LogFAQs > #945015745

YEah, there are always vulnrabilities, a mountain/hill castle though that had a town around it, with walls around the town, and additional walls (and maybe a moat) around the inside of the town leading to the castle, would prevent people from tunneling into the castle pretty easy (especially if it's just a large hill, which lets you surround the hill basically, it also could be towards the top of a hill, which gives you the high ground automatically from attackers, makes it significantly harder for them to use catapults etc.

Prob would be getting water up there , but if it's not a huge hill just you know like 3-4 times the height of a normal castle, you could still have a water source below etc (still would require workers to bring the water up to the castle regularly, but some kinda of system could be made to just pull ropes (with buckets attacked), that dunk in the river/water supply and then are pulled up to the castle.

A mountain with a steep cliff though could also work, but yeah rockslides could be a problem as well.

As far as more people = easier to starve out etc....with space around the castle for grass etc, cows, chickens, and a farming, all run by those same people who will help defend in a pinch, you could drastically increase the length you could hold out, especially since you could still stockpile etc, but the eggs/milk/fresh veggies/fruit etc (and eventually the livestock itself) could double or tripple how long the stored supplies would last.

Finally just because you have additional defenses doesn't mean you neccesarily need that many more men, because the men can fall back if the first line of defense is breached, fortifying the castle at that point. You certainly would want a few more men, but those men could also be used to farm etc, so would give a you a net surplus of food in a seige situation anyway.

Biggest problem is water, but if you have a well inside the wall, or a water source from higher up on the mountain (perhaps even an underground (or mountain) stream), that could basically let you survive for as long as you could keep enough food coming for everyone.

Building down, or into a mountain/hill etc just gives you either a shell for protection, or makes it far harder to hit you with missiles etc. Without magic building down wasn't really a good option, but building into a mountain/hill could have been.

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