Using watchtowers as defence!

[Razor1952]

Watchtowers are very useful things imho. I build lots for the obvious reasons.

Recently it was pointed out elsewhere that rebels tend to like sitting under watchtowers, so I thought I'd try and use this factor to my benfit and it worked.

Place your watchtower where you otherwise might have put a fort, that is a choke point like river crossing or valley and watch as rebels tend to accumulate there. The AI seems to hate attacking rebels in your provinces, so voila! , instant cheap defence.

Of course the down side is the hit on trade but particularly with in smaller peripheral provinces likely to be attacked this is likely to be relatively trivial tradeoff.

[Kraxis]

I was thinking about somethign similar but simply couldn't figure it out. I had a large rebel stack 'protect' that river crossing to the east of Caesarea, the annual Sassanid invasions stopped until I removed the rebels.
I wondered about that for a while but I didn't link it with the towers eventhough I know that rebels like them. I guess I just like the line of sight.

[antisocialmunky]

Yeah, the rebels seem to worship watchtowers like they were some sacred monothlithe.

[Prodigal]

Apologies for this digretion, but I've found recently that forts placed by bridges don't seem to "delay" the AI, in fact it seems it may as well not even be there the enemy just hops into the middle of the bridge & trundles merrily off in the same turn. Is this a new feature that I'm missing?

[dismal]

I thought this thread was going to be about using the hill watchtowers create on the battle map as a defensive position.

[Dutch_guy]

I always though not hte watchtowers ,but the forts prevented the rebels from spawning..

So is it jus t the watchtowers , or both ?

[Rodion Romanovich]

I thought this thread was going to be about using the hill watchtowers create on the battle map as a defensive position.

Yeah, me too... I used them to great effect that way once or twice, but both battles were easy turkey shoots as it was so they made little difference. Could be an interesting solution though when expecting a battle against a horde or something... But I prefer forts for that. Send a full stack to eliminate two enemy horde stacks, then withdraw to a fort. Then send another full stack to take care of 2 more stacks of enemies, then build fort with those. Finally fight one or two sally battles and most enemy hordes should be dead...

[Horatius]

How about simply placing a watchtower in order to create a very steep hill for your troops to fight on?

[Dutch_guy]

That's basicly what Dismal and LegioXXXUlpiaVictrix said.

[Viking]

How about simply placing a watchtower in order to create a very steep hill for your troops to fight on

The soldiers looks a bit weird when you do that. Even in slopes that doesn`t tilt much it does.