I've played them all and I've never seen it do anywhere near that badly, which is what led me to post about it :)

I cranked the battle AI to full strength and it did a much better job at fort defense. Different fight, but I lost about 500 out of 1500 this time, though that was partly my own fault. The enemy had cannon inside the fort and they blew up a wall section that I had a unit on before I noticed what they were doing. Trying to assault 3 sides of the fort at the same time gets a bit hectic. Lost 100 men when the wall went down. Cool seeing the AI blow up its own fort to defend it. I'd do the same :)

My second mistake was taking out 2 sections of one of the walls. With the small fort, when you take down a section of wall it also takes out the stairs that lead up to the wall. The enemy had about 4 units up on the front wall. I took out both wall sections either side of the gate which left 3 1/2 units stuck up there in the middle section.

That was fine in one respect because it meant they couldn't get down to defend when I charged in, but it also meant that they had a good position to shoot down on me, and I couldn't get up to them unless I wanted heavy losses. I ended up winning via holding the center square for the countdown with 300 or so of the enemy still stuck up on the wall. First time I've ever had to win a siege battle via countdown in a TW game. I usually do my best to kill all the enemy instead :)

I also very nearly ran out of money which looks like it will cause problems in this game. Previously you'd just go negative balance, but I got a warning when I hit the end turn button saying that if I continued I'd run out of money, that a bunch of units would disband due to not getting paid and that citizens could riot. Luckily I had just started the above siege which was to take a French province, so I was able to just do the attack and take the province which increased my income enough to cover my army upkeep costs :)

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