Understanding land combat

[Kaiser85]

Hi Pon players

I'm engaged in my first land combat in Pon as Prussia against Denmark. This is my first combat experience, so I have done a lot of mistakes as combat in Pon is very complicated as well as interesting and funny.
As you can see in screenshots, after a good start in Machlemburg, my main army (Albrecht army) is in Jylland besieging the city. Danishs have a fortress army inside the city, over entreched.
I have tried a disastrous assault last turn, which costed to me 50000 man and only 4000 danishs, I suppose because they have a lot of artillery entreched and I assaulted them at bayonett ;(, so now before continue I want understand how land combat works.
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Albrecht army has actually only 1 siege artillery battalion with 2 brigate. How can I try to defeat danish? should I construct and bring more siege guns?
Is my army actually besieging the danish city? which posture should I assume (defensive, offensive, assault...)?
Moreover, my fleet in Grand belt, is doing a good job in blocking danish ports. Since port in Jylland is blocked, is it receiving supplies and ammo?

Thank you guys

[loki100]

Some very general points which apply a lot in the AGE system. The concept of frontage is important, each unit type occupies a given frontage and one effect of a number of tech changes is that this value drops over time. That means as the game goes on, you get more firepower into combat.

In my Italy AAR you can see this in the differences between the first Austrian war (around 1870) and a war I had with Prussia (around 1900). In the first, in the Dolomites, only 4 units of each side could deploy per round, in the latter it was 12-15.

What this means is that a huge army is not always an advantage, except that as a battle progresses through its rounds you can replace those in contact.

The reason this is relevant is that storming an unbreached fort has very limited frontage.

Also, in some situations, the attacker gets a malus both on the chance to hit and the chance that hit will cause actual losses. So you can't bring that horde to bear, and the bit that can fight is at a disadvantage (& that is before the defensive bonus kicks in).

If you have a blockade the fort will run out of supply sooner or later. But it will have some intrinsic supply and its a small garrison so it'll take time. Also, looking at your second screenshot it looks like it has an ammunition shortage, which will limit its combat effectiveness.

Your options are to knock holes in the fort = breaches. To do this you want perhaps more siege mortars than you have (there is trade off between the amount of heavy artillery you have and what is in the fort), also I'm not sure but I don't think your pioneer unit has the siege bonus (not all do). A stack with both siege artillery and engineers gets a useful +2 on the siege roles to cause breaches. Also some generals have useful traits so it maybe worth looking around.

Not critical but your cavalry are pretty useless unless you fear an attack.

To assault you need to select the upper orange or red stance and the lower red commitment options. Stance will determine how seriously your troops hurl themselves to their deaths, get this wrong and you can do yourself serious harm, but on the other hand it maybe what is needed to overwhelm a small force.

If you have a look at 'Manufacturing Italy' (link is in my signature), in the index there are a few posts where the arcana of the PoN combat system is discussed - you may find these useful

[Kaiser85]

Hi loki

Well, as in the real, cavalry is useless on besiege or storming a city, my assault was a terrible mistake caused by inexperience, I did not realize that danish were entrenched behind walls and artilleries.
I don't fear an attack, because danish units are just fortress without possibility to move, so I will detach these cavalry in another army.
Meanwhile, I built 4 siege gun brigates, which will be joined to the main army (5 in total). I'm also bombarding the city from sea, inflicting some hits to the enemy, in the last turn I caused a breach and I have seen that keeping press ctrl button I can see their number in men and guns is decreasing.
I think that the city will capitulate earlier or later, but I don't understand, how many breaches should I cause before the enemy surrend? According to the informations, they still have a 4 level of entrechment, but running out supplies.
In this moment I feel like british generals during the siege of Sevastopol