Star Forts Useless?

[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