This works in a lot of strategy games, so no surprise it works here too. This is super easy, and super effective, but really boring, so I recommend mods.

Once they softened sufficiently, send in your infantry. Bombard fort with anti-personnel ammo only. Approach diagonally, as fort guns are only places along cardinal directions. If you insist on playing without mods, the easiest way is to use howitzers.

use mods that removes fortifications - modded startpos.esf with preexistent fortifications removed and mod to makes new fortifications impossible to build.

If you siege a fortified settlement, and make holes in its walls as God intended, it usually triggers pathfinding issues that drop game to 0 FPS, and make it somewhere between extremely frustrating to completely unplayable. I also wrote followup post with more tips.

If you're playing a bigger mod like Darthmod, most of these techniques still work, but a few might not. I'm aware there are some exploits much more powerful than those (notably cycle selling military access and movement detach exploits), but they take hours of your own time to execute and aren't really any fun.Īll these apply to vanilla or lightly modded game (I usually play with Additional Units and No Walls mods). Where these stand on scale of legitimate gameplay to outright exploit is up to everyone to decide on their own. I assume you played some Total War games and know basic game mechanics, and get right to the good stuff. Empire Total War predates popularity of let's plays, game wikis and such, so I don't think these tricks are widely known.

Empire total war pirate mod