Star Forts Useless?

[Superteale]

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.

[antisocialmunky]

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.

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

[Forward Observer]

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.

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.

[HKDDJulker]

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.
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.

[Bob the Insane]

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...

[HKDDJulker]

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?

[Jazzy]

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.

[Caliburn]

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...

[Superteale]

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.

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.

[geala]

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.

[antisocialmunky]

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?

[Major Robert Dump]

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

[antisocialmunky]

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.

[Jazzy]

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

[MikeV]

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

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.

[MikeV]

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 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 ...

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 ...

[Kobal2fr]

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.

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 :/

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

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.

[A Very Super Market]

Edit: Forget it.