Star Forts Useless?

[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