Ramblings on siegecraft

[Taqwus]

Fueled by caffeine, wander my odd mind does.

On sieges:

When a castle is seized, it is immediately at full strength for the new owner. Depending on the level of violence (ex. victory because small garrison tried to break out and lost; slow starvation; walls brought down via sappers; Maker of Ruins smashed the walls), this may or may not make sense. It strikes me that it would not be unreasonable to penalize the maximum defense, even leaving as ruins in extreme cases, based on what was used. Ex. -- take each besieger's siege value, deduct a floor, round up to 0 if it's less, sum up these reduced values, and do something with that. A mass of slingers won't hurt the walls much; a mess of giants throwing boulders, and sappers tunneling under the walls, -should- wreck the fortress pretty well.

And at that point, it doesn't make sense that the attacker gets an as-new fortress.

For that matter, this damage makes sense even if the -defender- wins because the besieger left or was driven off. Maybe the relief force saved the garrison, but if the castle was facing sappers for a few seasons, would it really be intact?

The damage would perhaps be repairable with time and gold, and commander use, if not too severe. If it IS severe, well, maybe you have a ruined fortress on your hands. *shrug*


Then, historically, brute force was not necessarily the only way to take a stronghold. It was not entirely unheard-of for a town or fortress's starving defenders to surrender in exchange for safe conduct, for instance. The mechanics of this would be a bit tricky, and it's not entirely clear to me that this could be implemented in a way that would improve gameplay.

Guile is another factor. In particular, a ruler who coveted a particular walled city might have taken the care to have agents inside that city. These spies might be useful for providing information on the fortifications or the enemy's disposition; they might be able to take more active measures, such as identifying possible traitors who might be bribed with gold or promises of position et al in order to open the gates. In game terms, spies on the inside might have a non-trivial siege bonus (perhaps a bit random!), in exchange for a risk of getting caught and executed by the defenders.

[HoneyBadger]

My view on this: perhaps if you manage to take a fortress in 1 turn, it's 100%. Each turn after that that you successfully seige it, the fortress's value increases by 10%, so that a careful seige-master who takes his time gets for his trouble an intact fortress, while one that obliterates the castle by whatever method would quickly conquer the province, but lose the fortress built there. The exception would be the home province of nations, where I feel that, if you're strong enough to take the nation's homeland, then you deserve the award of everything they have, intact. Latent magic/holiness could be blamed for this. I could also see high level spells actually causing besieged fortresses to explode (fire magic) if they're captured, causing lots and lots of damage to the army that captured them, or cause the fortress to become haunted (death obviously, also blood for curses), causing problems, curses, and whatnot to befall the new residences, a more powerful death+blood effect could actually cause the haunted fortress to be a source of problems for surrounding provinces, something along the lines of Ju On/The Grudge. Nature magic could cause a fortress to become infested with vermin, while water could cause the very stones of the fortress to melt away like ice. As far as guile goes, if you could sneak in assassins and take out all the commanders in a fortress, or a spy to bribe all the regular troops, you might (with a bit of luck) get them to open the gates to your nation without a fight. The fortress province in this case should, in my opinion, have very low or negative dominion, as the presence of a fanatical province should greatly reduce or eliminate the possibility of a powerful fortress switching sides in the middle of a war. I really like the idea of spies inside giving siege bonuses, as they could poison wells, cause fires, spread disease, destroy food sources, open gates, lose orders, contact the none-too-devout within the city, and ofcourse quietly assassinate a few very tired guards here and there-just stick an arrow in their back, and they don't even have to worry about the rest of the defenders getting suspicious.

[Agrajag]

The way I see it is if it takes ~5 months to build a fortress, it isn't too unlikely to merely repair it in one month.

[Graeme Dice]

Agrajag said:
The way I see it is if it takes ~5 months to build a fortress, it isn't too unlikely to merely repair it in one month.

It only gets repaired in one month if you have enough troops in the province to repair it in one month.

[Nick_K]

Wouldn't it be the population of the occupied province who should end up doing the repairing, rather than troops?

[TomD]

The population definitely although you'd need plenty of guards to "encourage" them in their efforts.

[Agrajag]

No no no, you can't have the local population rebuilding the fortress, you have to go to the guild of contractors and they send workers all the way from your capital province to rebuild the fortress

[Fate]

I believe (from the manual) that this is already implemented. An army has a seige strength and a repair strength (isn't it something like strength squared divided by 100?), plus bonuses (seige for seige, repair for repair). This is added/subtracted automatically each turn, and does NOT come back in full when the attacker leaves, it will just come back faster (obviously).

[PDF]

I think that I don't care for castle repairs, there's more important things to do in this game ...
Else you can play Stronghold !

[Taqwus]

Hm. Hadn't noted them remaining damaged afterwards -- might be I've never checked due to normally not being besieged immediately.

Does bother me somewhat that it's free, 'tho. Although castles being constructed in such short times is also a bit odd.