Can forts and citadels be captured?

[SJSerio]

Ok, another realism discussion. In real life a castle, fort, bunker or other defensive structure could be permanently garrisoned by a few dozen men. Lets say 100 for sake of simplicity. In real life, this is no big risk, because an army will not appear out of nowhere; the defender usually has enough time to bolster the garrison.

Forts require Engineering, which is a medieval tech. How many units will you have in the medieval era? Nobody knows, lets say it is a whopping 50 units. So the 1 unit garrisoned in the fort represents 1/50 of your whole medieval military.

This is by no means a "small garrison". Historically, I wonder how many men 1/50 of all Chinese medieval troops would approximately be. For modern times, I don't see how the USA could put 1/50 or 1/100 of their troops in a single fort. Packed like sardines in a can

How many individual soldiers do you think is in each unit? Personally, I see foot soldiers as being about 100, mounted about 20 - 30, Armored approx 5 - 10, Naval = 1:1 and Air is a single squadron!

 

[SeismoGraf]

Medieval armies were quite a bit smaller than modern armies. The English only had 6000 troops at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Hastings is usually estimated at a max of 8000 for each side. Obviously, this wasn't their full army (Harold had trouble marshaling men to fight William, William had to leave a garrison to guard Normandy). But if you double the number to 16,000, 1/50 is what, 300 men? Not too unreasonable for an abstraction.

Having 1 unit or 1/50 of your army in a fort is fine for gameplay. They will be there when you need them to fight in and around the fort. When the fort is represented as empty on the Civ5 map, there is actually a "small garrison". Basically they pick up the phone in case a fire breaks out or they run out of beer. They kindly open the door once the real army arrives. "Small garrison", as first mentioned in:

Actually not realistic at all. Historic forts needed only a small garrison, not an entire army stationed there.

So while I fight an oversees war, my fort at home is defended by just two sentries at the front door (private Laurel and corporal Hardy) to scare off anti-war activists and people looking for a place to sleep over night.

 

[DalekDavros]

Right. No backfiring, otherwise it wouldn't be worth building them.

As is clearly demonstrated by the fact that fortifications don't exist in real life.

 

[SeismoGraf]

As is clearly demonstrated by the fact that fortifications don't exist in real life.

There is a castle at 500m of my home... never thought this castle could be purely imaginary. The WW2 fortifications I've seen were probably merely tourist attractions made of cardboard.

bunkers

To be more serious, in modern warfare fortifications have lost most of their value. Said in a simple and short way: castles became obsolete with cannons, WWI trenches can be taken with tanks, bunkers are less useful because of precision artillery, bombers and guided weapons.

 

[Ahriman]

As is clearly demonstrated by the fact that fortifications don't exist in real life.

In real history, castles could be defended by a small garrison of a few hundred; they didn't need their own separate army. In real history, field armies were *massively* expensive to raise and maintain - castles were cheaper.
I highly recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Castles-Battl...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284035549&sr=8-1

And, castles really couldn't be taken by direct assault without massive casualties. They required a sustained siege first. In other words, you were never worried about the enemy taking your fortification during a particular tactical battle you were fighting (which is really what is represented in Civ5 when two armies meet each other).

And in real life, building a fortification didn't mean that you couldn't have any other normal economic activity in the entire area (can't build a different improvement).

So real life is not a useful guide to how people would act in a Civ game.
Most players in the Civ series have never bothered building forts. If we want forts to be useful, then they need to actually be of clear strategic value. So there is no good gameplay reason to make your enemies able to use them.

[And the numbers in posts above are non-representative; Hastings is late Dark Ages when armies are small, and this is by no means the entire army of England. Most estimates of Agincourt are of over 30,000, and many ancient battles had 50,000+ soldiers per side. If you have ~20 units in Civ, then 1/20 of a civ-wide military force of 100,000 is 5,000. So, 5,000 per unit. There is no way any fortress needs 5,000 people to garrison it.]

 

[GeoModder]

This is indeed how it works

Also for Great Person improvements?

 

[Ahriman]

Also for Great Person improvements?

I would imagine that an improvement is an improvement. The game doesn't care how it was created.

Also, if a regular improvement isn't permanently destroyed by pillage, why on earth would they make a hard to get improvement be permanently destroyed by pillage?