. The garrisonable buildings in the courtyard hold much better than the walls :/

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The French military didn't figure this out until after the Germans had simply danced around their magnificently obsolete Maginot Line

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Very common misconception. The whole "the Maginot Line is unbreakable and the Germans will smash into it and die !" bullcrap was propaganda for the newspapers, in order for the public to swallow the huge cost of building it. But the military and politicians knew better.

See, the purpose of the Maginot Line always *was* not to be attacked. The point was to build something that would be utterly formidable, and yet at the same time only require minimal numbers in order to be efficient : France's population had been decimated during WW1, and the army was still very much understrength. Since they didn't have enough men and certainly not enough tanks to defend the whole length of the border, they built the Maginot Line on the southern part, manned it with green soldiers & veterans too old for a real fight, and stationned the "real" army up north, near Belgium where the Germans were fully expected (by French & British alike) to attack as they'd done in 1914.

Except this time they didn't, passed right through the Ardennes forest (which had been deemed too dense for an army to move through), between the Line and the army, then turned right and outflanked everyone. Cue Dunkirk.

Nevertheless, the Line had fulfilled its intended purpose : it proved enough of a deterrent that the Germans had to figure another way into France, and the few points of the line that did face a German assault (mostly smaller bunkers on the outskirts, no major complexes) held fast, even though they were drastically understrength.

Edit: Forget it.