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Fort at level 4 or better will not prevent defender's retreat if there will be no town, city or urban terrain in hex.

Maybe. Currently the level 4 forts have two huge advantages over level 3--no retreat, and very slow degradation. The no retreat rule is ridiculous when the fort is practically undefended and huge odds still force no retreat and little degredation. I think maybe somewhat higher odds to force retreat, depending on the terrain, and faster degredation might be a better compromise.

Bonus fort destruction in combat will be rounded up, so at least 0.02 of fort level will be removed at all times.

This seems fine to me as long as low-odds attacks don't force degradation--that would invite gamey tactics.

Something else regarding forts that might be looked at is how fast level 3 forts can sometimes degrade. I sometimes see 1:1 attacks result in compete destruction of level 3 forts (while other times the fort degrades just a little). This extreme difference between level 3 and level 4 fort degradation is a "game changer".

What about this:
quote:

Fort at level 4 or better will not prevent defender's retreat if there will be no town, city or urban terrain in hex.

Also:
quote:

Bonus fort destruction in combat will be rounded up, so at least 0.02 of fort level will be removed at all times.

The no retreat rule just for cities looks to be a good change.
Not sure about the change to fort reduction, doesn't seem right to get reduction for a weak failed attack but maybe .02 doesn't make much difference. If it were at 4.1 you could do 6 weak attacks and then it is vulnerable...

oranienbaum fort

I can confirm this fort is now tough nut to crack.

now 3 and 0 in battles

just survived a 20:1 German attack, fort dropped from 4.22 to 4.12.

I now advise never disbanding it!!!

Yes I tried a couple of attacks this turn just to see what would happen, clearly an ungarissoned fort unit can hold out for a long time and a weak garrison unit would be clocking up a lot of wins.

I would be happy to use odds (and have in the past), but final random odds are not reliable, the numbers vary greatly between 1/256 and 512 of the non-random value. So they are not reliable enough to determine cut-off point for fort protection.

In the past I have also used combat size ratios or manpower ratios to determine various combat modifiers. Perhaps these could be used here. Never wanted lone forts to keep dozens of divisions from advancing.

Isn't engineering CV multiplied by sqrt(CV ratio) currently? Would it make sense just to have it multiplied by final CV ratio period?

Edit: I think this and the hex-specific no retreat rules for high fort values should probably solve most of the problems of overpowered fort lines and overpowered undermanned single high forts.

Good to hear it. I would like to see longer battles for key cities, but not a Great Wall all along the front.

Two thumbs up!

ORIGINAL: morvael

Good to hear it. I would like to see longer battles for key cities, but not a Great Wall all along the front.

+1 I think changing no-retreat to the cities and big towns change would be a great compromise.

ORIGINAL: morvael

In the past I have also used combat size ratios or manpower ratios to determine various combat modifiers. Perhaps these could be used here. Never wanted lone forts to keep dozens of divisions from advancing.

Wouldn't it be easiest to add 0.01 fort degrade for every X odds above certain level. Ie. if final odds are 5 to 1, every one extra step above will degrade the fort with 0.01 points. So 20 to 1 odds would degrade 0.15 extra points. This way a single fort would be taken down quite fast, whereas a single division in the same hex would already make it impossible to get those odds.

I think the issue with that is that then pioneers are moot. As long as you bring enough of any type of SUs then you'd be good to go disregarding Eng/Art points.

I don't think pioneers would be moot. You would still need to bring in some pioneers to destroy completely the fort level in an acceptable time frame if the fort is well manned with divisions. Let's say there is over 100 def CV in the fort... to even get to odds over 2:1, you will need to bring in very serious firepower and work very hard to take the hex. I think by that point, the fort level 4 will already have done it's intended job.