Forts useless without Zone-Of-Control? Yes.

[seebs]

I've used them a lot. Place them outside city limits, especially on useless spots (say, tundra not near a river, or desert). Place units in them. Watch as incoming barbarians charge at the fort and die.

It works pretty well, and gives my forward pickets a safe place to retreat without having to go back to the city. When barbarians come in, the fort units can hit them before they can pillage.

[Saurus]

Originally posted by seebs
I've used them a lot. Place them outside city limits, especially on useless spots (say, tundra not near a river, or desert). Place units in them. Watch as incoming barbarians charge at the fort and die.

It works pretty well, and gives my forward pickets a safe place to retreat without having to go back to the city. When barbarians come in, the fort units can hit them before they can pillage.

Will have to try to build forts as traps for barbarians then.
I seems strange though. Normaly Barbarians do not even seem to attack cities as long as they are reasonably defended - they are even avoiding attacking units in the open as long as the defender seem to get defensive bonuses or otherwise seem to have the an edge.
Why would they then attack a fort whitout anything much to gain when there is no need to strike it?

[Sarxis]

I've also noticed how powerful the defense bonuses can be if you put the fort on a hill, then put a guerilla promoted archery unit fortified in it.

Had some longbowmen in a hilltop fort with Guerilla II:

Fort and hill bonus +50%
Fortify +25%
Guerilla I and II +45%

+120% bonus total.

Longbow base defense of 6 + 120% PLUS first strike ability is a nice defense out in the open, and you can put some cavalry units in the fort to maneuver against incoming attacks. I especially like what was said about terrain: if your fort is surrounded by open land, you can seriously take control of that area with a garrisoned fort. Keeps the battle away from your cities.

[Bhruic]

Originally posted by Sarxis
Had some longbowmen in a hilltop fort with Guerilla II:

Fort and hill bonus +50%
Fortify +25%
Guerilla I and II +45%

+120% bonus total.

Is the 120% really that much better than 95%? 6 str Longbow gets 13.2 instead of 11.7. So basically a 1.5 bonus.

if your fort is surrounded by open land, you can seriously take control of that area with a garrisoned fort. Keeps the battle away from your cities.

How so? Your 6 str Longbow is going to attack? 13.2 down to 6, not too good odds. Or are you going to stick more troops in there? At which point the AI can just swing around you, and troops you might have had defending your city are now useless.

Bh

[Rommel2D]

Does a fort along a river in neutral territory block an enemy from using that river for a trade route?

[starchgrain]

I use it exactly as Sarxis said in Multiplayer. I think they have a great psychlogical value with human players.

Im a passive aggressive player. I like to post troops so the other players can see them and will not want to invest in a war against me. On this screenshot, these two guys were very aggressive. This fort was VERY useful during this game.

Here the orange guy had declared war on me. (Maybe he could not see the fort. In it were both a long bowman(2 promotions) and a pikeman (for mounted units) for defense. Also I had a stack of like 4-5 macemens and 2 cats.. I saw his first stack coming form the west and intercepted it with the macemen, using one cat to soften it up. I quickly went on counter attack and captured one of his city with the other cat and remaining macemen. He agreed for peace fairly quickly as I had the time to bring reinforcements. I never had problems with both of them after. The grey guy attacked almost everyone in the game but me.

I still lost cause i was a little cramped and had only 3 cities and could not get the cultural victory but It helped me prevent aggresive ideas.

edit: the fort is on a hill in front of York (center of picture)

Or are you going to stick more troops in there? At which point the AI can just swing around you, and troops you might have had defending your city are now useless.

You can hit them from the back with your offensive units. And I defend my cities as if the fort was not there with defensive units (mostly archers and a few pikemen). If I can afford an offensive force its posted in the forts with few defensive ones. It makes sense since my offensive army is ready for a quick counterattack keeping the battle away from my cities.

All in all it's just a nice bonus. Forest defense is better.

[Mayfield]

Originally posted by starchgrain
Im a passive aggressive player. I like to post troops so the other players can see them and will not want to invest in a war against me. On this screenshot, these two guys were very aggressive. This fort was VERY useful during this game.

Great spot for a fort BTW. Put a few fast movers in there to harass an incoming stack and it would have been perfect.

If you put a couple of Cavalry/mobile units in a fort, let the stack get close, and then harass the stack with them it can be quite useful. Remember the Artillery takes 1 move/turn and can't move fast into your territory while you can hit/run to weaken a stack. A human will address the fort ASAP if they know you will be doing this, but the AI might not.

[Mylon]

If this game had ZoC, I could see building a fort every 2-3 spaces apart along my borders and garrisoning them. If the enemy wants to attack, I'll get plenty of warning so I can move more units into nearby cities.

Right now strategy in this game seems to all fall to the same tactic: Move a huge number of units onto some kind of defensible space next to a city (hill, forest, hungle), foritfy until the stack is big enough, then attack. Generally the foritfy/archer bonuses (not counting city bonuses) are enough to almost gurantee the death of one unit for every healthy unit in the city. Therefore, unless your army is greater than the enemy garrison, attacking is a worthless maneuver. Even then, the effectiveness of the attack doesn't become meaningful until the attacking force is twice that of the defending force.

Also, using the current rock paper scissors model, if they have 2 of each and you have 2 rock, 2 paper, and 8 scissors, you might loose 4 scissors killing their two rocks, but the other 4 have a pretty easy time with the remaining forces. You can then use your 2 rocks and 2 papers to escort your scissors + reinforcements onto the next objective.

I think there needs to be more options to make combat interesting. Withdrawl and bombardment mix things up a little, but not enough.

[Arrian]

I haven't built one yet. Static defense hasn't been all that useful since CivII (when you could depend on the AI to throw unit after unit at your fort-on-mountain). A small % bonus, no economic improvements on the same tile, and no added effects (ZOC, healing) = not worth it.

-Arrian

[=DrJambo=]

One thing that might have worked is if forts also imparted a 25% "attacking" bonus when attacking from the fort. Coupled with a faster healing rate this might really make them worth building, as it would force enemy units attempting to travel round a fort into dealing with it rather than simply ignoring it. A ZoC might not really be required.

[Arrian]

Hmm. Sorta like a ZoC, but one you must actively use...

-Arrian

[starchgrain]

Originally posted by Mayfield


Great spot for a fort BTW. Put a few fast movers in there to harass an incoming stack and it would have been perfect.

If you put a couple of Cavalry/mobile units in a fort, let the stack get close, and then harass the stack with them it can be quite useful. Remember the Artillery takes 1 move/turn and can't move fast into your territory while you can hit/run to weaken a stack. A human will address the fort ASAP if they know you will be doing this, but the AI might not.

I agree 100%. But i could not secure horses in this game.

So mobile units in the fort slow down the attack giving the time for infantry to arrive. If they can pass this first line of defense, they will be quite weak when reaching the city.
Sounds good to me.

The fort is not mandatory in this strategy I aggree, but why not build it when your workers have nothing else to do. It looks more indimitating to the (human)attacker.

Also, you can do the exact same thing on offense:

Send horses pillaging and luring the ennemy out then infantry arrives with good defensive units and siege somewhere safe (in the fort would be quite ironic).

[Bhruic]

Originally posted by =DrJambo=
One thing that might have worked is if forts also imparted a 25% "attacking" bonus when attacking from the fort.

That's a nice idea, similar to what I'd thought of. I was going to go with a "field" (basically a 1-tile radius) that reduced the str of enemies. So basically, any enemy unit (where "enemy" would be defined as any Empire you are at war with, to prevent it from hitting your allies) that is 1 square away from a fort would have something like a -25% str. This would both encourage building of forts in general, and also encourage the building of forts near cities.

The only concern I have with both ideas is making sure the AI could properly account for them existing.

Bh

[polarnomad]

Originally posted by Akaoz
Got a screenie of how you used them?

Here's that screenshot I promised earlier:



The arrows show where the barbs were coming from and which routes they would try to take before I built the fort. After I built it I would wait for them to move into the red ellipse and attack with my jaguars. If the jaguars died then the archers would finish what remained. I really had no more barb problems after that.

There is a second fort to the south of my civ accomplishing exactly the same thing too.

The main advantage of the fort is that you can choose where to put it.

[Volstag]

Two options:

Don't build 'em.

Use them in conjunction with high mobility units. You can't rightly walk past when you're being mown down by cav, horse archers, armor, etc, every turn. Even better, use two forts in support of each other. If that doesn't give you a zone of control, I don't know what will.

Adding a "hard" ZoC is gamey, IMO. You just reverse the "problem": one warrior unit can pin down multiple stacks of modern armor (for example).