LogFAQs > #945013821

wolfy42 posted...

Actually a courtyard usually means a wall that is a secondary line of defense besides the castle itself, it allows you to have more people in defensive positions, and also to store food/water (have cows etc) inside a guarded position so you can't just be starved out as easily.

From a technical standpoint, the more defenders you have, the easier it is to starve you out (when preparing for a long siege, castles traditionally tried to reduce headcount) and I'm not sure that a few extra cows will be a major benefit since you're not going to have much grazing area to keep them fed which means you might wind up using grains and other dry goods that could instead go to feed the defenders.

In the case of a longer siege, one fewer person could extend provisions by a week or even a month.

wolfy42 posted...

A courtyward with solid walls surrounding the castle, and a moat around that is even better (with a drawbridge) as it prevents using many devices to try and smash through the wall, and makes scaling it more difficult as well. You can still use catapults etc though, but even if you do knock down the wall, if there is a dangerous moat, it still makes storming the castle more difficult.

Well, yeah, I mean if you had redundancies within the castle itself where the keep was like a castle unto itself, sure. I was more thinking about a keep within a castle where if the enemy could get over the walls, everything securing the outer walls would be negated and it would simply be a matter of getting into the keep. Castles with the same principle as a motte & bailey could simply have fall back to the far more secure upper region... although I guess even then there's the matter of outer walls and a keep rather than strictly just being the structure. I guess I might be overthinking this since main benefit either way would be a hill with steep walls at the end to block the enemy from trying to use ladders or siege engines.

wolfy42 posted...

If I was really going to make a castle like structure that was almost impossible to defeat, I would do it INTO a mountainside or large hill, then surround it with a couple of layers of walls for defense. Even catapults would not have any chance against that. You could even make it look like a traditional castle on the outside, but the actual living places would be underground/hill and pretty much impossible to damage.

With a mountain, you'd probably have the issue of natural tunnels potentially creating alternate entrances. Otherwise if you're just building into (instead of on top) of the mountain or hill, the structure would still be vulnerable from the exposed side.

Helm's Deep is a good example. Although the mountain protects the back of the castle, the walls can still be taken from the front as easily as any other castle. (And, on an unrelated note, the movie version of Helm's Deep had all kinds of vulnerabilities.) And the issue with catapults wasn't so much damaging the living spaces, but instead allowing attackers to breach the defenses. The point of a castle is having fortification against enemies entering, without it you're just vulnerable.

Then there'd be the potential secondary issue where catapults could trigger a rockslide. Granted, if you don't have anything important outside the tunnels and aren't impacted by having the entrance to your tunnels buried (in the short-term anyway), it can be a defensive advantage. The bigger concern would probably be enemies breaching the walls and then working their way through your underground structure.

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