Do enemy forts fire when you land to take them

[Wheat]

My opponent, G-Rex, seems quite miffed that I landed at Fort Pulaski, where he had even built extra coastal artillery, and they did not fire. Now, I have noticed they fire if you try to sail PAST the fort, and on up a river. But they don't seem to fire when you disembark AT the fort. Is this WAD?

Note, the rules state that forts do not have to be on offensive posture to fire at PASSING ships. If you put them on offensive posture, they switch back to defensive posture when the turn is processed.

Does seem odd they wouldn't fire when you pull up your fleet and slowly unload under the guns lol.

[FightingBuckeye]

Generally speaking, the CSA should never get any coastal batteries as even the Union can find it hard to justify the exorbitant expense. And replacements costs are pretty expensive as well. It can be difficult to do in some cases, but your best option is either capturing union batteries at places like Sumter, Alexandria, StLo, Cairo, Pittsburgh, etc OR moving one of your fixed batteries that was attacked to where you need/want it.

Part of the problem with the coastal batteries aside from the cost is that all artillery will only bombards a ship or units boating in a nearby body of water if it meets a double adjacency rule. What this means if an enemy force needs to travel two naval spaces within range of an artillery battery of any type before that battery will fire on that force in the second and additional regions. Take Puducah, KY for example. A naval force sailing from Cairo to Bowling Green would pass within any entrenched batteries at the Mississippi Confluent first and then the Great Confluent second where the battery(ies) would open fire on the passing ships. You and your opponent have discovered one of the greatest weaknesses of all those rebel coastal forts. Most people don't bother trying to defend them with maybe an exception of some of the NO forts that occasionally might be reinforced. IMO, 99/100 times those forts are death traps and not worth the time or resources.

There are still key positions, especially on the Mississippi, that entrenched artillery could be worth the time such as Norfolk, Paducah, Metropolis, etc. FYI I didn't realize at first, any naval force with bombard orders will be construed as an attack and could unlock locked units. So keep that in mind as I got a rather rude surprise when I unlocked a couple coastal batteries that were redeployed along the Mississippi.