an idea for fortifying armies and protecting locations and resources.

from Elemental Forums

I was thinking it would be nice if a stack was guarding a location it could start building themselves a little hill fort in a similar manner to how caravan roads improve.

digging in would be continuous as long as the army stack stays in place, 5 turns create a level 1 fort, 10 lv 2 fort, 15 for lv 3 fort etc.

Each level of hill fort would grant some of the same protections that a city would grant, i guess that is mainly a hp boost - probably 10% per hill fort level.

This would be an automatic process, it would require access to some point on the tech tree to do it, and this way we don't need to build outpost in the game.

However, i am not sure what to do about moving armies around making hill forts everywhere. I would suggest having an engineering pack for army units. This unit would be responsible for maintaining the fort, they are after all responsible for building it - if they leave the fort then it either collapses or decays levels over time.

1,225 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

i would also suggest that when you do this the unit vanishes from the list of availeble units (i hate having to check through units i have posted in defensive locations

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

There's a tremendous amount that can be done with city-external fortifications, and there have been several posts along those lines. Personally I'd like to see a zone of control (stop movement on entering zone, reduce non-allied movement to 1/turn while in the zone), and a more exponential timeline in fort improvements with significant changes between levels (things like the ability to damage troops trying to bypass the fort, higher health and defense levels, auxiliary structures affecting battle if the fort is attacked, larger fort ZOC at higher levels, etc).  

 

Also, different levels should require different techs (would Fortification enable lvl 1 or lvl 2?).  Whether it should be built automatically or cost out the wazoo is an open question, though...  if you have to build them manually, then in addition to greater base capabilities (health regen & defense) different fortification levels could unlock those more advanced capabilities for purchase.  Kind of how I'd like to see unit special abilities made available to units: after certain events (level changes, equiment choices, etc) they could go to a training ground (if you've built one) and learn from a set of skills based on your warfare research level, the weapons and equiment they're using, and their faction / race.

 

That said, in all the discussions I've looked at about this sort of concept (both the external fortifications and the training skills into troops) I've heard nary a peep from the dev team.  Maybe it's further down their to-look-into list, or maybe they're just not interested:-(

Galactic Civilizations IV