Crazy Castles and Frustrating Forts

[Feanor]

On a campaign with the HRE the Italians made their final stand in Corsica. The only man to escape the battle was the Italian Doge himself who retreated to his fort. What annoyed me was that this one man meant that the fort would never fall without a direct assault. One man! You'd only have to wait and listen for the toilet to flush and then bang, you're in.

This is crazy. Is there a way to edit the game so that the strongholds fall without a minimum garrison?

[Shoraro]

I wish there was. It's amazing the amount of bowfire one man in a castle can do, too.

Still, if you don't want to assault, you could try assassinating the annoying bugger

[Desiderata]

One other annoying thing with this situation, you can't destroy the buildings that are up in the province until you capture the castle/fort - like they're magiaclly protected or something!!!

[Feanor]

Excellent point. I'd have liked to have seen the poor Doge coming out of his hole to be greeted by nothing but rubble and scorched earth.

[Desiderata]

It does seem a crazy thing to have that hard coded as it was a historical tactic used by the English against the French throughout the 100 years war - began with a 'r' and basically IIRC meant going in, razing and then leaving b4 the big blue army machine could chew up the ickle red army

[Red Harvest]

The lone man in the castle thing is an annoying problem. The bowfire, etc. represents a sort of small stationary garrison/militia from what we can tell.

There are various reasons that you can't destroy various structures until a castle falls. The primary reason is to prevent rapid destruction of laboriously built structures on AI land. In an earlier version the initial invasion destroyed too many structures, the result was that AI factions quickly whittled their own good provinces down to low tech through "province swapping." The AI was bad about trading three or four provinces each year among multiple factions, but never assaulting the castles. Believe me, the system we have in MTW now is far superior to the old one for single play. The AI armies were usually primarily very low tech back then, partly because of the rapid loss of structures. There is not much point in fighting 2,000 peasant/dozen ballista armies.

In reality, probably quite a few structures in a province would remain intact while the main fortress held. One reason is that a number would likely be within the walls. Plus some would be within other defended locations (not shown.) While they could be destroyed, it would mean splitting your forces for "mini-sieges" and taking additional casualties. Also, in some cases, while the structure could be destroyed, the real key would be the skilled people that ran them. These people could trickle away into the countryside, etc. awaiting final disposition of the struggle.