Originally Posted by
Jurand of Cracow
I. Forts
In the M2TW the forts may be buildable or permanent, even with the names. However, they have been removed in the recent mods as SSHIP, BC or EBII, but they’ve been present in the SS6.4, DLV or recently in the Dawn of Conquest and The Italian Wars.
I see five major gameplay problems concerning both the permanent and the buildable (temporary) forts that justify the decision of the removal:
1. CAI is absolutely broken on the choice of what to defend. Usually, it leaves the main settlement empty, concentrating troops in a fort present in the province. Or it moves it between them. A player can easily exploit this behavior.
2. However, the AI doesn’t know how to use forts strategically in the way the player does. It doesn't use the forts to block the player's advances to buy time for the reserves to come. It also leaves forts from time to time (it doesn't stay in a fort, it moves out and in - if it's a temporary fort then it disappears).
3. While on the offensive, the AI sieges a fort instead of the settlement, furthermore it breaks these sieges very often. The result is: a player can dupe the AI easily into endless sieges.
4. The number of siege battles is high with the permanent forts. The chrome of the forts is nice, but it's a nightmare to play with: you're bogged down in dozens of irrelevant sieges.
5. Western Europe is already full of settlements close to one another, so any forts would limit the tactical movements even more, with the player blocking passes through the mountains or woods. The result would be a restricted tactical movement, detrimental to the AI as it's not really capable of assessing the situation and sending troops around, or not sending them.
x) If the buildable forts are additionally related with the free_upkeep then an exploit is possible: you farm the forts to keep your whole army without paying upkeep (it was the case of the HURB, but also in the DLV).
I think possible exploits were known long before and Byg, one of the most deep-thinking M2TWmoder of all times, has introduced a simple solution that on hand left the possibility of building forts, but on the other making that so unappealing to the player that it would happen very rarely. Namely, in the BGR IV_E he made the price of a fort to 15000 florins (it was an additional patch, I recall). Any player would think many times before splashing 15k for a fort but we would be able to do it in a grave need (or in the late game when you’ve got hundred thousands of florins spared – but who besides Alavaria gets to that stage…).
In future, I’d see theoretically just two possibilities of re-introduction of the forts.
a. permanent forts on lone islands (like Rodos)
b. buildable forts with the extreme price of 20000 florins or more.
However, for the moment I don’t see a real need for such a re-introduction.