Kingdoms: General Some thoughts about Kingdoms...

[Cross_T2A]

Is anyone else really, really, really tired of sieges? At first, they're awesome. But once you've done 20 sieges, I found myself wishing I was playing the first Medieval (I never bought Rome), where field battles were the norm. Siege battles have their place, but enough already. Anyone have some tips on how to adjust my play-style to maybe get more field battles?

[Tristan de Castelreng]

Maybe you should bring fewer units to sieges hence forcing the AI to sally and give battle in the field... The big plus being that, if it happens, most times you are outnumbered and outclassed and have a hard fight ahead of you...

[econ21]

Yes, I know where you are coming from. This issue was the subject of a recent rant:

http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=118952

I find the same problem in RTW.

In solo play, I tend not to bother with siege assaults and just starve the enemy out. The sally battles at the end tend to be turkey shoots, but I get lazy. Starving out the enemy paces your expansion and thus gives the AI more time to build up - it becomes less of a rush.

Tristan's idea of limiting yourself to smaller stacks is interesting. If you, say, tried to fight with only 8-12 units rather than 20, you might find the AI more willing to face you in the field. It's probably rather risky - as I have a memory that the AI could be quite dangerous in a battle where you were fighting at 1:2. In RTW, you could still win handily at those odds.

I too have found memories of the first Medieval. Better battlefield AI and especially campaign AI. But it is hard to go back to after the gorgeous visuals of M2TW.

[fester]

I know what you mean! I went back to MTW1 after playing rome for 3 months and coming to terms with the fact that this graphics roller coaster of a game left me empty inside. I've only now just bought MTW2 and am enjoying it. You just have to accept that the true old school of total war died when Rome was released and these are a new breed of game that look good and have there merits just dont play aswell.

[Discoman]

Sieges were so tedious and boring that I usually avoided them. Instead just camp out your army and starve the enemy out. Usually the AI will send like 1/2 or 1/3 a stack as reinforcements, so you could get lucky and fight on the field.

The worst is defending from a siege, which has its advantages, but you're pretty much waiting for the AI to do something. So I set the battle limit to a short time so that I wouldn't have to deal with an hour of fast forwarding by like 6x.

[IncubusDragon]

I suppose it's the good old trade-off between historical accuracy and playability. I think what CA did to their credit was try to increase the realism of the experience of Medieval warfare, but unfortunately, it landed in no-mans-land... it wasn't realistic enough for the purists, but also wasn't enough fun for the majority that like the good punch-up of a pitched battle.

In Medieval times, siege warfare far outweighed pitched battle (assuming we discount grand tournaments in which a surprising number of territories exchanged hands). This is because whoever controlled the centre of power controlled the surrounding territory. A majority of the pitched battles arose out of attempts to send relief armies to break sieges or to prevent them from happening.

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Coming to think of it, the Total War pitched battle is less like real battles and more like the grand tournament melee combats that would take place... they would sometimes involve hundreds of men on both horse and foot working in teams. Deaths were a regular occurence, but not the carnage and slaughter we get in the game, more like a couple of dozen for the entire tourney.

It's a bit of a popular misconception that tourneys only consisted of a series of knightly challenges in a medieval amphitheatre. This was perhaps true of individual challenges (one-on-one fights such as the joust or individual weapon disciplines), but the melee combat was an entirely different affair. A battlefield was established beforehand (many involving square miles). No fighting was allowed outside the designated areas, but when contact took place inside the battlefield, then it was survival of the fittest.

Well, when I say "survival of the fittest", it would be better to say survival of the best strategist. A prime example would be Sir John Hawkwood. Knighted for his services to England in the Hundred Years War, Hawkwood had no lands of his own and so became one of the most famous mercenaries in Christendom.

Whilst Hawkwood's mercenary exploits are well documented, what is less well known is that he was also a master of extortion at grand tournaments. Basically, before melee combat had commenced, Hawkwood would identify a "target" knight that had lands and wealth (e.g. a young knight who had just inherited his late father's lands). He would convene a consortium of fellow knights who would work together to isolate the "target" knight in the melee - who would then be overpowered and forced to sign over lands and riches in exchange for his life, which the consortium of knights would then split between them.

You see, there weren't any umpires or referees, so there was nobody ensuring a fair fight - the knights were entrusted to be chivalrous. That said, chivalry and fairness are two completely different things, so it would be unfair to apply our modern standards to a medieval event... the knights would enter the field and fight until there were victors and vanquished. Hawkwood was by no means the only knight that acted as he did, but he is attributed with perfecting the technique of extorting riches and lands in such a way that he still managed to be held up as a beacon of chivalry in the process.

[Old Geezer]

I don't mind the sieges being frequent, but a defender holding out for 8 or 9 turns is ridiculous. It took Nebby 17 months to capture Jerusalem and some of the common people were eating their children who had died. What is the longest siege anyone has heard of up until the 1700's?

[IncubusDragon]

Originally Posted by Cross_T2A

Anyone have some tips on how to adjust my play-style to maybe get more field battles?

Oh, I forgot to mention... Great idea from Tristan de Castelreng - if your army is not all-powerful on paper, then they'll deffo try to break the siege... I had 5 HRE armies (3 full-stacks & 2 half-stacks) vs 2 half-stacks of Hungarians when I was laying siege to Bologne - one of the best battles I've had in single player (I wish you could save battle replays in campaign - a most glorious win).

If you're totally sick of siege battles, the only other advice I would perhaps venture to offer is to let the computer automatically resolve any sieges you are mounting against a settlement, then sally forth when the faction you took it from subsequently puts you under siege to try and take it back...

...Based upon my current campaign, any time I sally forth to break a siege, the besieging army always withdraws and regroups (possibly to ensure they're out of range of towers in the wall), allowing me the chivalric nicety of enough time to form my own line-of-battle outside my city/castle walls... I then take the fight to them, and it's a good old pitched battle that then takes place.