Forts and movement

[CrispyCritter]

In thinking about ways to improve the balance for builders (as opposed to warmongerers), it occurred me that tweaking a current feature could have profound effects on defense:

Make entering a "fort" in enemy territory cause a unit to lose all its MPs (movement points).

Forts are currently quite useless except in very special circumstances (some chokepoints). 1UPT means a player can't afford to keep many forts manned; units are just too valuable.

MP loss for a fort means that a player can always set up a situation in which an invading army has to suffer substantial losses before attacking a city, if the player is willing to devote substantial land towards defense and forts. Putting a fort on clear terrain with -33% defensive penalties can change the nature of many battles. And delaying the loss of your frontier cities for perhaps 2 extra turns can change the nature of many wars!

It's realistic within the game - just assumed all "forts" are manned by something much less powerful than a unit. enough to delay but not cause damage. Note that a "fort" now is not only a classical fort, but also throughout the ages might be networks of ditches, bunkers, mines. There's always been means of preparing the land to slow up invaders (at the cost of not being able to build a town, farm, or mine there)

Forts can be pillaged, but that doesn't happen until the second turn at the earliest.

I think it's worth considering - I don't know if it can be modded; I suspect not. But the implementation shouldn't be difficult for the developers, given they have to be doing something similar for the great wall.

My major worry is this may be too powerful - a double row of forts, with the second row having occasional units in it, seems awfully intimidating!

 

[Scilly_guy]

I had a post in "suggestions not worth their own thread" about forts.

Basically my idea was to make forts static units with bombardment handled like cities and upgraded like normal units. I think forts should be powerful and hard to capture, I also like your idea that they should remove all MPs, that should be easy to mod via ZOC, but I think they should have a bigger ZOC than normal units.

 

[Camikaze]

I would've thought it best to ban movement to a friendly fort, since it prevents the civ it belongs to from using it.

But as for taking enemy forts, then yeah, removing movement points would seem to be a reasonably good idea. I'm unsure as to how the AI would deal with this, however. Would it be to their advantage, or would it simply make defence easier for the human player?

 

[Tantor]

Forts have always been a weak part in CIV. I think the best solution would be to give them a bombard value like cities regardless of the ranged attack of the garrison unit. And the range should be three tiles over water hexes...

 

[CrispyCritter]

Unless you are extremely lucky (or are playing archipelago, which has its own problems), you can't play a small empire builder style at high difficulty levels like immortal. You absolutely need to have physical barriers serving as chokepoints. The proposal here allows a player to construct their own chokepoints, which should allow a builder to at least exist in many more geographic setups, possibly having to spend the growth or production of a border city or two on defense.
And if you need an extra strong chokepoint, a row of forts with a citadel immediately behind is going to be hard to attack directly!

I'm not too worried about the AI forts. The tradeoffs for an AI building a fort at the immortal level are much higher than for a human - the AI bonuses they give up for not otherwise improving the tile are high. I agree there may be problems with "desert fort spam" as any non-productive tile may end up with an AI fort; I'm not sure how to combat that.

At levels lower than king, I'm not sure the AI can afford to give up the improved tiles - that would put them even further behind.

In any case, humans are going to be much better at attacking forts than the AI is (unless the AI improves tremendously); there's just too many possibilities for the AI to choose the optimal one. I think we just need to worry about "fort spam".

 

[CrispyCritter]

I had a post in "suggestions not worth their own thread" about forts.

Basically my idea was to make forts static units with bombardment handled like cities and upgraded like normal units. I think forts should be powerful and hard to capture, I also like your idea that they should remove all MPs, that should be easy to mod via ZOC, but I think they should have a bigger ZOC than normal units.

My fear here is that makes forts way too powerful. A citadel is already the one great person building that I consider worth sacrificing a GP action or golden age for (in appropriate circumstances). Your proposal here makes forts even more powerful than a citadel in some ways, all for the lowly cost of a tile improvement.

I also don't like the changing of a fort from defense only to semi-offense. Damage to a unit from a fort/ditch/bunker/mine field is always suffered at the volition of the unit, who decides if the objective is worth the damage. Here, you're giving too much choice to the fort, which can attack units that are not directly involved with it. And I can just imagine rows of adjacent forts on opposing countries bombarding each other - how tedious!

One possibility in this direction might be to just have entry into an unoccupied enemy fort cost 3 HPs or so (including after winning a battle). That would encourage an attacker to stop and pillage the fort if they're going to have multiple units going through the tile. But I think I still like the MP hit better. It's subtler, but I think changes the game enough to be quite effective.

 

[Camikaze]

Forts have always been a weak part in CIV. I think the best solution would be to give them a bombard value like cities regardless of the ranged attack of the garrison unit. And the range should be three tiles over water hexes...

Making forts like cities in that regard would seem a good way to give them more power.

Unless you are extremely lucky (or are playing archipelago, which has its own problems), you can't play a small empire builder style at high difficulty levels like immortal. You absolutely need to have physical barriers serving as chokepoints. The proposal here allows a player to construct their own chokepoints, which should allow a builder to at least exist in many more geographic setups, possibly having to spend the growth or production of a border city or two on defense.
And if you need an extra strong chokepoint, a row of forts with a citadel immediately behind is going to be hard to attack directly!

I'm not too worried about the AI forts. The tradeoffs for an AI building a fort at the immortal level are much higher than for a human - the AI bonuses they give up for not otherwise improving the tile are high. I agree there may be problems with "desert fort spam" as any non-productive tile may end up with an AI fort; I'm not sure how to combat that.

At levels lower than king, I'm not sure the AI can afford to give up the improved tiles - that would put them even further behind.

In any case, humans are going to be much better at attacking forts than the AI is (unless the AI improves tremendously); there's just too many possibilities for the AI to choose the optimal one. I think we just need to worry about "fort spam".

I'm still a little sceptical that the AI would effectively deal with creating chokepoints. I can see the value in it for a human player, but it's unbalanced if the AI cannot utilise the feature effectively.

As for fort spam, yes, that would be a bit of a concern, but it could be countered fairly easily by raising their cost.

 

[Scilly_guy]

Theres the time it takes to build them, the fact you lose a tile from a city, upgrade costs and most importantly upkeep. If you are worried about fort spam there is nothing to currently stop you building a massive army which IS offensive. By limiting a forts range to 1 tile you could make it less offensive. But I don't see the issue with forts bombarding each other, once they have destroyed each other they can't march into enemy territory like units could.