Fort questions....

[BandarLover]

I've noticed playing several MP games now that a lot of players build several forts rather quickly (within the first few turns) and it got me to wondering (Dangerous I know, but bear with me). I seem to recall in Dom 2 that forts could compete with eachother over resources from adjoining provinces, meaning (I thought) to keep your forts spread out and perhaps not have too many. Have the mechanics in Dom 3 changed this? Example: Do forts increase, say income as well as resources for the province they are in? When's the 'best' time to build your second (third, fourth) fort?

Early game, forts seem too expensive and time consuming to me. I always look for chokepoints or resource heavy provinces to build my forts. But even then I don't usually have a lot of forts sprouting up in my games.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

[BigDisAwesome]

Only reason I could think of is if you took good enough scales that you have plenty of money leftover, making it beneficial as you could essentially produce twice(3x, 4x, etc...)as many troops.

[vfb]

Income is affected by forts (page 37). The income is adjusted by (1 + admin/200). This only applies to the province the fort is in, not the surrounding provinces. But this does mean that if you are trying to get more income built up, it is better to build a fortified city in farmland rather than popping up ramparts in a forest.

The sooner you get your fort up, the sooner you pull in the extra income.

You don't need to build your fort inside a resource heavy province. Building it next to a group of resource heavy provinces that you own or will soon own can be just as effective.

As BigDisAwesome says, building extra forts should be done in some cases for reasons other than income. For example, Mictlan should built lots of cheap Mictlan Priests and Jaguar Warriors. The only way to do that is with more forts.

[Ironhawk]

Building forts isnt about the income. Or even about units, so much. Its all about the mages.

Mages power your research machine and are what supply the bulk of the firepower of a given army (bless armies aside). So MP players want to have as many of them as fast as they can. Thus, lots of forts and labs.

[jutetrea]

so if i have a 50 admin in a 100 income province I should be multiplying that by 1.25 for 125 income? Not that huge an increase for laying out 1200, although might just be frosting for the extra mages/troop recruitment.

elephants. in general is it worth building a fort over a nice indy poptype? Heavy cav maybe, longbows, xbows, elephants?

[Xietor]

Dedas posted this on another thread, it was enlightening:

If you have a mountain province adjacent to your capitol and your capitol has more than 2 adjacent other provinces, build a castle there. The peg-fortresses Ulm has are great with their 700 defense and admin 20, and they do not drain the capitol's provinces, only the province their built on. Read it up in the manual. There is "hidden" 50% resource pool in every province that is used for admin first. Building a castle on a province unlocks all the resources in that province of course.

A small walkthrough:
Let's say that the mountain province you have adjacent to your capitol is a mountain with 65 visible resources (if you capture it this number will of course go down at first due to the unrest). This figure (65) isn't too far fetched and is pretty standard for a mountain region.
After you've captured it you start building your castle here, paying the 1000 gold that you will have on turn 3 if you did everything right; if you have difficulties with this use an Alchemist pretender, or use one so you also can build troops in your capitol on that turn. The castle will take 4 turns to complete, so use your scout pretender to build it the first turn, recruiting a commander or scout to continue it on the next. Attack another province adjacent to your capitol (with good resources) with your unoccupied army.

This is what the new castle will get in resources:
65 base
*2 - for fortress built
30% bonus - your dominion
25% bonus - Ulm production bonus
= 201,5 resources
+ 20% from adjacent provinces without a castle.
Say 4 provinces with 45 resources each after your dominion Remember now that it draws from the hidden pool so this won't affect your capitol.
Total = 237,5 resources

Not too bad is it.
Your capitol will still have way over 200 resources as it begins with 130 (if you play production 3) and draws 50% from adjacent provinces.

Another good thing with this is that your new fortress is only one move away eliminating the dangerous travel later for your troops, who almost everyone has mapmove 1.

You could of course build a citadel (admin 40) if you only have standard provinces around you, but this would lead to draining problems later when trying to maximize outcome.

The strategy is to build a long chain of castles as fast as possible. Your capitol will form the center.

After you've built around 4-5 castles in the first year and a half and labs here and there, start mass producing troops and smiths.

You will find that this castle chain is not something your enemies wants to siege as you can ship reinforcements between your castles fast and safely. In your capitol you should build lord guardians for defense of the chain. In the other try to build one troop of each type useful for the campaign you are planning. The smiths should of course forge like earth boots with their earlier forged dwarven hammers (a final 50% forge bonus) and later good equipment for you commanders. Also build some siege engineers and siege troops (they have crossbows) with any spare resources. They will come in handy, I promise.

[MaxWilson]

You might not want to build a fort adjacent to your capitol if you have important capitol-only troops. Page 42 of the manual, "A fortress cannoct collect resources from a province with another fortress in it." Even an admin 20 fort reduces the resources of your capitol if you build it right next to it.

-Max

[Dedas]

Yes, and this strategy takes notice to that. That is why you want to build a chain and not a ring, thus you do not cut more than one province from the capitol.
Obviously, this strategy does not suit every nation, but as Ulm gets 25% extra resources per castle it works very well for them.

Also, they do not have an important capitol only unit. The Lord Guardians should be built eventually, but not spammed as they get minced by some weapons and spells, just as much as other Ulm units, but they cost a lot more gold. Therefore it is better to build 3 pikes instead, getting some numbers. The reason for this is apparent - Ulm is in dire need off big, tough armies as they are limping badly on the spells apartment.