Siege Casualties

[Hamburglar]

I don't know if this is moddable or not, but I think the way siege losses are handled is rather unrealistic.

First off, both the attacker and defender should be taking casualties. While reading accounts of sieges in a book I bought called Chronicles of the Crusades, quite often the attackers would take a lot more casualties than the defender even without an assault taking place. Disease, starvation, and of course the defenders shooting them with various missiles would make a big difference.

I understand that army food supply is not really factored in the game because it would require a lot of micromanagement, but that leaves the question of defender losses.

If the defenders have to worry about starvation, then the attacker should have losses due to starvation and disease as well.

And if some of the defenders losses are a result of the attackers firing siege weapons at them, then the attackers should incur losses from the defenders towers. The description of the demi-culverin tower in the game says that it will punish attackers that get too close but that never actually happens in game.

I figure it can be coded, to have the attackers suffer attrition just like a Crusade does, except perhaps suffer more losses the better and more upgraded the defending castle is.

This will force players to actually assault the castles if they want to avoid a long siege and the inherent losses. As it is there rarely is any incentive to assault castles unless the garrison is miniscule or you're in danger of excommunication.


Also

Perhaps if the defenders sally out of the castle then shouldn't the battlemap be of the castle? Thus the defenders would actually need to rush out at the attacker as well as having the towers and defenses offering support if the attacking army got too close and tried to block the defenders in.



Any ideas?

[Gregoshi]

Rah-bul, rah-bul Hamburglar. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif

I don't think you will find much argument about sieges and how they are handled. My only comment is that sieges in MTW are much improved over STW and I expect they will be even better in RTW.

[Knight_Yellow]

how would the attackers suffer from startvasion? they arent being blockaded so they have all the supplies they need.

plus to siege a castle u dont need to be firing at it and cuming under fire u just need to suround it so that no supplys get in.

so realy attackers shouldnt take casualties.

[econ21]

I think CA have said the besiegers will take casualties in the VI patch. I suspect this is historical - sustained camping outside a town may lead to disease, desertion and losses due to minor engagements.

For me the big problem is that the autoresolve for sieges is way out of line (too soft on the attacker) with what a normal human player can achieve, but I am not sure if this is being tweaked in VI. However, I find fighting sieges manually frustrating and dull so the nice autoresolve may be a blessing.

[Bhruic]

That is one area that I find somewhat annoying for the AI. It has a habit of retreating to the castle and just sitting there. Nice if it can get reinforced and lift the siege, but since that often doesn't happen, it simply loses the troops. It'd be more useful to make a suicide attack, at least it'd take some down with it.

Hope the fix in VI works. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

Bh

[Hamburglar]

The attackers would suffer starvation because they are in a foreign land and far from their supply lines.
Knight_Yellow:


Also, they need to keep a large amount of men watching the castle so the defenders don't sally out and kill them so they can't have all that many men out foraging. Plus by sitting in one place for such a long time they use up all the food in the area. Medieval supply lines weren't exactly fantastic - they pretty much needed to get local food supplies to survive in enemy territory.

When armies are marching through the enemy countryside they loot and raid farms and villages for food supplies but in sieges the troops can't stray far from the castle so there isn't that much food.

Also, about combat casualties

If the attackers aren't moving into bowshot to shoot at the defenders and cause casualties, then why are the defenders dying at a steady rate? If the cause was only starvation, I figure they would die in small numbers at first and then as time went on they would start dropping considerably.

[BDC]

Well I think maybe they should figure in disease in that case, so in one year the entire castle could be forced to surrender. Anyway when right next to an allied provence the attackers should be able to get supplies in, so only low casulties, but after say a crusade a long way away they should take more.

[SmokWawelski]

Most of the calc in the game is far from reality, so using the this is not realistic sentence is out of line. We are talking about sieges that take up to 10 years if the number of defenders is small...

However, you are right that the decreasing number of attacker would add to the game and make it more interesting, and yes, it would force more sieges to be resolved instead of waited out.

I hope that the autoresolve as well as the atacker deaths will be fixed in the coming Xpack...

[Llywelyn ap Gruffydd]

I am wondering if anyone has kept statistics, at least roughly for your castle seiges. I've always heard that a good rule of thumb for seiges is to make sure you outnumber the defenders at least 3 to 1, all things equal.

Does this ratio hold true for most seiges?
Llywelyn

[Kalle]

This is an interesting topic.

Yes the game is a game and in very many things not realistic. But i sure think the developers intention has been to keep the game as realistic as possible and still entertaining - entertaining and selling the game being the main purpose of making it.

Thus they have made a very big miss when it comes to sieges. It was very very much harder to siege - attack - and take a castle then it was to defend it.

Attackers would normally have to be at a strenght 10 to 1 if sure of success though their are exeptions of course. And attackers would take serius casulties when besieging a castle. Illness, hunger and all that was rampant throughout armycamps till very recently. And medieval men (western at least) were not keen on taking a bath http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

If you read some historybook about warfare that is written by a professional historian you will find that allways more people died from hunger, illness and so on then from battle. (most generals didnt want to do big battles as they were risky business over which you as commander had little control - they were not like in the game where you allmost are in a helicopter - able to monitoring the whole field)

And as stated supply lines were not good developed during this time. And food was scarce the extra food that existed was probably in the castle with the defenders.

So as i have stated in other posts - sieges are to easy as attacker (in singleplayer) and attackers should take plenty of casulties while sitting the siege out. A mistake i think could be easily corrected by the gamemakers.

Kalle (FF Kalle in mtw lobby)