Forts

konrad · Post by **konrad** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 1:46 pm

Do you guys build a fort in every city you own ?? (even if it's just a small one) Or just in strategical places ??

Thanks

honvedseg · Post by **honvedseg** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 2:15 pm

Never. The limited spaces are far too valuable to waste for an extra garrison unit or two. I'd rather just train the extra troops.

konrad · Post by **konrad** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 6:50 am

That can't be right...

I have a border city with a Medium Fort and I get 3 Hoplite squads to defend it when attacked...
If I would have to buy those 3 squads I would lose a lot of resources and have to spend 500 silver each turn to maintain them...

No single building slot makes that much money... Or am I missing some important point here ??

duncan · Post by **duncan** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 7:46 am

konrad wrote:That can't be right...

I have a border city with a Medium Fort and I get 3 Hoplite squads to defend it when attacked...
If I would have to buy those 3 squads I would lose a lot of resources and have to spend 500 silver each turn to maintain them...

No single building slot makes that much money... Or am I missing some important point here ??

if you use the extra slot with a production building (let's say: marble

) you're making more money per turn, so you can pay those extra units (and they do get experience, so they're better than garrison units)...and move them forward if your "border" city is no longer your "border" city...

...but I do build forts. They're relatively cheap and I like having those extra hoplites, even if they don't get experience. If my city is no longer a border city, I destroy them and I build another resources producing building...but I play defensively most of the time, so it depends...

miki · Post by **miki** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 2:01 pm

Regarding forts I usually play similar to Duncan. As far as the cities are the frontier line, I build forts. Until the frontier moves forwards. Many coastal cities regain their forts for most of the campaign, as they are specially vulnerable to enemy fleets and marauding pirates...

Frontier forts are great keeping your civilization out of danger, beating off those pesky neighbours and barbarians...

sum1won · Post by **sum1won** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 7:22 pm

If a city has something like lvl 8 in a commodity, I will build a fort, as I often have little other use for all that surplus space. And if it is on the border, of course I build a fortification.

alexandernevsky · Post by **alexandernevsky** » Wed Sep 14, 2005 11:51 pm

The main reason I build forts is so I can build walls, even the lowest level of town wall will make your town impregnable ,once built recycle the forts.........

joseph_kerr · Post by **joseph_kerr** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 7:47 am

I'm more inclined to build forts if i'm playing an eastern campaign since i have more confidence in a garrison of archers. I definitely don't bother to build forts in any Pelegasian campaign since those Pelegasian Spearmen can't seem to stand up to much of anything but the most basic light infantry and below, everyone else just tears them to shreds.

rural · Post by **rural** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 4:25 am

no
never
i never build any forts

it waste too much time and money (resources)
to build a fort

well ... if you are playing scenarios against AI
there's nice kinda cheating way to counter em
when the comp got a 16 squad army moving toward you (1100 people)

what you need ... is to send 1 squad of smallest size basic army (1 squad of hillman or 1 squad of astynomia .......)
(since they are with smallest size .... it's only 40 people in a squad)
send that 1 squad army to the comp's 16 squad
and hit "auto resolve"
you'll take down about 100 man
leaving the comp's squad down 1000 men

spartan0536 · Post by **spartan0536** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 3:11 pm

I bulid a fort in every city that I have I like to make shure my people get the best of everything. When you build a fort and you have a supply upgrade the garrison sheres in the upgrade as well so the more you have with it the more you get out of it.

spartan0536 · Post by **spartan0536** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 3:13 pm

The only reason I Build forts is because I only play as the Lacedimonians (Spartans).

magobarca · Post by **magobarca** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 2:14 am

Forts are nice,
Forts are good,
Whether you build them out of stone or wood.

Chris

honvedseg · Post by **honvedseg** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 3:04 pm

The biggest drawback to forts is that it's extremely difficult to attack with one. (Duh!) It's fairly inexpensive to garrison a backwater town with the smallest size units of Astynomia or Hillmen, and you get no increased morale benefit for guarding with better troops. At 2 food and a handful of silver for upkeep, it doesn't cost much, if any, more to buy a unit of troops and station them there, compared to a fort. Besides, I don't think that the fort even gives you a happiness boost, and the units it provides don't benefit from experience.

I'd rather keep a stack of first-line troops on the frontier, healing from their last battle, and then moving on to take the next town, than to rely on a garrison of inexperienced levies. My experience has demonstrated that it's better to attack the enemy's towns that produce troops as soon as possible, than to keep defending your own.

If the AI is so rash as to attack your elite assault forces, the extra rookie unit or two shouldn't make a lot of difference anyway. I've had five full AI stacks (OK, one of them only had 14 units instead of 16), a mix of peasants, Astys, and a few scattered Prodromoi and skirmishers, attack a front-line town of mine in one turn, and repeat the senseless slaughter the next turn with two more full and one half-stack. Between turns, I rotated out two badly depleted units with fresh reinforcements which I had rushed to the scene from a nearby town. All of my units survived the onslaught, without the assistance of a fort.

magobarca · Post by **magobarca** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 3:10 pm

Hi Honvedseg,

Yeaup, I don't use forts in backwater towns, only along the borders. As the game progresses, it does seem that the Barbarians and Pirates get better and more units, but that may just be coincidence, I don't know.

Magobarcid

roberthuntingdon · Post by **roberthuntingdon** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 4:09 pm

So wait -- you pay maintenance on the city-bound garrison troops, but can't actually move them around? Is that what you are saying? If so, does anybody know a way to turn that off? Because I'm playing around with a mod I made, and I noticed that the AI never seems to build forts, so in an effort to help them out I disabled forts and made barracks give garrison troop upgrades, but I don't want that to mean money is getting wasted on troops that are (usually) so useless...

Also, has anybody else noticed that the AI seems to do a lot of attacking with astynomia and light infantry? Granted light infantry is enough to smash unsupported astynomia, but against a mixed force it's mere cannon fodder. Yet time after time I have been attacked by size 16 stacks of astynomia charging at me, and even 4/4/2 thracians/astynomia/javelinmen is enough to send them packing quite handliy. I'm wondering if anybody has any ideas on how to increase the frequency of building more useful units by the AI? Not trying to be mean, I do like the game, but I heard they reduced the difficulty in one of the patches and I'm wondering exactly what changed and -- assuming those changes are why the AI builds so many crud units -- if there is any way to undo that... at least partially, and/or only on the higher difficulty levels.

Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that diplomacy can actually prevent my faction from getting swarmed under by everybody nearby. But when I go on the offensive, often the only defense I face is 4 units of astynomia. As it's my understanding that the AI doesn't pay maintenance costs -- and/or has nearly infinite funds from which to do so -- I'm thinking that surely they must be capable of defending their cities better, so I'm wondering why they don't.

RH

Post by **IainMcNeil** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 4:13 pm

You pay an upkeep for a fort but you do not pay for the garrison.

honvedseg · Post by **honvedseg** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 9:53 pm

You don't pay upkeep for the garrison units provided by a fort, but the fort itself has an upkeep cost. The mobile troops give a happiness benefit to the city, the ones provided with the fort don't. The cost of maintaining the fort is only a shade less than what it would be to support a low-level unit. The local garrison also seem to recover slowly after taking losses, so they're pretty useless if the AI sends in multiple waves (except that there appears to be a 3-man minimum which you ALWAYS get, no matter how many times the unit gets routed in a turn). I'd rather buy a unit that gains experience from combat and also keeps the city pacified, rather than pay to have a big lump of brick and stone tie up a build slot.

The problem with the AI buying gazillions of trash units is probably due to the low priority it places on upgrading its technology and barracks buildings. It seems to devote almost everything available to cranking out hordes of whatever units it can build with the existing facilities. I also suspect that it can freely exchange resources, since it seems that factions without a particular resource have no problem building dozens of a unit that requires that resource in quantity. Once its facilities are finally upgraded, it will then mass produce the next grade of units. Once the AI finally upgrades a barracks to create decent armies, you really need to take out that city in order to prevent the AI from swamping you with a flood of dangerous troops. The AI is slow to recover from that, and usually takes a long time to create another barracks, even at higher difficulty levels.

The AI must not pay the upkeep penalty for units in the field either, otherwise there is no possible way that small single-city states could afford to amass three or four 16-unit stacks of troops and keep them in the middle of nowhere for 20 turns. The AI may pay more or less than the player for various things, but it is hard to judge because it obviously plays by a different set of financial rules.

magobarca · Post by **magobarca** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 10:08 pm

You can adjust what the AI pays for troops easily, I did it a couple of years back. Forget what file it is in but it is directl connected with the Difficulty Setting, at Hard the AI is paying maybe 50% of what you pay for troops, but I think this is to build them, and don't know if it is connected to their upkeep once built.

Chris

roberthuntingdon · Post by **roberthuntingdon** » Mon Apr 03, 2006 2:16 am

honvedseg, that is a very intersting theory, that happens to fit very well with what I've noticed. When I take over a city, usually everything is destroyed (something else I'd like to reduce, if possible) but if it isn't, it's almost always VERY out of date. Not always, of course, sometimes I vassalize an ally and find a few -- or even more rarely several -- decently well-built up cities... but it seems to be VERY rare. I'm not sure exactly what causes it to be so uncommon yet still occasionally occur. Something random in determining the playing style of each AI rival at the game start, I suspect.

Anybody have any ideas on how to reduce the amount of pillaging your soldiers do when you capture an enemy city? Or how to reduce the priority on building troops vs upgrading their cities? I suspect that most AIs would actually become more susceptible to the "rush", but if they survived it would become severe threats in the late game. This would actually kind of be a reversal of the current way things work and I think it might be fun to try playing against it to see what happens.

RH

rural · Post by **rural** » Thu Apr 27, 2006 10:29 pm

well .....
for impossible levels...
the AI pretty much got unlimited resources...
cuz .... later on in the game ...
you can see the AIs vasselling .... well .. i dunno if i spelled it right
anyways .... they are buying each other ......
while the cost ..... sometimes is as high as billions .....

it's kinda fun to play with the AIs
especially letting em get over 20 cities...
cuz they'll send a large wave of troops to you .....

if you have ever played against romans AI (well ..... the AI romans with 30 cities )
you would have a lot of fun ....
fighting with 3~5 of 16 squads consiting of all hastatii / trauii troops .....
it's ..... well.... really really fun ... i'd say ....