A gabion is a cage, cylinder, or box filled with rocks, concrete, or sometimes sand and soil for use in civil engineering, road building, and military applications.
The most common civil engineering use of gabions is to stabilize shorelines, streambanks or slopes against erosion.
Since in LiF we don't have to worry about erosion I am focusing on the Stabilize portion of what a Gabion is used for, retaining walls.
A Gabion wall is a retaining wall made of stacked stone-filled Gabions tied together with wire.
Trapion: a form of gabion with a trapezoidal cross section, designed for stacking to give a face that is sloping rather than stepped.
History
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In the medieval era, gabions were round cages with open tops and bottoms, made from wickerwork and filled with earth for use as military fortifications. These early military gabions were used to protect field artillery gunners. The wickerwork cylinders were light and could be carried relatively conveniently in the ammunition train, particularly if they were made in several diameters to fit one inside another. At the site of use in the field, they could be stood on end, staked in position, and filled with soil to form an effective wall around the gun.
Retaining walls are structures designed to restrain soil to unnatural slopes. They are used to bound soils between two different elevations often in areas of terrain possessing undesirable slopes or in areas where the landscape needs to be shaped severely and engineered for more specific purposes like hillside farming or roadway overpasses.
In LiF when you drop something on a slope that is over 20 height (2.0 some would say) the terrain will slide down the hill, with something in place to stop this from happening you could effectively create a slope at any height.
Uses
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Uses would include Ramps up the sides of hills/mountains, for ease of access/ forced points of entry.
Ways to modify terrain to force choke points, without having to level all the ground below it, just place a few retaining wall sections up, then level against that.
Different levels of construction
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Wood, (branches, maybe a hard/soft wood billet) additional 1-3 before dirt slides
Copper, (hardwood/lumps (to simulate wire) additional 3-5 before slide
Iron (hardwood/lumps) additional 5-8 before slide
Steel (hardwood/lumps) additional 8-10 before slide
Reinforced (steel bar/leather/rope?) 10-15 before slide
with various materials needed for either gabions for steps or trapions for a slope, also each level gives more defense for the siege engines.
