But you know at this point we’re basically replicating the experience of building walls in a star shape, placing outposts at the corners, and putting a barracks and stable in the middle…
For that kind of thing the fort could be fully replaced with a commandery building called a “fort core”. You build walls and towers and put your fort core building in the middle where it can shoot over the walls and train a garrison. Maybe it can have a modified version of the new wall pillar mechanic, so if you build the fort core by itself its pretty flimsy, but it gets more range and HP by having walls and towers around it.
Otherwise, I think there is value in just replacing the og fort with a building that is less fantastical, but I also think it will still have to have a heavy dose of abstraction in order to work with how the game is set up. It can’t have a big footprint and it needs to use the scaling of the other buildings in the game (which area REALLY small for what they represent, e.g. the houses are barely 4x4m), but at the same time it needs to radiate the idea that it is powerful. I did some concepts for a star fort using the current footprint with these thoughts in mind, adding a taller central castle bit, but the feedback was that people preferred the realistic style of having just the fort with no central building. In my opinion that design would look weird in the game due to the scaling and wouldn’t work as feeling like a powerful fortification. It would probably end up looking more like the stockade prison thing from the campaigns.
This should have long been available by default for all European Explorers in Fortress Age (limit 1) since USA civ was added to the game. HC cards should only send Fort Wagons and at the same time increase the Fort building limit.
