Editing Forts

[Reveilled]

Forts as they are are pretty useless, in my opinion, and often the few times when they could be useful, they're useful because of a chokepint that would be a useless place for a city.

Unfortunately, chokepoints like that are often outside cultural borders, so what I want to do is make it possible to build forts outside of one's borders. Is this possible? If so, how?

 

[Padmewan]

Based on the experiences of folks here, it looks like building anything other than road (and even roads, if you try to put them in the ocean) is not quite possible. Would love to hear differently from others.

 

[Kael]

Getting workers to be able to build forts outside of your cultural boundries = easy (use Talchas's action buttons, give your workers the ability to level and buy promotions which lay improvements).

Gettign the AI to understand when and where it should use such abilities = very very hard.

 

[Padmewan]

Thanks, Kael. I thought this was the problem with the Naval mod and ocean "railroads." It sounds like Talchas has a workaround, but that isn't hooked into the actual "Build" code? That is, does the AI not even know the action is available, does it understand that the action leads to the creation of a useful result (e.g. if you made the result a +6 food, +6 commerce improvement), or does it just not understand forts?

Actually, if you think about it getting the AI to understand how to lay down forts in a strategic way is pretty hard -- considering human players can't even agree on whether forts are useful at all! I don't think I've ever seen the AI build a fort in either Civ4 or Civ3.