Siege

How a fort holds out, how an army wears its walls down, what starvation does inside, how a castle is stormed and how a siege is broken or relieved.

verified 6.37updated 2026-10-02 · Jake11 min read

An army that is inside a fort cannot be attacked in the ordinary way. A siege is the long way round: the enemy camps outside, grinds the walls down turn by turn, and only then fights the defenders. This page follows a siege in order: what the fort brings to it, how a siege begins and how the walls fall, what the defenders eat meanwhile, the storm, and the ways it can be broken or lifted.

For the fort’s economic side, see Province attributes. For the garrison that stands in a province whether or not there is a fort, see Province defence. For the orders that decide who ends up inside the walls, see Army management. For how the battle itself plays out, see Combat.

The figures here are the ones the manual states. We have not measured them. The last section lists what the manual leaves out.

What a fort brings to a siege

A fort has five levels. Each is built on top of the last and replaces its figures rather than adding to them. The manual’s table gives these values, in order from palisade to grand citadel.

• Palisades: administration 15, recruitment +50 percent, supply 150, wall integrity 200.
• Fortress: administration 30, recruitment +75 percent, supply 750, wall integrity 500.
• Castle: administration 45, recruitment +100 percent, supply 2,500, wall integrity 1,000.
• Citadel: administration 60, recruitment +125 percent, supply 7,500, wall integrity 1,500.
• Grand citadel: administration 70, recruitment +150 percent, supply 10,000, wall integrity 2,000.

The table in the manual we worked from has its last columns misaligned, with one column header (storage) having no figures under it. We read the final two numbers in each row as supply and wall integrity. That is our reading, not a statement in the text.

Three of these figures matter for a siege.

• Wall integrity, which the manual also calls the fort’s defence value, is the damage a besieger must do before the castle can be attacked.
• Supply is the food the fort provides to the troops inside while it is besieged.
• The fort’s own defenders, the castle guards and the wall defenders, fight in the storm. Their number depends on the fort level, and the manual does not give the numbers.

Which levels a nation can build depends on the age and on its commanders. The standard fort is the fortress in the early age, the castle in the middle age and the citadel in the late age. Some nations build only primitive forts, some build better than the standard, and a commander with the mason trait can build one level higher. The grand citadel needs both a nation that can build a citadel and a mason.

Who is inside, and who is outside

A fort protects whoever is in it. The manual states the basic rule: when one side is in a fort, it cannot be attacked there until the fort has been besieged and broken, or its own force chooses to sally out. A province with a fort is therefore settled in a different way from an open one.

A besieged force is in the fort because of one of these.

• It was on the Defend order, which concedes the province and takes shelter rather than fighting an attacker who walks in. Units on the Patrol order fight outside the fort instead. See Map movement.
• It moved into the province and so went inside the castle. Reinforcements that move to a patrolling army in the same province enter the fort. If the patrollers then lose, the enemy besieges the reinforcements.
• It was recruited there. Units recruited in a fort stay in it and are besieged if an enemy arrives the same turn. Units in the garrison pool of a fort also stay behind the walls.

While a fort is besieged, the province is split. The manual calls this partial ownership: the besieging player owns the province and the besieged player owns the fort. It becomes full ownership again when one player owns both. Some events need full ownership. An allied pair can besiege the same castle, and in that case a later step in the turn decides which of them is the besieger, with the larger army taking precedence.

Besides the fighting, the walls shut out a number of special actions. Assassination cannot be carried into or out of a besieged castle, unless the assassin can scale walls. Seduction, dream seduction and corruption have the same restriction, and the same three exceptions apply: scale walls, flying and teleporting. A besieged fort cannot be demolished.

Wearing the walls down

Each turn, the game compares the besiegers’ reduction strength with the defenders’ repair strength. The manual gives each unit’s contribution as a formula.

• Reduction strength is the unit’s strength squared. Flying units count double.
• Repair strength is the unit’s strength squared, halved. Flying units count double. Mindless units count for only an eighth of the calculated value. Animals count for half, and so do undisciplined units. (The manual leaves apes out of the animal rule here but gives a separate rule: animals without arms are worse at both besieging and defending, at half strength.)

The manual does not say which statistic “strength” is. In the unit lists, several big monsters and a few items carry an explicit siege strength bonus, for example +10, +50 or +100, which is presumably what feeds the formula. The listings do not say how that bonus combines with the squared figure, so we do not claim a combined formula.

When reduction is greater than repair, the difference is taken off the fort’s wall integrity. When the walls have been damaged and repair is greater, the difference is added back, up to the original value. A besieger whose repair side is winning gets a report that the defenders are mending the walls quicker than they are being broken, which means it needs more troops.

Two further points from the manual.

• Only units on the Maintain Siege order add to the besieger’s reduction strength. It is the default order for a besieger. A commander who does something else, such as preaching, adds nothing until his order is changed back. Castle guards and wall defenders add to the defenders’ repair strength.
• The besieger cannot see how close the walls are to breaking, though there are hints. The defender can read the current wall integrity from the fort button of the province. A damaged fort that is no longer besieged is repaired in full automatically.

A few magic effects change the arithmetic. Iron Walls, a fort-only spell, raises a fort’s wall integrity by 2,000 for as long as it lasts, but walls that have already been breached gain nothing from it. It also makes the walls magical, so ethereal units cannot pass through. Crumble is cast on a besieged castle and damages the walls by 300, plus 25 for each Earth level of the caster above the minimum, and makes half the defenders roll to avoid blunt damage. Lion Sentinels sets up stone lion statues that wake when the castle is attacked and go for the besieging army; one stands in the courtyard, and the lions help defend the fort in a storm. Fires from Afar is a ranged spell that can be used to harass a besieging camp or a castle’s defenders.

Supply and starvation inside

A besieged fort feeds its defenders from its supply value, but the supply shrinks as the siege goes on: each turn the supply value is divided by the number of turns the siege has lasted. The manual’s example is a fort with 300 supply, which yields 300 on the first turn, then 150, 100, 75 and 60. A fort with 100 supply yields 20 on turn five.

Units that cannot be supplied suffer starvation. After two turns in a row of it, they can become diseased, and diseased units slowly gain more afflictions and eventually die. A siege is therefore on a clock: the fort’s supply is a fixed pool that thins out, so a long siege hurts those inside. The manual does not say how supply is divided between the units inside, or what happens to a besieger’s own supply; see Province attributes for the general supply rules.

Storming the castle

The Storm Castle order is available only once the walls have been reduced to zero. The next turn the besieging commanders are given the choice between Storm Castle and Maintain Siege.

If at least one commander storms, a battle is fought at the gates. The defenders start inside the walls, together with the fort’s castle guards and wall defenders. The attackers are the commanders with the Storm Castle order and all the units under them. If such a commander is killed before the battle happens, his units take no part.

The wall defenders stand on the walls, never run out of ammunition and have 20 percent more missile range. Only attackers on the inside stairs, fliers, ethereal units and missiles can reach them. Against missiles the wall counts as a tower shield with a protection of 30, and each defender uses whichever is better, the wall or his own shield. The castle guards start behind the gate.

Storming comes after movement. This has an important consequence for the besieger. Any battle in the province is resolved first, and a besieger may therefore have to fight a relieving force that has just arrived from outside. If the relief force wins, there is no storm. If the relievers lose, the besieger may still be so weakened that the storm is much harder.

A defender who retreats in a storm battle hides deeper in the castle rather than leaving. If the defenders won and the unit was smart, it reappears in the castle. If the defenders lost, all of them are killed, and a unit that was not smart is killed regardless. Commanders are always smart. A lone unit gets an extra 50 percent chance of being smart in this case.

Breaking a siege

Break Siege is the defenders’ order for a sortie. It tells the besieged units to come out and fight the besiegers in the province. Units that retreat from that fight run back into the castle or into a neighbouring friendly province, and where both are possible there is an even chance of each. The order is carried out in the other-movement stage of the turn; see Turn order.

A siege can also be broken by relief from outside. A friendly army that moves into the province fights the besiegers before the storm, and if it wins there is no storm that turn. The manual does not state a rule for exactly when a siege ends.

Magic can end a siege without a battle. If the besieged side is a pretender in his last fortress and your dominion reduces his dominion to nothing, he is eliminated, and no storm is needed. This is the manual’s own example.

When the fort falls

The manual’s passages do not describe in one place what happens when a storm succeeds. The pieces it does give are these.

• The besieger already owns the province during the siege, and the fort is the besieged player’s. The manual does not say in so many words that winning the storm is what hands over the fort.
• Province defence is wiped out when a province is captured. See Province defence.
• A fort that is not under siege and is in a province owned by someone else, in team games, takes the province back for its own side at the end of the turn.

What the manual leaves open

• How many castle guards and wall defenders each fort level has, and which units they are.
• Which statistic “strength” means in the reduction and repair formulas, and how the Siege Strength bonus combines with it.
• Whether the table’s final two columns are supply and wall integrity as we read them.
• How supply is divided among the units inside a besieged fort, and what a besieger’s own supply does.
• What decides when a siege ends in the besieger’s absence or defeat, beyond the cases above.
• What a successful storm does to the fort, its buildings and the units that were inside, apart from the retreat rule above.
• Whether the walls’ damage over several turns follows exactly the stated difference, or has other terms.

Where the manual disagrees with itself

• The Sieges chapter says a fort can be stormed when its defence value is reduced to zero, and then says the same about its wall integrity. The Forts chapter lists defence and wall integrity separately. We treat them as one value.
• After a sortie, the Break Siege entry gives retreating units an even chance of the castle or a neighbouring friendly province. The Retreats chapter instead sends a smart leader into any fort in the province, with no coin toss. We take the first as the rule for a sortie and the second as the general one.