On Thu, 14 May 1998, Mark A Vandermeulen wrote:
>
> On Thu, 14 May 1998, Raygun wrote:
>
> > How do people account for the wall in Stjordvik. Does it cost 1 GB
> > per month to maintain as per a normal fortification,
> > does it count as a castle or fortified holdings?
>
> I count it not as a castle, but rather as a manifestation of the Build
> Monument Domain action (which is a netbook product), with the benefit of
> stopping the advance of all enemy troops at the wall,
[and]
> would give defending units who used the wall +1 to their defense score

It shouldn't be a castle, because it can't be besieged: it has all
the farmland of the country inside it, so food and water are not problems.
It shouldn't really be a fortified holding, because it protects the whole
province, not individual bits of it. It needs special rules because it is
a highly unusual object; the thoughts below are just my guesses.
If the wall is garrisoned, troops approaching from the other side
should be forced to attack and defeat the defenders in order to enter the
province; it shouldn't be able to be neutralized as a castle is, because
the whole point of the wall is that attackers can't just go around it.
In the ensuing battle, I'd put fortification cards all across the
the middle of the battlefield, with defending units set up there. Why not
the defender's line? Because the attacker should have the opportunity to
break through and sweep around behind it. You'd need some sort of rules
for getting through a section of wall, too: a certain number of D results
against a defense 6 or 7? A big fire spell?
The drawback of such a huge fortification is that it needs a huge
garrison, or people can just climb over an undefended part pretty easily;
requiring ~5 units per province to completely cover the wall as the above
battle setup would seems reasonable, and the primary upkeep expense.
If there is no (or insufficient?) garrison, an opponent should still be
required to spend a war move just getting over the wall. See the
Stjordvik book for all sorts of strange schemes the Scarlet Baron has come
up with to deal with the wall.
In any case, one big question is, how much does it cost? I would
say at least a GB per domain turn per province, given that it does act to
fortify each of them. It should probably be more, since it is made of
wood (and thus much less durable than a stone castle) and is much, much
bigger than any castle. This then seems to indicate that most of the
Stjordvik budget goes into maintaining the wall, which is not unreasonable
given its vast size, but makes the whole project something of an overly
paranoid boondoggle.

- --Ryan