Fort Attack Discussion

[katanatan]

https://imgur.com/a/hGgbB

The picture in this post/ link shows a sucessful for attack of 2 50k stacks of strelitz , with even a little bit ahead of time tech against a lvl 8 fort that was breached.
I lost 90 k.

From a gameplay perspective it is in (almost) every case a very bad idea to siege attack a fort. (aside from cleaning up during the endphase of a worldconquest)

I want to mainly look at the newer age sieges (18th century) and not the whole eu4 timeline, because then many people would tell of some ottoman sieges where they had tens of thousands of losses.

The ottomans were horrible at sieges, but their mass (of cannons and shier unlimited infantry) compensates it pretty well.

An example for a modern siege would be the siege of toulon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Toulon

An 18k strong allied fort got besieged by 32k french troops. After 3 months this harbor city with allied siege control gets attacked twice. There was no breach, because of nreaby supplies of sicily and the allied fleet there were no supply shortages at all. Only note is that the allied cannons on the forts wall got partially destroyed from the attackers.

The resultating losses were 4k on the allied entrenched side, only 2k on the french side.

I of course think that there has to be some cost / slight punishment for the attackers on a siege.

But those losses (8k vs 100k losses 8k vs 90k) should exist if you attack a fort without a breach (with anchor and ropes and ladders).

But if you attack an fort, if OVERWHELMING numbers, losses should not be as absurd.

 

[YuriiH]

Although I do agree that the assaulting mechanics where ALL your 100k troops got hit by 2k defenders is stupid, I would post another example of perfect defense when outnumbered:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Siege_of_Malta

 

[gia257]

yeah its only useful when the fort has a small garrison, so that they die without hurting you much, reinforce with stacks the size of the defenders otherwise? that way they wont die early

 

[misiceman]

Also don't forget to consolidate every day on the assault (shift consolidate is fine) as the unit strength get hits everywhere diminishing your potential "hits" to the denfenders. you'll still loose loads of men but you will loose less over all.

Also note that manpower in EU4 (and force limit) can not be taken literally. They are an abstraction for game play. Any ideas in the realm of reality breaks for certain parts of the world (and lets not even take shipping troops around the world - or China, or India, or...). And while fort assaults aren't realistic and probably need a re balance they are like that for game play reasons only. I don't think there is a clearer example on not taking this from pure history here because its a game and so many things are abstracted and there are MANY conflicting examples in history.

 

[katanatan]

Although I do agree that the assaulting mechanics where ALL your 100k troops got hit by 2k defenders is stupid, I would post another example of perfect defense when outnumbered:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Siege_of_Malta

Sorry, that i disagree, but you just bring an example of an ottoman empire with plentiful ressources that had nothing else to do than throwing men against the wall.

I warned of that case in my post.
Ottoman empire is a very bad example of sieges.
Either they let 100k foreign (albanian, greek etc) men at sieges die to get rid of unrest or they have mega cannons at jerusalem or whatever.

Please if you want to talk about "standard" sieges use european countries.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Also don't forget to consolidate every day on the assault (shift consolidate is fine) as the unit strength get hits everywhere diminishing your potential "hits" to the denfenders. you'll still loose loads of men but you will loose less over all.

Also note that manpower in EU4 (and force limit) can not be taken literally. They are an abstraction for game play. Any ideas in the realm of reality breaks for certain parts of the world (and lets not even take shipping troops around the world - or China, or India, or...). And while fort assaults aren't realistic and probably need a re balance they are like that for game play reasons only. I don't think there is a clearer example on not taking this from pure history here because its a game and so many things are abstracted and there are MANY conflicting examples in history.

Concessions for gameplay are fine, but I'm not convinced that "option is a false choice unless the garrison is very depleted" is actually a pro-gameplay concession.

 

[misiceman]

As I said in my post i think it should change, as it IS a false choice right now (unlike artillary barrage which is amazing in many situations). However trying to find an "average" siege from different parts of the world at different time frames and tech levels and war styles to use as a representative argument for what a "realistic" assault should look like is problematic at best.

I don't think it was looked at since before the fort changes (level and garrison sizes in the building rework is what i am referring to there) and it should be changed, but IMO it should be game play that dictates the change over everything else as it can sit at the razors edge of balance. As it is right now its dumb, as it was before, where you used to hope for a breach and almost always assault for fast sieges was too far the other way. It should be a meaningful decisions with risks and costs so it makes it a real choice. What the balance should be i am not really sure though.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Agreed, assaulting everything or (almost) nothing are not the way to build a mechanic where assault is an option :/.

 

[HeyIAmInfinity]

@katanatan the problem with assaults in the game is that the defenders seams to do percentage kills depending on how large is your stack.
If you attack with 100k you will lose less than if you attack with a 1000k stack. Florryworry tried this in his 3 million stack campaign, lost more that a million in a single assault.
Recently florryworry found a way to get less losses by attacking with the minimum required troops (10k on level 2 fort) and then reinforcing when the troop count lowered by 1k; so to always have a 10k attacker side (and shift consolidating).
This caused between 5k to 7k losses for an assault to a level 2 fort but with the consistent victory of attacker.
Doing the same for a level 8 or 9 fort could lower the casualties by a lot but still we are talking about 40k to 50k per fort.

In EU4 assaulting with more than required troops is not a good idea.

 

[bbqftw]

Funnily enough with the new siege tech (only assault with as many troops as the assault tab tells you, then consolidate troops in every day using a stack moving off the siege as needed) you can safely win assaults against level 2s with 16k infantry and 6k casualties.