View Full Version : Sieges
Wildthing
10-23-2002, 19:37
If I autoresolve a siege when the castle has a very small garrision (less than 50) I usually take it losing only a very small number of men.
When I try to do it manually (same siege) I usually lose a lot more, mostly to missile-fire from the castle and not from the enemy troops.
Am I doing something wrong or is the computer just damn good at assaulting castles?
The autoresolve is a joke most the time. In which case most the time it does not make any sense.
I believe it uses the generals command rating and that brings most of what the results may be.
You could auto resolve a conflict where you general has 2000 men and a command rating of 3. The enemy has 400 men and command rating of 6. Guess what you will lose most of the time.
I think autoresolve is a waste of time and space.
I will never forget when my 1500 man army with 6 catapults lost a siege battle agaist 10 Ai units in a caste. Never ever forget that.
Thats 10 Men total not 10 seperate armies.
[This message has been edited by malkuth (edited 10-23-2002).]
Maybe the 10 blokes were REALLY HARD ? http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif
Jango Fett
10-24-2002, 01:55
hahaha this is fucking hilarious!
I killed 216 men and lost only 2 when I autoassulted a castle. The arrowtowers would have killed hundreds of my troops if I controlled that fight myself.
Maybe the strength of the ghost archers should go down as the garrison is depleted. I mean, I hate it when 1 or 2 individuals are left alive in a part of the castle and the towers are still firing at my troops with full force...
Papa Bear!
10-24-2002, 04:41
ya the arrow towers are sketchy at times... Attacking a citadel? the number of men required to man all of those walls, and to pour all of the arrows that they do upon me... it would be insane...
I think you're right, I think some sort of toning down on castle defenses should be used depending on the garrison, if possible. This would provide MUCH needed balance to the siege system. (wherein there is sometimes little point in waiting a few years for more of the troops inside the caslte to die, because all of your deaths will come from the artificial archers instead)...
If I had to balance out sieging a castle for a while... risking intervention and rebellion, with the casualties I'd take if I pressed my attack early, that'd be alot more interesting imo.
Lord Romulous
10-24-2002, 04:57
i find that the ai castle defences are not robust enough..
IMO if you assualt a citadel or fortress you should be expecting to lose almost a full stack of high quality troops. I think the historical figure for overunning a castle is 10 attackers for every defender.
idealy i would like to be able to control the fire if the arrow towers, cannon towers etc, but i can see how thi could unbalance the game cause im sure i would do a much better job than ai. i would win all my defence of castle battles and the ai will lose most theirs..
i also would like seige times to be much longer, reflecting that it is one year a turn. (is being corrected in patch). also for a fortification of castle and above i do not think you should lose your city upgrades eg (armourer, spear guild etc) until the castles falls.
Ports, and farm upgrade losses should stay as they are currently with a random uprade or 6 being lost after pull back to fortification.
in other words i want it to be very difficult to take a castle either by siege or assault. reflecting historical reality.
this added difficulty could compensate for the reduced difficulty due to the change in the way rebellions work in the patch (eg they cant rebel with units that the provence cant produce)
[This message has been edited by Lord Romulous (edited 10-23-2002).]
Whats suppose to happen (IE reading the manual) is that when you take a certain part of a castle those Towers wont fire anymore. But in reality if you move your troops into the Keep area, the towers come alive again. And sometimes I notice they dont stop at all. So those 10 guys holding the castle can cost you hunderds of men.
And the worse thing about it all is they are going to increase the siege time with this patch. So now you dont have much of a choice other then to take on those 10 guys instead of waiting the couple turns take to have it fall.
Out of the patch this change with the siege time is going to be the worse thing. In fact I hope they dont do it at all. Unless they fix the 10 guys holding a castle thing it just will be sucky.
If I have a choice between having 10 guys hold up my army for 8 turns instead of the now 3. I will always attack. And always tons of men just to get those 10 guys. Sieges will not be fun.
Now if I was attacking a sieged army of 100s that would be a different story.
Lord Romulous
10-24-2002, 05:04
Quote Originally posted by malkuth:
Whats suppose to happen (IE reading the manual) is that when you take a certain part of a castle those Towers wont fire anymore. But in reality if you move your troops into the Keep area, the towers come alive again. And sometimes I notice they dont stop at all. So those 10 guys holding the castle can cost you hunderds of men.
And the worse thing about it all is they are going to increase the siege time with this patch. So now you dont have much of a choice other then to take on those 10 guys instead of waiting the couple turns take to have it fall.
Out of the patch this change with the siege time is going to be the worse thing. In fact I hope they dont do it at all. Unless they fix the 10 guys holding a castle thing it just will be sucky.
If I have a choice between having 10 guys hold up my army for 8 turns instead of the now 3. I will always attack. And always tons of men just to get those 10 guys. Sieges will not be fun.
Now if I was attacking a sieged army of 100s that would be a different story.[/QUOTE]
you have to remember that your are not just attacking the units that have retreated into the castle but the castle garrison also !
so you may have 10 men retreat into the castle but inside the castle itself is a 500 person garrison waiting to shoot and arrow into your ass.
chilliwilli
10-24-2002, 05:08
Only time I use autoresolve is against rebels. You can only beat up on an army of peasants and archers so many times before it gets old.
Papa Bear!
10-24-2002, 05:14
what garrison? I don't remember ever paying a garrison its yearly wages? I don't remember ever hiring a garrison of any sort for my castle?
I mean thats a nice imaginary explanation for the imaginary archers, and since we're all in game land it almost makes sense... but the fact is, sieges lasted so long, (again several years, not decades), because the attackers not only had castle defenses to get past, but because they didn't want to lose hordes of troops in storming the castle. Furthermore, archers on the walls could be supressed by your own missle troops, (which, after a long siege, have had plenty of time to build defenses for themselves, so that every attacker should have a pavise of some sort at least)....
The point is, the castle defenders in a siege aren't the threat, its your imaginary garrison, the problem is that we have no way of combating the imaginary garrison, (short of massive amounts of siege equipment)... and that the imaginary garrison, unlike the visual one, doesn't take casualties from a siege before the assault, so we're forced to face totally unreasonable defenses.
I say, if they're gonna stick with a huge imaginary garrison, then we should be paying upkeeps for that garrison in our castle.
(lords of the realm 2 auto created a small garrison of archers to go along with a newly finished castle) If in the MTW engine it isn't possible to man the walls with our own troops, then these troops that we don't control should at least be modeled realistically.
Jo_Beare
10-24-2002, 05:17
What is really funny is that if you assault the castle with 15 cannon and pound the castle to a pile of rubble; the next turn the castle isn't downgraded. If you just wait until the defenders give up the siege, the castle gets downgraded. I know that CA made the rule in order to reward the player for assaulting, but it seems a little counter intuitive.
I think you should only get the castle intact if you only force open the gates. If you take out 6 walls, 4 towers, and the keep with an artillary barrage; the castle should require a significant amount of time and money in order to repair it. IMO
JoBeare
Cyricist
10-24-2002, 05:18
I Agree.
But for now the best way to storm a castle is autoresolve then. It may be 'cheating' in a way, but the actual manual storming isn't very fair either! Where oh where are those nice Shogun castles with no gates you could just walk into...
Lord Romulous
10-24-2002, 05:33
Quote Originally posted by Papa Bear!:
what garrison? I don't remember ever paying a garrison its yearly wages? I don't remember ever hiring a garrison of any sort for my castle?
............
I say, if they're gonna stick with a huge imaginary garrison, then we should be paying upkeeps for that garrison in our castle.
(.[/QUOTE]
the garrison would be all the towns people and other people from the provence who have escaped to the castle. it really doesnt take much training to resist a seige.
thus no upkeep costs because they are not full time profesional soliders http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif
(arnt my imaginary explanations good)
Quote Originally posted by Lord Romulous:
you have to remember that your are not just attacking the units that have retreated into the castle but the castle garrison also !
so you may have 10 men retreat into the castle but inside the castle itself is a 500 person garrison waiting to shoot and arrow into your ass.[/QUOTE]
Hey if thats what you tell yourself when you play then good for you. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif
But back to reality! Reading the manual yet again states that once you take a part of the castle the Towers in that part dont shoot anymore. This is a hit and miss right now. It works sometimes. and others it does not.
HopAlongBunny
10-24-2002, 07:19
I'm a little unsure about this... I think I read somewhere that castles; if they have arrow towers, ballista towers, gun emplacements; will have those "features" manned during a siege. I believe this also works for the players castles.
Of course, I could be dead wrong =)
Niccolomachiavelli
10-24-2002, 07:40
As I recall it, it was pretty much unanimously agreed that when you auto-resolve a castle battle, the computer just pits the units of both sides against eachother and in no way takes into account the castle itself. The evidence bears this out.
RabidMonkey
10-24-2002, 09:16
I totally disagree that the castle is downgraded when you storm it, what is the point of capturing a nice big fortress and then spending 20 years upgrading it again? if you reduced it to rubble during the seige it would make more sense.
And i agree with Romulos that the buildings should not be destroyed until the castle is taken, what is the point of retreating to a castle if the enemy destroy most of your structures and get the income fom the province every turn??
This could improve the woeful AI as they seem to like retreating!
Papa Bear!
10-24-2002, 10:08
and it would shift castles from the realm of central tech tree component to defensive fortification.
Right now nobody really uses castles as they were intended in the medieval ages, for defense. (its simply too expensive to build up castles, only to retreat back into them, and since your troops within a castle immediately start taking casualties, with none inflicted on the attackers, they basically just exist as a death trap for your garrisons)
thus castles are used for the better troops they allow you to build, and never as a defense, sad really.
Lord Romulous
10-24-2002, 10:40
one thing i just noticed which puts a bit of a hole in my imaginary garrison theroy.
when you attack a castle as soon as you destroy all the defending units (the units you can see on the ground) it is classed as a victory.
I still had a inner wall and the keep to breach but because i had killed all the enemy visible units i got victory.
what i want is victory only when
1. you have breached the whole fortification eg all the walls and the keep. (the keep should have a door which you can smash in)
2. you have killed all the visible units.
i dont mind that the towers still fire on you after you breach a wall cause it fits in with my fantasy land where there are actually soliders you cant see manning those towers and walls. just cause you breach a wall doesn't mean you have killed off all the defences on the wall.
i think castle assualts are to easy as they are,so i dont want to have a situation where just cause you have a few troops on the other side of the wall the garrison stops firing at you. this way it would be all to easy to send 2 units in at a time and have the other units wait in front of the now stopped firing walls for the call to join in the attack. I think if you are in range of any of the walls you should be suffering casualties. maybe less casualties once say 70% of your army has breached and is beyond the wall. that wall would then fire at 40% of usual.
Wildthing
10-24-2002, 14:31
The problem with not having the castle missile fire automatically stop when you have entered the castle is that there is no way to assault the walls and towers. What you an do is hammer away and raze them but you cant enter them to kill the defenders. I also think this would be to hard to implement so therefore I think it is a good simulation that the firing stops when you enter the castle.
I agree - I like the sieges and the way the archers keep shooting and I have no problem with the imaginary garrison - but I think that the main point is castles are not used defensively they are just building requirements and theres little point to building them up cause you rarely get seiged by the AI - you just get wittled down. I think castles should be able to keep producing men and they should make you seige every castle. Taking the province then waiting them out is too easy and certaily preferable to taking heavy losses by seiging - so why bother to seige - if castles could produce men they could hold out for longer and what is a seige if its not attacking the castle - Hence I dont think taking the province should auto seige the castle - some times the best place to defend a province is from the castle - so retreating to the castle should be encouraged not be a prolonged dying move. thats my opinion anyway
Once I had around 10 defenders in a full equipped fortress- and finallly! The AI decided an assault! Guess what, they walked 50 infantry up, broke up all gates with taking minimal losses and killing my 10 men. Thats a friggin' joke, the other units where close to the castle and my cannon, ballista ect towers NEVER fired one shot.
Too easy to break up gates http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/frown.gif
Quote Originally posted by Lord Romulous:
when you attack a castle as soon as you destroy all the defending units (the units you can see on the ground) it is classed as a victory.
I still had a inner wall and the keep to breach but because i had killed all the enemy visible units i got victory.
[/QUOTE]
I had this demonstrated in a very amusing way on 1 castle assault - all the garrison consisted of was a single trebuchet crew. When checking all of my catapults to see if any were in range of the unit directly, I noticed that one of them seemed to be able to target the trebuchet directly -so I did.
The very first rock demolished the trebuchet, at which point its crew walked straight out of both gates, out of the castle and into the open! My unit of Steppe Cavalry was under fire for the time it took to charge from my lines into the retreating crew - which was all dead in seconds. I lost 1 man and took the castle! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif
Amusing but very slightly stupid! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif
I agree castle assaults should be beefed up. Gates can be lifted to quickly and the time should be extended. Attacking a castle should be brutal, like it really was. Porcupines, boiling oil, ball chutes, non of these ghastly anti seige weapons are included and that sucks as far as I'm concerned. To compensate, double the quarrels
coming out of those towers and extend the durability of gates and walls.
I wonder how difficult it would be to implement a simple rule. Where a minimum number of troops are required to garrison a keep, castle, citadel, etc. If the defending province doesn't have say one unit for a keep, two units for a castle, they loose both province and castle. This would prevent the 3 remaining troops of the initial battle from retreating to the castle and remain for 9 years within providing full maximum castle defense.
Wildthing
10-25-2002, 18:27
I like the idea of having a minimum garrison in castles. If you dont have enough troops, you can't defend the castle properly and therefore have to give it up.
Maybe there should be a new troop-category called garrison with a very low up-keep cost (but lousy in all other combat)?
I think if you destroy the whole castle in a siege on the next turn it must be just downgraded. The reason - the castle is destroyed, but the building material is still here and it cost not too mutch to repair the most of the castle. In the siege of Constantinopol 1456 (I'm not sure I write this correct) the turks destroyed in the day the castle and the byzantians repayred the walls in the night.
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