Forts (Level 2)

[Ace]

What are the benefits (beside obvious defensive ones). How does it help in region control and interception. Does region of control extends outside province borders? Do units in forts help those that are battling in the province outside the fort. Many questions...
Thanks in advance

[lodilefty]

http://www.ageod.net/aacwwiki/Fort

[W.Barksdale]

**Just note that you cannot destroy level 2 forts, and also I believe the requirements for construction have been changed. Maybe someone can update the wiki.

[lodilefty]

Build cost updated in Wiki

[Ethan]

Thank you very much, Lodilefty!

[Njordr]

Build cost updated in Wiki

But AFAIK in v. 1.15 you need 4 artillery batteries and only 2 supply wagons... I know because I built two forts just yesterday.

[Captain_Orso]

But AFAIK in v. 1.15 you need 4 artillery batteries and only 2 supply wagons... I know because I built two forts just yesterday.

I just tested this out. You need 4 artillery batteries of any type and four supply elements, which are present in one full strength supply unit. The supply unit my be of any type, supply train, oceanic transports or river transports. I'm not certain whether or not you can mix and match these supply elements, but when building depots I know you can use several under strength supply trains to build a depot, as long as the total is 4 supply elements. So it probably works with building a fort too.

BTW the units/elements used in building the fort (as is also with building a depot) are returned to your force pool and can therefore be rebuilt on a subsequent turn. So to keep the actual cost of building a fort to a minimum you could use the 6lb pounder artillery batteries that can be built in Delaware, West Virginia, Kansas and Missouri (assuming you are playing the Union - who builds forts as the CSA anyway ) and if you are building a fort on a river or coastal region you can use river or ocean transports which are both cheaper in resources than supply trains.

[Njordr]

I just tested this out. You need 4 artillery batteries of any type and four supply elements, which are present in one full strength supply unit. The supply unit my be of any type, supply train, oceanic transports or river transports. I'm not certain whether or not you can mix and match these supply elements, but when building depots I know you can use several under strength supply trains to build a depot, as long as the total is 4 supply elements. So it probably works with building a fort too.

BTW the units/elements used in building the fort (as is also with building a depot) are returned to your force pool and can therefore be rebuilt on a subsequent turn. So to keep the actual cost of building a fort to a minimum you could use the 6lb pounder artillery batteries that can be built in Delaware, West Virginia, Kansas and Missouri (assuming you are playing the Union - who builds forts as the CSA anyway ) and if you are building a fort on a river or coastal region you can use river or ocean transports which are both cheaper in resources than supply trains.

You're right. I confused "elements" with "units". When I built those two forts for each one I used two units of under strenghtened Supply.

[TheDoctorKing]

Forts are very powerful tools in this game. I just wrapped up a grand campaign against Andatiep (hi!) in which he basically completely stymied my USA offensive by building many forts as the CSA (Paducah, Nashville, Norfolk, Mobile, New Orleans, and probably others that I never got close to). I was only ever able to get into one of his forts, Norfolk, and that after a siege that lasted almost a year. Moving around forts is very difficult, because of their high zone of control. If you have to cross a river to get at them, they will bombard you and cause huge casualties - even if you are moving to an adjacent area (very long-range guns, these rebels have! They can shell your boats up to 60 or 70 miles away!) In order to cut off supplies to the fort, I think you need to control all the surrounding areas (military control level 50% plus), though in the case of Norfolk they finally did starve although the CSA had control of one adjacent region. You must also control neighboring river/sea areas with your ships, which is a problem since the fort's guns are very deadly to passing ships. In our game, the CSA forts sank literally dozens of USA ironclads. Even entering/leaving port in an area across a river/harbor from a fort can prompt deadly shelling by fort cannons, preventing even a quiet withdrawal from in front of a fort by a depleted fleet. And be careful about your own supplies as the presence of the fort will prevent movement of supplies across those water areas even if you have the place besieged (as I found to my sorrow in Mobile).

Unlike in ROP, forts don't seem to surrender, or at least not very easily. In our game, no CSA fort surrendered to its USA besiegers, even when the garrison was hugely outnumbered and had no supply wagons inside.

I recommend very strongly that the CSA build as many forts as possible. My opponent stripped his armies of artillery and supply wagons so that he could build these forts but it sure paid off for him. I was unable to advance into CSA territory after mid-1861.

And then when the forts finally do fall, you don't get any NM for the guys who starved inside. I don't know what happens with NM if a fort surrenders because that never happened.

I would make some recommendations to fix what I believe is a weakness in the game system:

1. Units that die through attrition should still cost their owner NM. In fact, troops who die in general, even if they don't cause actual elements to disappear, should have an NM effect. Many's the time I've had a big battle with thousands of casualties on either side result in no change to NM because no actual units were destroyed. This probably requires a coding change and can't be implemented in this version but it should certainly go on the wish list for AACW2.
2. The bombardment potential of forts needs to be reduced, perhaps by increasing the minimum range for bombardment of passing fleets so that only very heavy guns (naval guns and Columbiads) can bombard. The CSA will probably build only a few such pieces. This will enable the very powerful USA riverine navy to blockade supply to forts more easily. Also, the historically fairly easy time USA fleets had bypassing CSA fortifications would be more closely simulated. I wouldn't mess with the defense values of forts, however. Ship's guns had little impact on forts either, especially on newer construction ones.
3. Similarly, the defense values of ironclad ships should be higher. Almost no ironclad ships were sunk by gunfire in the course of the war. CSA ironclads were mostly destroyed by their crews to prevent them being captured in port, while the few USA ironclads that were lost were sunk by mines or hazards to navigation.
4. It should be much easier to force a fort to surrender; the values should be similar to those in ROP. In ROP, a fort with a small garrison and no supply wagon inside will normally surrender if the besieger gets a breach, and even without a breach if the besieging force is large and has plenty of artillery. As I say, in our game despite an aggregate of probably 50 turns of sieges, no CSA fort surrendered.

[Chaplain Lovejoy]

Agree on all counts.

[Gray_Lensman]

deleted

[TheDoctorKing]

Yes, I will post the suggestions into that thread as well.

I was hoping that suggestions 2-4 could be implemented in a patch to AACW. I'm thinking that the failure to surrender might be a bug in AACW, since fort surrender seems to work just fine in ROP.