ZFR: When I try to sally forth or escape from my castle I get a message that it's not possible due to its design.
But it does have a gatehouse. Is it because it's surrounded by moat? But then so do the pre-made ones. Or does a moat always prevent escape?
By the way, I love the sieges here. So much better than the ones in LotR2, where it's just a battle.
That's because your moat is two units wide. Gatehouse can only bridge a single unit moat, so removing a unit of moat in front of the gatehouse should fix the problem for you.
ZFR: ^It seems that the weaker weapons have the advantage of requiring less support. Nothing else.
Another question: can anyone tell me what's the best number of cattle/sheep in a field? The tutorial manual says that it's best "when there are neither too few nor too many of them" and that the optimal number is 3. However I noticed that you get more births if you decrease the number of animals per field as much as possible (with 1 animal giving best results). Can anyone confirm?
3 isn't the optimal number. Overcrowding become an issue for cow after 3, and for sheep 5.
The maximum growth rate for cows are around 1 per field, but it doesn't to have a formula. Here're the numbers I found ingames for the minimum cows/worker/fields needed for additional cows per season. Use these figures as a guide, but it might vary slightly for your game due to season and other factors.
Growth | Fields | Workers | Cows Needed
12 | 13 | 778 | 189
11 | 12 | 703 | 174
10 | 11 | 552 | 138
9 | 10 | 502 | 123
8 | 9 | 452 | 108
7 | 8 | 376 | 93
6 | 7 | 301 | 75
5 | 6 | 251 | 61
4 | 5 | 200 | 47
3 | 4 | 150 | 33
2 | 2 | 75 | 19
1 | 1 | 25 | 1
wpegg: I found that I was best off keeping the crowding to a minimum. The only thing I noticed was that if I put cattle in all my fields, 1 would go bad every so often. For this reason I always kept 3 or 4 fallow even when farming dairy and wool.
There's a trick to this one. If you have all 16 workable fields and work all of them, then low fertility would no longer cause fields to go bad. You can run full cow/sheep economy with all 16 fields once you have them all fixed up. In my experience, max cows are actually the ideal end game economy.