Trying to Understand Forts (Illustrated)

[Brylajok]

I will be able to provide a save file (ironman) later if needed.

I've run into this, as well as where my troops had to walk all the way around to attack from the backside of a fort, this happened twice, one of them I recall being Neva. I didn't occupy the adjacent province, but instead told my troops to siege the fort. (I was TO, and taken most of Lithonion order's land.

My troops instead of attacking from the Southwest, were forced to march through Novgorod and swing around from the North.

Not only this happened, but also the same issue as the OP mentioned. As I continued to lay siege a larger stack came and attacked my army, and they got stack wiped instead of being able to retreat.

Following up with MaXimillion's post, I did click the detach siege and move most of my army elsewhere, not sure if they are related, but sounds like it.

 

[heroes133]

I had a trap problem too, while i was invading Livonian Order and Riga, Their army retreated to the north i could chase them all the way (i could walk past their fort) and kill the stack but then i found myself trap with my whole army in 1 province, getting attrition to death.

 

[Homer2101]

A related problem concerns marine invasions of fortified provinces. An army can be moved from transports in a sea zone to a coastal fortified province that it cannot otherwise get to, and will siege the province as normal. However, it cannot be moved back to its transports until the siege ends. To reproduce, declare war as England on Burgundy in 1444 and siege Holland from the sea. The army will not be able to move from Holland until the siege ends.

 

[CNightwing]

If you split and re-merge your sieging regiments so that they are now a new army, they forget which province they entered from and can no longer retreat.

That's probably it! I'm sure, now I think about it, that I detached a siege in order to chase down the newly constructed stack of 1-2 units, and then found I couldn't do anything with my army. This is frustrating, as certainly split stacks should inherit the 'moved from this province' data of the stack. I'm not sure what should happen if you merge two stacks though since they might come from different locations. Something needs a rethink there..

 

[Elin]

I had a pretty similar problem too with forts while playing France and fighting Burgundy.

What makes forts difficult to handle is when there are lots of frontiers involving opponents,allies and neutrals who give you the right to move on their territory. I am not sure that there was a bug but i coudn't explain some moves.

 

[CNightwing]

Ok I played around and haven't been able to recreate the 'nowhere to retreat to' problem, so it must be a very specific little bug. I discovered a few things though:

• You can indeed move between two provinces next to an enemy fort if you move into a province you control, it doesn't matter where you come from
• If you split a stack, they inherit the 'came from this province' data
• If you join two stacks from different locations, one province takes priority for this purpose - in my case it defaulted to the stack with a general but I don't know what the actual rule is

 

[mcmanusaur]

Props to QA for their forum presence as of late.

That said, I still think it would be much better if forts only blocked movement through their own province and if that change was balanced by just making forts cheaper = more forts. I think that having that finer granularity would also be more strategic as players would truly "draw" their line of defenses across multiple provinces. They would likely place forts along more defensible bits of the border and then contend more open areas with their armies. At any rate, I think all of this cross-province stuff is terribly unintuitive for a game in which separate provinces are otherwise treated as independent from each other for 99% of purposes.

 

[Lee Saxon]

Forts are also weird for narrow nations. For example, Venice's fort is right on the border (in Treviso) so there's no need to give access through any other province to allow enemies to reach it. But because they're on the border, Friuli and Verona and Brescia can be entered as well. Now, enemies can't move between those provinces without going back out into Austria or Milan and re-entering Venice, but that's not worth much. I don't think you should be allowed to enter border provinces under the ZoC of a fort except as necessary to reach that fort.

 

[Gturkey]

If you split and re-merge your sieging regiments so that they are now a new army, they forget which province they entered from and can no longer retreat.

I've had the same problem, as Novgorod invading Livonian order - got stuck on the fort on the gulf of finland. Watched helplessly as the Livonians picked off my rearguard that I was powerless to reinforce

 

[mattpilot]

I don't think you should be allowed to enter border provinces under the ZoC of a fort except as necessary to reach that fort.

I think this is needed

 

[Ketilsen]

It seems strange that a besieged fort still maintains its zone of control. One would imagine that the patrolling units would be too busy defending the fort to have time to spare to get in the way of advancing armies, or what say ye?

 

[Zeek40]

If you split and re-merge your sieging regiments so that they are now a new army, they forget which province they entered from and can no longer retreat.

I think this explains why I see this issue so often. I'm constantly tweaking my siege stacks to make sure my mercs are taking most of the attrition, and I hate having extra armies in my outliner, so i keep merging and splitting siege stacks as mercs free up from other sieges.

 

[Lee Saxon]

It seems strange that a besieged fort still maintains its zone of control. One would imagine that the patrolling units would be too busy defending the fort to have time to spare to get in the way of advancing armies, or what say ye?

In real life, yes, but in game terms this would make things too easy. Having a fort besieged does prevent provinces you've captured within its ZoC from automatically flipping back to their owner as soon as you move your troops out of them, it's just the movement restrictions that stay until a fort is occupied. I think that's a fair balance.

 

[Lemont Elwood]

Let's face it: the Fort system was a perfectly good idea, then Paradox slapped that movement restriction on it and screwed it up.

Enjoy not being able to march anywhere.

 

[CNightwing]

I've got some new diagrams but I can't seem to upload them in a reply..

 

[lihp]

I encountered the same issue. The area around Loom/Liege/Limburg also appears to be prone to this exact "army locking" bug.

 

[Arachne]

I think the fort system is a great improvement, but I have also encountered this issue, along with others, such as the AI not seeming to understand how province flipping works and repeatedly sieging down provinces protected by a fort, only for the fort to lift the occupation, rinse and repeat.

 

[mackwolfe]

I had the trapping problem yesterday and I thought it was due to merging units at the fort, creating a new army . The new army had no recollection which way it came , so it could not retreat.

Was not sure this is WAD or bug .