Forts

[proviisori]

Originally posted by MadDjinn


forts should remove tile improvements (they're big)
should allow a ZOC around them of 1 tile (maybe make it a 'cultural' boundry to make that happen - so it looks like a city with no cultural growth)
unlimited troop residence.
some high amount of defence % bonus. (or for ease of coding... could be a 'city' that can build walls/castle only)
for modern times, then the defense bonus drops (say post gunpowder as now exists, but not fully dropped, maybe 50% less defense)
forts built anywhere, except within other cultural borders. fort ZOC cannot be removed by cultural expansion. possible exception is when a non-open borders cultural border fully envelops the forts ZOC. then fort defenders could be forced out due to no food...

Well... forts are not THAT big. One tile in civ is usually about 100 square kilometres. There is a lot of space for the fort and some other improvement i.e. mine or farms.

so... they should not remove the other imrovements.

[Ijuin]

I have modded forts to give a 50% defense boost in my game, and this feels adequate to make them worthwhile. However, the lack of a ZOC still means that they can only be an obstruction when you have a choke point such as an isthmus or mountain pass. Otherwise I mainly use forts as a forward deployment point to station my units.

[Nugog]

I have only ever built one once.

I thought I was being clever, building a fort to help with defending the only supply of iron on the island

Mine was destroyed, my neighbours invaded next turn!

Never built one again!

ZOC would make them of some use though.........

[Nugog]

Actually ZOC would make of great value and purpose

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by nugog
I have only ever built one once.

I thought I was being clever, building a fort to help with defending the only supply of iron on the island

Mine was destroyed, my neighbours invaded next turn!

Never built one again!

ZOC would make them of some use though.........

Sorry but couldn't help myself.

Thinking about it, you would have thought that the fortification would be a reasonable way in which you could improve the defense of an improved resource.

On a similar subject, why don't banana plantations give a defensive bonus?

[Nugog]

Originally posted by couerdelion




Sorry but couldn't help myself.

Thinking about it, you would have thought that the fortification would be a reasonable way in which you could improve the defense of an improved resource.

On a similar subject, why don't banana plantations give a defensive bonus?

You must admit it seemed a reasonable assumption at the time!

As for the banana thing - whats that all about

[MadDjinn]

Originally posted by Flamer(fin)


Well... forts are not THAT big. One tile in civ is usually about 100 square kilometres. There is a lot of space for the fort and some other improvement i.e. mine or farms.

so... they should not remove the other imrovements.

well... cities aren't 100 square km either until the get really really big...

but if we want to make a ZOC around the fort, then it would need to be big.. otherwise the ZOC fits within the 1 tile.

ZOC with fort = 30 km x 30 km...

[drsparnum]

can the enemy benefit from forts in your borders?

[Peterk1]

I was being piled-on by the top 2 civs in one of my last games and I ended up building a huge Maginot-Line of forts on my entire western border and tried to keep them fully stocked with 1 defender each.

It _did_ help keep the invaders away from my cities. They'd get beat up pretty bad getting through the forts and then I'd have a mobile reserve to mop up the damaged units.

But...it took a huge amount of time and effort and the work would probably have been better off spent elsewhere. Would be nice if forts would get a little bump, since they are a nice strategic addition for someone situated next to a warmonger.

[Blaupanzer]

Yes, your fort does benefit the attacker once taken. Without the ZOC, forts actually suck in Civ IV.

[Nugog]

Originally posted by Blaupanzer
Yes, your fort does benefit the attacker once taken. Without the ZOC, forts actually suck in Civ IV.

You can say that again!

They are hopeless, pointless and useless!

Not that I have strong feelings on the matter...

[uberfish]

There are a couple of uses for forts although they don't come up very often. I use them occasionally to blockade narrow choke points and force invaders to come from a certain direction. Also, if you have culture touching an AI civ's city that you're planning to attack, you can build a fort there and use it as a staging point. The reason for doing this instead of just taking the city outright would be that in the early stages of a war the computer has mobile stacks around, and instead of defending in a captured city with no defence bonus, your troops can bombard the city to 0%, defend in the fort and keep killing enemy troops sent to garrison the city.

[Generaldoktor]

It is true they can't be built outside the cultural border, but early in the game, with a few wonders and temples built, your cultural border can be a healthy distance from the cities. I use them as fortified assembly points for fighting barbarians, particularly since I like "Raging Barbs". The barbs are smarter in v. 161, but still have a tendency to gravitate towards the first fighting unit assembly they see. I like the forts on hills, particularly bald ones outside the "fat X," though if it is true what is written here that in v.161, you can now build a fort and keep the woods, I'll might start doing that, though it would be better to chop the woods, I suppose, after Mathematics at least.

Forts do suck in C4, but remember we're getting the military-oriented revision coming, "Warlords." They may revisit it. Besides the "castle-city" world history is remembered at times for great forts. The Japs had some splendid ones in the Shogun era, even made of wood; ditto for Britain, who didn't always put the good ones around a town. (Our narrator buddy Lenny Nimoy recently narrated a special on History Channel about it, here in the States.)

Then there was Louis XIV, who of course is in the game, with his famed fortmaster (and siegemaster) Sebastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban [1633-1707], aka Marshal Vauban, under whom fortification became an art for a time in the 17th century, carrying into the 18th. According to one website, gunpowder itself, available for most of Vauban's life, didn't wreck his work as much as rifling (of artillery) did later. In a perfect world, "Warlords" would reflect some of this by introducing "advanced" forts, still resistant to gun weapons and "rifled" artillery, just like we have rifled infantry. But that I suppose is too much detail from a design team that wanted to downplay warfare in this Civ version anyway. (Which has been largely overruled by the Vox Populi and the emergent characteristics of Multiplayer.)

Zone of control, I don't know. The design team seemed to want that out for good too, in this one. But we are looking at an upcoming redesign of the military-related rules, so who knows?