Battle help, please

[Gazius]

I've got a unit inside the walls, but how do I make them capture the gate house to stop them from shooting at my troops? It's a stone wall, and I wasn't prepared for a siege.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

To capture stone walls, you have to get inside the settlement and climb up onto the walls (on or near gates and towers).

[Gazius]

Which is what I thought you do, but how exactly do you get them up the walls? No matter what kind of command I gave,they just milled around on the ground. Very annoying. I won anyways but the losses were painful.

[philos]

u should click on the walls ... if u cannot see any spot where movement is available, then zoom in a lil' bit and walls will become large enough... then u'll see ur troops entering the small doors at the base of each tower... they'll come out up on the walls...

[Spidey]

Which is what I thought you do, but how exactly do you get them up the walls? No matter what kind of command I gave,they just milled around on the ground. Very annoying. I won anyways but the losses were painful.

Right. One lesson I learned is to be patient and take the walls first. You do this by:

(1) using ladders or towers to get up on top of the wall (top = the narrow flat space where the enemy archers sometimes stand. In game, you'll know your cursor is on that area when it changes from a yellow X to a green arrow.)

If you have a unit on the wall, just move them past (and through) the tower or gateway. As they pass through it, they will capture the towere or gateway. A small information sheet should appear on your screen telling you that your troops have captured it.

(2) If you break open the gate, but don't have any ladders or towers, highlight your unit (click on it) and then, as if you were going to move them, click on the narrow ledge at the top of the wall. Again, watch for the gold X (meaning you can't move) v. the green arrow (or whatever it is). After you click on the wall, your troops will move to the closest entry (a black doorway in the wall somewhere) and then disappear. Supposedly, they are climbing the steps. Oddly enough, they are taking no casulties. When they reappear, the gateway or tower will be taken. And you'll get another note.

(3) Strategy: I assume you've learned that it's pretty foolhardy to try to take a city with stone or higher walls by just breaking open the doors. Before you take a city with stone walls or higher, you might want to buy some ladders or towers.

Ladders are fairly cheap and if you position them correctly, as effective (even more so, in some cases) than towers. Why? Because troops get up them faster. For example, if you aim your ladders for a spot on the wall between the gateway and a tower (remember, towers shoot arrows, too), you may draw some fire, but not as much. As soon as one member of your unit is on the wall, he can start for the tower or the gate. Only one member of the unit has to enter the tower to capture it (a huge AI design flaw--and you don't loose any men capturing a tower or wall, either).

You can also build wooden assualt towers. They're expensive (and much slower) that ladders. And the men behind the tower still get shot at. I find them barely useful and I never buy more than one tower per attack.

Once you're on the walls, keep a unit up there, moving ahead of your army, capturing other towers/gateways as they go, until---if necessary, they circle the walls. On a city like Athens, I usually try to get two units of skirmishers up on the wall, each heading a different direction, just to make sure my men are safe.

I hope this helps.

Spidey

[Gazius]

I suppose my problem would be related more the AI following commands. I know how to siege a city, maybe not all that successfully since I rarely do it, I just don't know what trick you use when you've walked inside a city to get them up the walls. Deploying them up there didn't seem to work, a simple click from various directions didn't work. Indeed, on that particular one, I had a slow stream of guys actually try to walk back out into the oil.

Maybe its just the fact that I'm using BI, but on the whole the battle AI seems stupider than before. Campaign AI defnitely improved though.