Re: Forts good defensive idea?
I use forts and watchtowers quite a bit.
Watchtowers are much cheaper than spies and in the large land areas like the far northeast and the middle east they are very valuable. I have found them to be very useful on some of the coastlines as I can then see farther out to sea as it were and observe the movement of fleets without having to maintain fleets in the open.
I use forts along the long roads that I may want to move reinforcements along to avoid the occasional troop desertion. Again, this is particularly effective in the large land areas where a reinforcing stack of one-two-three units can be moved safely to an area of trouble.
I have learned to place them to provide excellent positioning for specialty troops for several settlements in an area. For example, there is a hill SE of Leon, NE of Toledo, somewhat S of W from Pamploma and a bit N of W from Zaragoza. I leave a depleted unit of something in there all the time and maintain 4 units of mixed cavalry in the fort. I can reach each of those four locations in one turn and this way do not have to maintain cavalry in those settlements. Cost is much lower and the incidence of bandits seems to either go down or is so easy to handle with the mobile SWAT team that it becomes fun rather than a several turn pain do deal with. Another easy geographic example of this tactic is Northern Italy.
I also use the forts to force a neutral faction to play its hand while a least a few squares from a city. I would much rather have them strike a fort with a rather small depleted unit than dramatically reduce my income from a city with a quick attack.
I make powerful use of the forts to handle the Mongols and the Timurids. I am sure there have been posts on this, but I will spend a bit of time on this subject.
The obvious use of the forts at a choke point isn't just to slow down an attacker, it is to make them extend a stack out of a group. We all know the Mongols and the Timurids like to stay bunched up and that as a group they are very difficult to deal with. When they are faced with a fort in a natural choke point that does not allow them to attack with multiple units at the same time you have that one turn to back up the fort with a stack of your choosing - or more than one - and you have not exposed that primary unit to a multiple stack slaughter. There are several places where you can have a primary stack centered on an area with passes. You keep small depleted units in the frontier posts. You keep a strong cavalry force in the primary. When the posse of Mongols clusters up behind the fort, you march up on your side. To attack, ONE of their stacks has to make the move and it is without cover from their buddies. Even when they serially hit the fort, you have the momentary breather to do the VERY important replenishment of missile weapons. If you take on two or more stacks in the open and it is all one big battle, it is very hard to keep from using up all your ammunition.
Done well, you can often have two stacks behind a fort with several real units in it. I have been able to withstand multiple attacks on the same fort in the same turn from the Mongol Horde in this manner. It really breaks up their stacks into more manageable armies. At this point, your forts now serve to restrict their movement options. I tend to follow along just behind their horde and continue to bottle them up ever tighter in the passes or between crossings. You can take on all twelve stacks of the Mongols, for example, in those passes with substantially fewer stacks and total units in this way.
This works extremely well in the passes centered between Edessa, Caesarea, Trebizond, Tblisi and, Yerevan. Play around with individual units and you can find places where you can put more than 1 reinforcing unit behind the proposed fort site and that an attacker can only line up serially. Even if you can only get 1 stack behind it, when it becomes obvious that they are moving down a specific valley, you can fill the fort and have a full stack behind it. If they hit you more than once, which they will, you will maintain an advantage through multiple attacks since they are still hitting you 1:2 or 1:1.5 or 1:1.3.
First time through the game the surprises are great. It becomes harder to keep the freshness if you behave with too much foreshadowing. First repeat of the game I allowed myself to anticipate the Hordes. I did not enjoy that. By operating this way I do not prebuild stacks in anticipation of the Hordes. I admit to briskly taking the frontier areas so that I can build up the settlements and get to the point that their open recruitment slots are going to be sufficient to meet the need and that I have improved the roads and added forts along the obvious reinforcement paths. This way I do not feel I have cheated with a crystal ball as to the arrival of the Hordes. I do this same treatment throughout whatever empire I am helming as you eventually have to to deal with bandits. As I noted before, done this way, the bandit issue is fun and training exercise rather than a big pain. I end up feeling that it is good management rather than using those astrologers or pagan magicians.
Another fun area to cover is the plains to the west of Bulgar. There are several river fords to cover. You can place forts behind those with depleted units and center a fort or two with a good stack. Bulgar can produce some more troops before the Hordes are upon it and Ryanzan and even Moscow and beyond can get troops over to help fairly quickly. Add multiple frontier posts between Sarkel and the larger settlements to the west and the stacks you need will be available just in time. I do find that the Hordes will often dither about more if they are faced with good opposition which gives even more time to bring in the right units.
Practically this means that Generals must be allocated in all of your operation regions to go out and make these forts and that a number of depleted units will need to be kept in their understrength condition to allow you to cheaply occupy the forts. In other words, do NOT -as a reflex- combine after every battle. If I am using a fort for bandit control or reinforcement housing, I will be sure to ALWAYS have a very small unit left behind. Do NOT select all and discover that because you had to chase the bandits down you cannot quite get back to the fort. It will go away if you leave it unoccupied for 1 turn. Quite the pain if you have moved all you Generals on to other areas. It is easier to remember when you are just moving units through.
These details have been noted in different posts but here is the info in one place anyway: You CANNOT make a fort or watchtower within ONE square of another Fort, Watchtower, UNIT, or Settlement. They have to be TWO squares off. I have not had the 'Natural Disaster' problem yet but it is supposed to work like this: a flood or similar affects an area. After it has occurred the area on the map holds a memory and will not allow you to build a fort or WT in that area. Supposedly if a SECOND disaster occurs, it may clear the issue. I HAVE had the issue that I could NOT build for no apparent reason: no adjacent structure and no visible units and no map feature that appeared to prevent me. In those cases, when the next turn came around and I now had movement points to spend I discovered that there was a hidden unit or a hidden spy literally under my feet. I have also had wilderness areas where I could not build WTs. I specifically see that in the wide open desert areas. Obviously there are some areas that you cannot even go, but I am not sure why some areas just seem to be off limits. I do sometimes reload on those issues as I feel that my scouts would likely have been able to advise their general before getting into an area of that nature. So if you are in a questionable area building a string of WTs or forts, you may want to do a quicksave before committing yourself to a build location until you get a feel for where the can or cannot be built.
One side note. You will lose forts to the Hordes sometimes. (I will often back them up with an additional fort two squares down the valley.) I have found that having had a spot of trouble at this point, the entire horde will not necessarily charge through the gap. One stack may occupy the fort for a turn and then head off after the Horde that has turned off a different way. At this point the fort is not occupied but it is still 'theirs'. If you reoccupy the fort, you tweak their noses and they will respond by resieging the fort. It is a great way to make them waste another turn or two while you are bringing in the reinforcements or moving troops in the new direction that they will likely go back to.
A bit of a long post, but I have been reading posts over the last few days on how to handle the Hordes and then this one on forts, so I thought I would bring the two together.
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