AGEOD Forums

Is it historically accurated that old/modern fort can welcome "intra muros" enormous armies and/or enormous fleets ?

I'm planing as USA to use Ft Pickens to concentrate a large fleet and army before a big invasion somewhere in the Gulf. When i look at the images of the fort in the reallity, i wonder how i can fit all this ships and soldiers in such a tiny place...
Even the game region of the fort looks like an atoll.
I wonder how any ships can be safe there historically...there is no port at all.


- Maybe Forts and cities need a stack limitation depending on their size (like 18 elements/1 division for each city level of population).

- Maybe Coastal Forts and cities need also a stack limitation for ships depending on the actual size of the ports in the 1860's (for each city port level ?).

- Maybe some coastal forts should not be able to welcome ships at all.


I guess it's hard to implement anyway before a new AGE version and an AACW II for example, but i would be glad to receive your point of view in order to define realistic Home Rules on this topic with my PBEM colleagues...

In general, I agree with this. Avalon Hill was doing this for years in the rulesets for their board games.

Most AI games, surprisingly, IMO, do not have force limits for 'areas'.

AACW's regions are usually 'big' enough that you can shrug and say, "Well, you could have an Army in the Richmond area," etc.

I do feel that ideally, Forts and 'confined' areas should have a limit. Just my opinion.

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I like this idea also. Hopefully we will be able to see it sometime in the future. Ifin that second version of ACW does happen to come to fruition.

Although for ports it should be prettya straight forward to do, ie you can only disband so many ships per level of port so that only a few ships might regain some cohesion per fort level and only at a certain port level do you start regaining strength, it is more difficult for forts..

Here we should distinguish between coastal forts, ie smallish forts, and fortifications which could be quite extensive ie Vicksburg, Henry and Donelson, Washington, etc...

I personnally think that this game doesn't emulate that well the difference between quickly dug field works and deep trenches and fortifications that ar not a close fort either.. As a player building a fort isn't really worth it because the province can still be crossed by an opposing army... what would be nice would be to be able to "buy" for the building of field fortifications that protect the whole province, prevent the crossing except by combat, even if you have a probe setting, an doesn't disappear when one loses the province but could be blown up by the opponent if he wants to..

Forts in controlled regions augment the ZOC effect though...

The absence of limits on stacking for forts and such is indeed an engine limitation, most notably for the AI.

For ports, The other side is a 14 day turn. In theory, a 14 ship fleet could spend 1 day per ship in a port, with the other 13 ships anchored just outside (under the protection of the fort guns.

As for the pre-existing forts (old brick types), I think a hard limit would be a good idea for AACW 2. They are only so large, and can not be increased in the time frame of the game (they usually are on islands (or man made islands (see Ft. Pulaski near Savannah ). You could also limit the frontage when attacking/defending the old style forts (completely different than say the Richmond/Petersburg fortifications). There's a reason the garrisons were very small (usually less than 1,000), and were attacked by small groups.