Castle OP please nerf

Historically, sieges were the greatest portion of medieval warfare. Field battles were rare because defending a fortified position was ridiculously easy. How could this be changed for an alternate history or low-fantasy setting? How could castles be useful and relatively plentiful but exist at the same time as powerful siege equipment?

Simple, powerful siege equipment is a recent invention. Not every army has them, and plenty of castles are still around that haven't been wrecked by trebuchets yet.

Sieges were a risky thing. A fully garrisoned, well stocked castle can last long periods of time against ten times their numbers,

So basically just say that the trebuchet was invented much earlier in the setting than in our world?

To fully besiege a castle, you must be able to cut off all supplies going in and out or diminish them to such a degree that your army can outlast them with their own supplies.

Castles, forts typically had huge reserves of grains, foods and livestock brought in their defenses before the siege began. Your army would have to have enough supplies, for the army, to encircle and cut off the castle from obtaining more. Many sieges were broken purely because the army ran out of supplies.

Three missed meals is all it takes for an army to begin breaking down. Typically not the lowest enlisted but your NCO corp, your Sergeants and such, the ones that enforce and provide localized leadership to the plebs.

Some traitors too. There were a few times some people opened the gates.

Yep, all it takes is a handful of men to come to an understanding with the besiegers that they stand to gain a lot from opening the gates.

I might be able to do something with the supply angle. Say there are few preservation methods for food so castles can be starved out easily if the garrison is too big. The bribery angle probably wouldn't work with what I've got so far as many nations have species homogeneity and racism problems.

Have castles benefit from the earlier invention of refrigeration and/or reinforced concrete to make them difficult for siege equipment to crack regardless. Late medieval castles have been known to stand up to sieges using early modern artillery with breech-loading shells, to say nothing of a castle that has been retrofitted to be even stronger.

That is the exact opposite of what I asked for. I need castles to be easier to crack.

>low-fantasy
You mean boring?

You want more castles? You need more man power, more materials and lots of free space.
Try an Alternate History setting with Castle tech in Africa.

CANONS

The supply problem can be solved fairly easily.
>People are unable to plan ahead, consuming supplies readily and without restraint
>Inferior stone for many of them, while easy and cheap to repair they can be brought down the same way

>low-fantasy boring
I couldn't think of any way to get the idea across that a setting has non-humans, non-standard animals, but no magic.
Would higher manpower allow for better assaults as well? If an army of 80k+ were used to attack a medieval castle rather than the relatively small armies that were usually used the attackers might be able to erect some massive counter walls, ramps, bigger siege towers, more artillery, etc. Sound reasonable?

Inferior building material might work very well. Didn't think of that one. Thanks!

Well, there is psychological warfare, biological (think plague, poisoning water) stealthy nightraids to either assassinate, poison or scare. Tunneling underneath the castle\walls and make them topple over or provide sneaky entrance way. And then there is Siege Towers motherfucker

Trebuchets weren't actually powerful enough to destroy castle walls, they were primarily used to harass the wall defenders and fling things over them.

Unless you set them up RIGHT NEXT to the walls they'd be largely ineffective at actually damaging them. So as long as the setting doesn't have cannon, castles will still remain a serious fortification.

Seeing as how defenders almost always have an advantage in combat given anything approaching parity, there's not a lot you can do to negate a true castles power.

I'd advise either making most "castles" more like hillforts or fortified towers or having a regular castle being something brought down regularly and a few rare "Super castles" of some kind for actually hard to take positions.

Please note that cannon did not end castles. Instead, it changed the primary construction material from stone to brick.

As mentioned here: The best bet to bringing a castle low is a combination of elements:
a) inferior building materials / poor reinforcement of structure.
b) lack of hope for relief of seige
c) access by the besieging army
d) Speed of establishing semi-permanent enfilade and counterfilade

For d, if building a castle is cheap and easy, then why not build a castle around the castle?

For c, if the walls aren't a problem (for instance, masses of siege ladders, or cavalry that can easily climb sheer walls), then the castle becomes a much less secure fortified position. Similarly, if there exist weapons that can easily cut through stone, the castle is less fortified. I think OP wanted to avoid that, though.

This isn't right at all.
Sieges were so common because they were so low risk compared to pitched battles for the besieging army. This is why the English besieged harfleur in the run ub to Agincourt. The plan was, take some coastal cities march through France to show the French cant stop you and then go home. Dysentry and delays put paid to that idea.

As late as the wss Marlborough was considered a maverick for seeking a decisive battle instead of cautiously gaining small advantages sieging towns in the Netherlands, he had to lie about his destination in order for the Dutch to let him lead his troops in the campaign which culminated in Blenheim, in which one of his allies continued to suggest sieging towns in Bavaria instead.

Tldr pitched battles were rare because it took real stones, or desperation, to risk an army to total destruction in open battle NOT because whole armies were hiding in castles normally.

Maybe make access to proper materials for constructing a castle out of good stone rare or otherwise hard to acquire enough to build a large fortress, forcing castles to be smaller or harder to come by and repair so causing damage to the castle you're trying to capture is something most want to avoid.

Or construction techniques in the setting aren't advanced enough to make any grand structures, just some walls and simple battlements but not huge fortifications. Making castles smaller could also force the size of garrisons or more importantly granaries to be smaller and easier to force out through attrition by an enemy force. Castles would be less important as structures to assert the owner's control over the land and be more focused on being a center for mustering forces for a campaign.

The terrain of the realm could be uneven and difficult to build on making castle designs irregular and often with weak points and blind spots that can be exploited by besiegers; think thick woodland that isn't thoroughly cleared or hilly landscapes that provide lots of cover for would be besiegers to use to get closer than would be comfortable, an area which while difficult to defend is important enough to bother trying to hold or take.


You'd just need to be a little imaginative to find a reason for castles to lose some of their strengths that made them so impregnable but likewise create reasons to keep them important and needed in the setting.

Would a castle, as we know of them, exist and survive in a world with magic and dragons?

shitty building materials make it so a few dudes with pickaxes can fuck up your walls

That's what archers and defenses are for.

What is undermining?

Well, by rendering the fortresses impervious to sieges, the war will not be solve through patience

A reskin mod for Terraria but that's not important right now.

well, first of all, you need aerial defense. also being kinda protected against fire from above seems like a good idea. against magic you need to use counter-wizards.

If you basically want useful and plentifull castles that don't turn every war into a turtlefest, just make it so castles can't operate as they should.

For example, there's been a long period of peace and calmness in the realm/region, that degenerated into corruption and missmanagement of military defenses. There's plenty of castles that could be used, but that would take too much time. A lot of tem need to be reparations. Most are not well supplied for a long siege and the garrisons have like 50% (or less) of what the paperwork shows, men included. Some are outdated. This could've been prevented with time, but the war catched everyone by surprise.

Easiest possible solution: no good land to build them on. All the available land is squishy swamp mud or a tar-like substance, and trying to build huge and heavy structures like castles on them would require extensive foundations and reshaping the land just so the castle doesn't sink into the dirt and rendered useless. Traditional castles become an impractical investment, reserved for only the most strategically important places or used as a show of extreme wealth and power.

Treated wood is used instead of stone for castle construction, which allows it to sit on top of the shitty mud dirt at the cost of being easier to break through. Perhaps the military leaders learn to compensate for this by using field tactics based around the cheap wood castle as a defensive point.

Side note, being made of wood is an easy excuse for being plentiful, and bad dirt makes farming more difficult which makes supplies lower and cutting them off a more powerful tactic.

My setting is in the Early Modern Era just because High Medieval-style siege warfare is difficult to translate into a fun yet reasonably realistic experience. The country has been at peace for so long that most Late Medieval-style fortresses have lost their purpose with time. Additionally the maintenance of stone fortresses are a massive drain on royal finance; the nobles who own them generally prefer living in luxurious palaces that look like pic related instead of old castles; and last but not least the costly excess of castles and fortresses present The King with control/stability issues regarding castle-owners - they run the risk of rebelling along with their fortresses, which will always be considerable centres of power either way. As a result, castles that aren't along the borders with neighbouring countries or in 'rough' bandit/reaver-infested regions are being dismantled. The great castles of old are now being cannibalised to support urban growth and improvements to local infrastructure (i.e roads, much to the chagrin of ancaps). The only exceptions thus far have been the capital city's grand citadel dating back to the High Medieval period.

There also aren't any star forts to counter newer gunpowder weapons. Well, they do exist but the country where they originated from in my setting is pretty much on the other side of the continent. The trained engineers and knowledge required to build (good) star forts are closely-guarded state secrets of said country (much like Greek Fire and the Byzantine Empire) and are not allowed to leave its borders. The only star forts outside that country, at least for now, are pitiful, flawed knock-offs of the originals.

Basically, have most if not all of the 'castles' in the playable regions of your setting be one of those artsy, decorative Revival castles like Neuschwanstein Castle. When people ask where all of the grand fortresses are, handwave them as being far away from anywhere of relevance to your plot.

Nothing a bowl of water can't fix. That, and trained engineers and sappers of your own. It also helps to have built your castle where the bedrock layer is situated high enough to make undermining impractical in the first place.

Friendly reminder that LindyBeige claims that all it took to garrison a castle was half a dozen men.

Plague. Castles were great at defending against barbarian hordes and the next lord over, but pulling all the peasants in for protection makes it all the more likely for disease to run amuck.

Aerial forces, of course. These didn't exist in our actual medieval period.

Dragons, griffins, wyrms, giant condors, whatever. They can overfly & map defences, drop bombs/alchemicals/potions, snipe from a high plane, and aerial forces can concentrate firepower at small locations, say around a sally gate or rear gate, while the defenders have to man the whole perimeter. Concentration of force and mobility are what doomed fortifications (cf. Maginot Line).

The same way they got obsoleted in modern warfare; manoeuvre warfare and effective siege weaponry.

You need mobile armies that can bypass strongpoints and disrupt supply lines, combined with easily transportable weapons that can destroy fortifications.
Siege warfare didn't really end until WW2, when fortifications like the Maginot line were just bypassed by panzers, and Stalingrad just expended supplies without falling properly.

>plenty of castles are still around that haven't been wrecked by trebuchets yet.
Gunpowder did in most of the ones in England, during the civil war. One side or the other would hole up in one when the going got tough, and had to be blasted out.
Then the winning side demolished most of the rest to stop it happening.

>this isn't right at all
Next you're going to say that WWII was all tanks & no horses.