Fortress.... arggg...

[Shadowstrike]

How about having a fort raise supply? It would make really big forts siegable because you could bring in more artillary and men. Of course, it would be hard to justify that historically.....

 

[Vinraith]

I just had my first real experience with this problem last night, and figured it'd be more constructive to raise a thread that already has a lot of good ideas in it that to start a new one.

As Denmark in 1753, I couldn't capture a single province from the Swedes. Hundreds of thousands of men, thousands of cannon, only sieging the southern (non-winter) provinces, and still zip. I appreciate the fact that fortresses should markedly slow the progress of war, but from what I can tell, unless I'm just missing something, they seem to stop it altogether at this stage. The makes late game wars, well, less than interesting and more than a little nerve-fraying.

Anyway, I figured I'd bring this one back up for discussion. While the "support cost" idea is my favorite, I think it'd probably screw the AI up something wicked. Anyone have any clever ideas?

 

[Pwyll]

I think the fault lies in the cost to create these mammoth fortresses and the total troops allowed to be garrisoned there...Four Maxixmum Forts = 100,000 men?? If you can Siege a fort and trace a supply line back to a port you control your attrition should be alot less. There are alot of creative ideas here to make this better, I think the question remains is how to implement this in the game where the AI can recognize these restrictions and play within those boundaries...Attritionless AI navy is only one example where the AI cannot handle certain restrictions and the rules have to be bent to enble it to compete. Their is no Strategic value to Fortresses right now...except preventing you walking through and capturing a province. In effect they are not fortresses at all, they are walls around the provincial capital. The first things antions do is try to capture a supply route for their forces. It can be a port or a province on the frontier...holding a siege out of supply is ridiculous. Starving could take a long time. I have mentioned before that the future Henry VII stayed in a castle for four years and only surrendered with 50 men left. The AI seems to ignore the troop limits but if you made garrisons a part of your total troop altoment and made that alotment concrete only to be adjusted by the DP sliders then you would have a restriction on how many large fortresses would be built and the length of wars in general.
The thing is all these ideas are somewhat linked together and it may be beyond a simple fix.