What in the name of Caesar's ghost is wrong with my forts, or "I think my peninsula is broken"
The disaster that is Italy, with a map of her forts. Green provinces have forts.
Short version: Why were the armies down in Southern Italy allowed to march all the way down the Italian peninsula, part several layers of forts?
After a couple games with the new(ish) fort system, I thought I had a pretty decent intuition for forts by now. Forts block movement through their zone of control. Playing as Italy, I had a bright idea: a series of forts could block movement down the peninsula for years. I could sit in the South and wait for my manpower to build up again (or just wait out a losing war with my army intact). As you can see from the retreating Italian armies and mass of Goths and Gauls in Southern Italy (who definitely walked there), this has not worked out.
Posted Jan 26, 2016, 6:09 AM UTC
Hahahaha
Sorry op, but I must laugh.
Forts do cause a ZOC around them. However the only way out of a ZOC is: into a fort or out the way you came. Since the forts are within the ZOC of other forts, you can enter the ZOC around fort A, then you go onto fort A, then you are in the ZOC of fort B also, so you can enter fort B, and so on. If you ever make a chain of forts your enemies are able to use them as a sort of highway through the entire country.
Edit: as a side note, I see you are at war with Pomerania, Munster, Poland, Muscovy, France, and probably others, so was this part of a coalition or what? Who are you even allied with?
Well, shit. I suspected it had something to do with adjacent forts or coastal forts, but I ruled it out as too crazy too mention after a few ill-formed google searches came up with nothing. I guess the good news is I'm about to start saving a whole lot of money on fort maintenance!
As for the war, it's a coalition against my ally The Palatinate (whom I have been regularly feeding assorted Germans, which probably caused the war in the first place). I accepted the call to arms after doing some dirty mental math: I had a larger army than France, the Palatinate was bigger than Poland, I rounded the assorted trash Germans down to 0, and rounded the ~120k Lithuanians involved down to 0 for being backwards barbarians (this ended up being the only part of the calculation to sort of pan out). The phrase "Schlieffen plan" actually popped into my head in this process and I genuinely took it as a good suggestion, rather than a warning.
It's like totally LOL. It's so counter-intuitive that many gamers think the game is broken. I'm surprised it got passed the design stage. The natural inclination for gamers are to build forts to protect high value key provinces from being sieged down. The game rather than have a system where chained forts create a zone-of-control and lone fort do nothing, the game actually have a system where lone fort create zone-of-control and chained forts negate that zone-of-control. Thus high value provinces close together lead naturally to building forts close together, but then the forts are suddenly weaker when close together. The enemy do not have to start working from the outer forts in. It's so brilliantly LOL.