Fort! Heh! What is it good for? Absoultely nothing!

[Amarsir]

I took eight workers or so under a stack of riflemen and had a desert fortress lickety-split. It allowed my faster units to pester her redcoats and whatnot before they got into areas I actually cared about.

Points for using them, but I'm curious if it was truly the fort itself or rather the location that worked for you. If you'd taken your stack and fortified them there in that place, wouldn't that also have provided a suitable base from which to attack? Yes, you give up the defense bonus but considering you're already a deterrant and they're trying to go around rather than through you anyway, I wonder if that wouldn't have been sufficient. And you gain the flexibility to move over a couple squares and present the same image as the battlefront changes.

Clearly if that's where you want to be then the fort can only help. I'm just thinking that even when it's good, it's not really that good.

[Lord Avalon]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
I wasn't saying building a fort in enemy territory (even though this is possible in real life, e.g. Nazi Germany's Atlantic Wall is a series of forts in France and the Lowland Countries).

Actually, the Atlantic Wall wasn't really built in "enemy" territory, as Germany had already conquered it. I think better examples would be seigeworks built when laying seige to a city (Alesia comes to mind), or perhaps the fortified camps built when Roman legions stopped for the night.

[JohnUghrin]

Re: Re: Re: Fort! Heh! What is it good for? Absoultely nothing!

Originally posted by Rook


Well, it seems you did find a use for it in that one paricular case, but over all, forts seem to be useless considering there effect is small and you can't build a more useful improvement under it.

The "not build anything underneath" part is the most annoying thing about fortresses IMHO. I'm not a big fortress pimp, but I have found them occasionally useful.

Originally posted by Rook
What caught my attention in your post though is the last sentence. You are said you build forts more than castles. I don't understand why. In my games, usually I run out of things to build in my cities so inevitably all my cities will get a castle. They don't usually help much with defense, but castles give a +2 culture bonus, so why not build them? It's not like in older civ games where buildings cost $$$. In Civ 4 buildings are free so build build build.

Currently my games run in one of two directions. When I'm in a position to think about building castles, I'm either looking to build more impressive improvements because I'm so far ahead techwise. Or, I'm building units rapidly to fuel my recent spate of invasions or just upgrade my defenses hurridly.

My son (8) thinks I'm not aggressive enough. (He plays in a perpetual state of war with somebody.) So I've just started experimenting with more naked aggression. Castles might help that, I guess. I'm still getting used to it, I usually end up getting overrun in the late industrial period (for my invader, usually early industrial for me). I'm certainly not used to playing behind the tech curve.

[JohnUghrin]

Originally posted by Amarsir

Points for using them, but I'm curious if it was truly the fort itself or rather the location that worked for you. If you'd taken your stack and fortified them there in that place, wouldn't that also have provided a suitable base from which to attack? Yes, you give up the defense bonus but considering you're already a deterrant and they're trying to go around rather than through you anyway, I wonder if that wouldn't have been sufficient. And you gain the flexibility to move over a couple squares and present the same image as the battlefront changes.

The difference is that after the fort is built, the workers head home. Most of the military units can then head off to invade England, leave two or (maybe) three to keep the fort. Depending on what units you have available, you can either launch spoiling attacks from the fort, or just let it spot for defenders on the homefront, allowing a much smaller number of units to be tied up in defense.

Originally posted by Amarsir
Clearly if that's where you want to be then the fort can only help. I'm just thinking that even when it's good, it's not really that good.

As I said, I don't build them all the time. As I think about it, I build them most often in large "no man's land" areas, and almost exclusively after I've been invaded. If I don't have that situation, then I usually just let smaller cities pull the load.

[Paddy]

Re: Re: Fort! Heh! What is it good for? Absoultely nothing!

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


You mean forts should give the units inside ZoC. That would be a cool feature IMO.

Cities too.

Now how to get that implemented

[DrSpike]

Damn, I agree with UR.

In removing ZoC from the game (this applies equally to Civ3, even though technically they were present) it's hard to know what the role of the fort is meant to be. Also, of course, they originally had an advantage in that each unit defended individually rather than the best for the whole stack.

Now that the game has changed in both ways, either forts should go, or they should get a new reason for being.