A Modern User's Guide to Fortification #1

This is my attempt at writing a user's guide to castles, forts, walls, ditches and generally ways of protecting yourself from the nasty things that are trying to kill you/ slaughter your dwarves/ steal the emerald/ take the briefcase etc.

Part 2 Here

Part 3 Here

Anyway...

First up, the Hill-Fort

The hill fort is one of the earliest ways of defending your village/town/extended family, with a simple hill-with-ditches design as shown in the picture. This made it more difficult to storm the place by just walking in with your tribe/mates, and also is easier to construct than the next type of fortification.

Looks cool but isn't really effective against most attacks that involve more than basic infantry.

The Roman Fort

This picture is a reconstruction of Vindolanda, a roman fort on Hadrian's wall. It's a simple design - one curtain wall (built of wood first, then stone if the fort needs to stick around) with the buildings within, all surrounded by a ditch. Fairly cheap and quick to build, if built of wood, this could be constructed very quickly to protect a camp.

Good for armies on the march, won't hold against more than a primitive attacker.

Next up its the classic Motte and Bailey Castle...

Not particularly complex this one. Really, it's just a hill, with a wooden tower on, with a fenced off enclosure attached to it all surrounded by a ditch of course (seeing a trend with these ditches?) Fairly cheap again, good for invading armies wanting to protect themselves but not having many resources to build a massive fortress.

To quote the famous song, "Burn, baby, burn, disco inferno..." Great unless your enemy has fire.

Now for the stone keep...

Pretty imposing isn't it? No? Well maybe its 'cos the picture's smaller than real life(Captain Obvious strikes again! Quick Tree Powers Activate!) Nevertheless, this work of engineering is the stone keep castle design - similar to the motte and bailey idea, but built out of stone, with the keep having much ticker walls (Rochester here can take trebuchet hits easily).

Great castle design - takes a determined attacker to take out - watch out for undermining though.

Now for a trip to Wales - the concentric castle!

This is the peak of medieval castle design. The two castles above are Harlech (top) and Conwy (bottom). Effectively - the idea of this castle design is that two walls are better than one. They don't have keeps, they use buildings built into the walls and gatehouses for storing important objects - moneys, arrows, kings, your grandmother etc. and have smaller 9so they can be shot over) rings of walls around main rings of walls (or in Conwy's case a series of rings attached to each other). 

Great castle design - breaching this with medieval weaponry is nigh-impossible. Watch out for enemies with explosives or large armies willing to lay siege. 

Part 2 Here

Part 3 Here