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Quick tips and tricks for Forts
By SamsterBirdies
A collection of quick tips for beginners, average players, and experienced forts veterans.
   
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Created by
SamsterBirdies
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Category: Gameplay Basics, Multiplayer, Walkthroughs
Languages: English
Posted
Updated
Jul 5, 2020 @ 1:13am
Nov 8, 2022 @ 1:15pm
2,374 Unique Visitors
39 Current Favorites
Guide Index
Overview
Guide to this guide 
1. Beginner starter tips 
2. Average player tips 
3. Advanced player tips 
Fun facts 
Useful links 
Comments
Guide to this guide
This tips guide is still in development and I will continue adding things as I go.

Click on the pictures for a bigger clearer view.


1. Beginner starter tips
If you just starting playing forts and were to ask "What are the most important tips i should know?", these are them:

1. Watch replays, especially the ones you lose.

This is the number 1 tip. You can learn all tips eventually just by following this one tip.
When you lose, you can watch what the enemy has done better. You can learn from them, and fix any mistakes you have seen. Alternatively, when you beat someone, you can watch the replay and see what the opponent could have done, and how you could've reacted if he had done such.












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2. Resources are scarce. Build only what you need.

Choose the best use of your resources at any given time. You should only build things that you need. At the beginning of the match, ask yourself things like: Do I really need to expand your base backwards? What am I even going to place there? Wouldn't it be a better choice to spend those resources on something else like mines for more metal later on, and turbines for more energy later on, and technology to unlock bigger and badder weapons? This also ties into tip 3.









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3. Only defend against what you need to defend against.

Hold off on placing that armor when the match starts. You only need enough defense for the weapons that the opponent could potentially have. Nobody is going to be shooting cannons at you at the first minute of the round. That armor isn't needed for the enemies machine guns! Press F8 to see the time in the match. An opponent might bring out mortars/emps/miniguns around 2-3 minutes, or heavier weapons like cannons and lasers at 5-6 minutes. By scouting the enemy base, you might be able to guess what they are using!

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4. Scout the enemy base.

You can gain a lot of information about what the opponent is doing by occasionally looking at their fort. You might see what technology he places, which indicates what weapons he might use. You might see that he is building missile silos, and you can then build anti-air, etc.












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5. Get a feel for how much damage each weapon does.
Play in sandbox, and mess around with the weapons to see how much damage each one does so you can properly defend your base against certain weapons. For example: I know that a cannon needs 5 pieces of wood to stop it, or 2 pieces of armor, doors have the same properties as armor, etc. This also relates to tip 6.

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6. Wood is cheaper than armor.

A piece of wood has 150HP. A piece of armor has 400HP. 3 pieces of wood has slightly more HP than 1 piece of armor, yet is much cheaper than armor. Thus, wood is far more cost-efficient than armor. However this does not make armor useless as 3 pieces of wood takes up more space than 1 piece of armor, and it weighs more. Special weapons like the Buzzsaw and the Firebeam will melt straight through wood aswell. Find the most effective balance between wood and armor.

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7. Get a good grip on the game before messing around with mods
Playing too many mods while you are still unfamiliar with the game can make it difficult to get a good grip on how the game flows. Refrain from playing with lots of mods until you are familiar enough with the game to be able to exactly spot what things are modded and what things are not.
2. Average player tips
Players that have played the game for a bit of time might benefit from these tips:

1. You can adjust Eagle Eye's laser sight
While using a sniper with Eagle Eye, you can hold right click and scroll to adjust the laser sight to account for bullet drop.
(tip is now added to the game)

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2. Sandbags are excellent mortar defense
Putting a sandbag in front of mortars or machine-gun lined roofs protects them from AP snipers and firebeams. They only cost 300 energy to place, so there isn't much to lose.



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3. Protect weapons from howitzers with Background Bracing

Howitzers collide with background bracing, meaning you can protect your weapons with them.
As shown, the howitzer projectile stops before it even touches the doors. Since wood is cheaper than doors, this is very effective.




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4. Build bracing to make missiles launch higher

Missiles will continue to fly upwards to the highest point in the fort before going towards the enemy. You can use background bracing as shown on the left fort to make missiles fly higher. This is useful if the missiles are hitting your own base, or if some terrain obstructions are blocking the way.







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5. Struts that you wish to not break should be background bracing.

It is best to turn your supporting struts into background bracing, or anything you don't want to break. Most projectiles will just pass straight through background bracing, so things like cannons will be unable to collapse your base. The picture shows the top row of the hanging fort turned into background bracing. Cannons and such cannot easily detach this fort from the foundations.

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6. Distract anti-air with mortars-
You can use mortars to distract anti-air from firing at deadlier projectiles, like the nukes as shown above. Of course, this does not work if the enemy is manually controlling their anti-air. This ties into Tip 7.

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7. Manually fire anti-air

The AI is very incompetent at shooting down warheads and often misses, especially with flaks. Try to shoot them down yourself if you are able to. Don't end up like in this GIF!





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8. Use firebeams to block anti-air
As shown above, you can burn out bullet-like projectiles with a firebeam to protect your warheads, or mortars, or anything that can be shot down.

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9. Protect machine guns from incendiary mortars with bracing

Sometimes you fall into a situation where you are unable to finish building machine guns because a seemingly endless barrage of mortars keep taking them out. It helps in this situation to cover your machine guns while they are building and uncover them when they are ready.
3. Advanced player tips
This isn't your average everyday tips. This is advanced tips.
Even players that are very familiar and consider themselves great players might not know these:

1. *OUTDATED* Shockenaugh Barrels attempt to spawn on foreground bracing before background bracing

Shockenaugh barrels will only spawn on background bracing if there is no available foreground bracing to spawn on. You can use this to your advantage when defending against shockenaugh. As shown in the picture, The only available foreground bracing platform was the one in the back. So it always chooses to spawn there, rather than the background in the rest of the base. It is best to have multiple platforms in the back like this just incase.
(Shockenaugh now longer spawns barrels. But this tip will stay for archival purposes.)








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2. Efficient structure method
By extruding diagonal struts as shown in the GIF above, you can create super efficient structures. While these do not support devices, they are very cost effective, very light, and extremely sturdy. It is best to use these in the back of the base to support backward expansion for things like turbines and mortars.





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3. Converging of projectiles at angles.
A tracer mod was used to show the trajectory of the projectiles in the pictures.

By angling multiple weapons you can get projectiles to all hit the same spot. As shown in the bottom left picture: By firing the weapons at the same angle as the alignment of weapons, the projectiles will converge roughly at the same height on their way down. You can control the projectiles to converge above or below the height of the weapons by changing the firing angle, as shown in the pictures.

A sample build using this technique is shown below with howitzers.










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4. How smoke affects missiles

Open the console with F3, or ~.
Typing in "\set projectile_wireframes 1" will show these extra details that are shown above.
The left picture shows normal missile targeting, all aiming for where you have targeted them to go. The right picture shows what happens to their targeting when the missiles pass through smoke. Their destination gets offset, as shown with the red lines. This causes missiles to overall be spread out when they pass through smoke. Some missiles will also become drunk.
Fun facts
These aren't exactly helpful for game-play, but if you like random fun facts then well:

1-1. Forts is programmed with C++ and Lua. No game engine like Unity or Unreal was used.

1-2. Forts third party thingies include DevIL, ILU, LightFX, FMOD, FFmpeg, and LuaPlusC.

1-3. Forts is 64-bit, but used to be 32-bit.

1-4. Forts uses FMOD as its sound system. Current version is 2.02.09. Past versions have been 2.02.07, 2.01.09, 2.01.06, 2.00.07, 1.10.09, 1.09.04, 1.08.15.

2. Forts runs 25 physics frames per second, meaning that the position of struts, projectiles, open status of doors, rotational status of turbines, and even the screen-shake is updated 25 times a second. Some of these are interpolated to look smooth. Each tick in forts is 4 physics frames, or ~6 times a second. This means that inputs like building struts, placing down devices, and shooting weapons is registered ~6 times per second. Both of these can be changed through modding db/constants.lua. However, changing these values will cause certain things to break like weapon firing speed (it is rounded to the physics rate), and the firebeam rotation threshold (it prevents lighting things on fire while firebeam is swinging. The higher the physics FPS, the more it can swing.)

3-1. Forts has a work log[www.earthworkgames.com] and archive dev blog[www.earthworkgames.com] for information about the games development.

3-2. Forts was originally named "Fort Wars" during development.

3-3. Forts was originally planned to have a medieval seige warfare theme, but was changed to have a more modern theme to have exciting weapons like lasers and guided missiles. Reference: Interview[www.earthworkgames.com] with Zed Games at about 6:25

3-4. Scrapped features to my knowledge include: Tractor beam weapon (pulls forts), Command tower device, Solar panel material , Armored bracing material, Fog of war materials, rubber band material.





2 Comments
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SamsterBirdies  [author] Jul 24, 2020 @ 12:52pm 
Thanks, glad you think so.
Pyro Jul 24, 2020 @ 4:22am 
Short, concise, and clear. Can't get a better guide than this.