Does anyone use forts?

[naterator]

no, unfortunately they can only be built in your culture for now

 

[AL_DA_GREAT]

forts are ussually only good in bottle necks. i think they should be made more powerfull

 

[Diceclock]

Forts are useful for countering rampagers, not stacks. Place a series of forts along border areas, with one or two defensive units, and one or two calvary. That way if you get a sudden war, the calvary are in place ready to strike pillagers when they are on an exposed tile. With the fort and defensive unit, the Calvary are protected from the initial advance.

Forts are best put on bald hills.

 

[Appren]

I use forts alot..but then, I mainly play with sevo mod and they are actually useful there

 

[nealhunt]

They are okay in the rare bottleneck. I have also used them a few times if there is a good "vantage point" hill at the edge of the cultural borders that makes a pseudo-chokepoint for spawned barbarians.

They can be useful for the OCC, as you will have cultural borders far beyond what your city can actually work and if you had to war at all you will have a surplus of workers to build them. I completely ringed a far cross with forts one time, but only because I had nothing better to do with the workers.

Overall, they are extremely limited and I agree they need to be boosted.

 

[St.Aves]

Very occasionally I've built them for coastal defence purposes to prevent the enemy landing a counterattacking force from the sea. This has only ever been where the topography means I can accurately predict where that attempted landing will take place. Before marines come around, the 25% fort bonus and the penalty for attacking across water means that a pair of contemporary defence units in a fort stand a good chance of holding off quite a large army, even if only on flatland.

 

[Pantastic]

Forts are useful for countering rampagers, not stacks. Place a series of forts along border areas, with one or two defensive units, and one or two calvary.

This doesn't work at all if your borders are close with someome and your improved land runs right to the edge. I also don't see how it offers any benefit over being sure that there are roads all along the border, and just stationing the units in your border cities without the need for as many defenders. You can still pop pillagers in the same turn they show up, and don't have to spend the time making forts or all of the extra defensive units for them.

Plus the AI won't conveniently make forts in the right spots for you, so once you capture some cities you've got to have your workers build new forts instead of improving the land around the cities, and they can't even start to work on a new defensive line until your borders double pop. Just doesn't seem worth the effort at all to me.

 

[GeorgeOP]

Last week I built my first fort! There were two main paths between me and another civ. I built a fort on one and put 3 units there. I put the rest of my units on the other path and declared war. The units that tried to come into my teritory from the first way refused to attack the units in the fort. The next turn my units would attack out of the fort and retreat back. However, if there were a forest or a hill near there, the fort would have been useless.

I really like the idea of ZOC. Merge that with the idea that they are the beginnings of cities. You can park a fort outside your borders, and another civ can't build a city within that fort's zone of control. That could lead to a lot more fighting over territory during the expansion phrase.

 

[juballs2001]

i build em on desert tiles when nothing else can be built on them

 

[Fetch]

It seems like I heard that forts increase troop movement, but I can't verify it.

 

[chipix]

I have never seen a fort in any of the games I play. I have never created one nor the AI.

 

[johnny_rico]

I built a fort once to see what they looked like. It seems kind of odd the developers included such a universally useless improvement.

I also have never seen the AI build a fort.

 

[Peck of Arabia]

I've never built a fort, my AI has never built a fort, nobody I've played against has built a fort- a complete deadweight in my opinion. My workers usually have better things to do, and if they haven't I'd rather not ravage my industrial potential simply so I can get a measly 25% defence bonus- in my opinion, if you've got time and energy to build forts, move up a difficulty level...

 

[Caradoc]

I wish forts would increase the fortification bonus the longer the armies there.

 

[Solo4114]

They can't do it infinitely, though. that'd just be stupid. At some point, you could conceivably station a warrior in a fort and just let him build and build and build his fortification defense 'til he's as powerful as a nuke.

I think the best way to deal with forts is as a means to expand your cultural borders (which de facto creates a ZOC) but which cannot work the land or generate culture of their own. Or maybe if they do generate culture, it's like one per turn and never improves until you plant a settler there (which destroys the fort).

To me, this actually tracks to what happened in history. A lot of military forts later became major cities. Hell, even in the U.S. this is true. Ft. Myers, Ft. Lauderdale, Ft. Worth, etc.

The ZOC could even start as a single square with one culture point, which then expands to the nine square box in 5 turns, then to the fat cross in, say, 15 or 20 turns or something. And you could even have it consume the worker to keep things balanced (if it's built outside of your borders -- which would be the point, really).

 

[naterator]

a whole fat cross ZOC?!? i'm sorry. i'm thinking a ZOC is a 1 square radius where you get free shots at enemy units as they pass. i could be wrong, i didn't own civ III for too long before civ IV. a 2 square ZOC would make forts a little TOO awesome, in my opinion.

 

[Selous]

Actually, I think the forts' ZOC would be a great addition IF the 50% bonus could be reduced or bypassed by aircraft. This would accurately reflect how forts worked in history. They controlled -- by virtue of their placement -- strategic positions. When placed, you'd typically try to put them in a location where you couldn't "just ignore them." You had to take them out or find another more difficult route.

One thing that's a problem, though, is that forts themselves often were NOT in land that you controlled specifically. It might be land you later INTENDED to place a city in (or a town/city would develop around a fort), but it wasn't necessarily within your territory in the sense of cultural borders.

If forts could be used as sort of advance locations OUTSIDE your borders (IE: romans building a fort in gaul before having actually conquered the land or built any towns), they'd be a lot more useful.

Currently, I use them VERY rarely if I have positions with choke points that lead to cities. Alternatively, I suppose they might be useful if you place them along your trade networks/roads to give you more ability to respond quickly to enemy mounted units. But as defensive positions, they're basically pointless -- the enemy can simply go around them at least 70% of the time.

Of course, over time, the practical effect of forts and static defenses is considerably limited

This basically culminates with the Maginot Line, however, when the notion of a fort or fortifications

I think this is an excellent post and i agree with pretty much every word.


Forts and fortifications were used extensivly in history, but it is very rair (not sure that i have ever seen one?) that i see the AI build a fort.
I think they look really cool and will build some around my citys in really cool looking positions(but that is just me), and also in those choke points ect that it is a really good idea (and generally pretty rair in themselves).

They need a ZOC! just 1 square ... but it would make them something you have to contend with rather than just blowing them off

 

[Michelangelo]

In my current game I have a rocky world with lot of mountain ridges. When monty declared war on me there was only 1 way he could enter and those tiles were desert tiles (no defense bonus I think) with some hills adjacent. So I built a fort there, and created great killing fields. The only downside was that they were so effective, the war lasted for only a few turns of the first invasion.

Otherwise, never build them.

 

[BadHorsie]

I don't think I've ever built a fort in my whole Civ career... I maybe did once, in Civ I and then quickly found them to be useless. The other tile improvements available are much more useful.

I guess they could be useful if you built a wall of them across a bottleneck to your land, and fortified a unit in each, perhaps on a pangea map. That might stop advancing units from pillaging your stuff. That seems fairly pointless though really, doesn't it?

I think they should have a field of vision, like a lookout post (which I guess a fort is, kind of). So you can build them anywhere you like, irrelevant of other people's borders, and they can see a radius of 3 squares or something. Then you can stop advances early.

 

[Captain2]

can you build forts in the end of the game times? i mean like with modern weaponry? cause that would help my current position, got some angry fascist waiting for a chance to attack me and fort would certainly slow them down