City Assaults: the good the bad and the ugly

[SpencerH]

I havent seen another thread on this topic so I thought I'd start one.

City assaults are definitely a big improvement over MTW. I actually do them now! Hopefully they will continue to be interesting later in the campaigns.

A couple of points:

The AI hasnt assaulted one of my cities yet. They seem more willing to lay seige.

I had a weird situation in one assault. The gauls outnumber me and sally from their town. I cut em to pieces and we're kinda skirmishing around the gate. While that's occurring I cant use my ram to break the gate. So I move some hastati through the open gate and I've captured the building. Then the gate closes when the hastati move away and I've lost the building. Moving the hastati who are now locked inside the town close to the gate doesnt recapture the it though. I have to move the ram back from the gate then forward again (so that the troops working the ram arent in front of it) and attack the gate. By this time my hastati inside the town have been attacked and die before I finally smash the gates. I'm not sure if its a bug, but I would have thought that an unopposed unit inside the city would be able to open the gates. Maybe the position of the ram in front of the gates prevented it from being opened?

[Blodrast]

well, there are several problems with them, several mentioned in the RTW Bugs thread.
Some of them are:

- rams bug: multiple rams, until one attacks, only one moves at a time, the others stop, if you're targeting different sections of the walls.
- you can shoot the hell out of the AI units that are walking behind the gate; instead of retreating out of your archers/artillery range, they just literally run around like headless chicken.
- same with plazas: units defending the plaza just stay there; you can shoot them until you run out of ammo, and then some; they never make a move... Several times I've killed them almost completely just with missile fire. That's really, really, really silly.

[DisruptorX]

I lost a battle yesterday because my men REFUSED to move onto the town center elevated area. They sat there and I lost 3 units as they just sat and were charged by the cavalry guarding it. This had better be fixed in a patch.

[Blodrast]

I lost a battle yesterday because my men REFUSED to move onto the town center elevated area. They sat there and I lost 3 units as they just sat and were charged by the cavalry guarding it. This had better be fixed in a patch.

Were they all in one group ? If so, then this is a known bug (meaning, other people have seen it happen, myself included). You can give orders to each unit individually; re-grouping them may sometimes fix the problem, but I'm not sure.

[Colovion]

While your side of the siege feels very real and very exciting with the Battering Rams pounding on the gates, dust shaking off the gates as the ram pounds relentlessly. Your archers line up ouside of the gates to rain death on the inhabitants who are.... running around in circles? It's a good thing that the enemy armies will usually stay well back from the gates when you're assualting it to stay away from arrow fire (this is the only way I can justify the enemy not halting your invasion of their settlement until you've actually breached the walls with your troops). Strangely there are always two or three units running about in circles getting pelted by javs, arrows and whatever else you throw on them.

I love the urgency you have but how methodical you must be to have a successful siege as they are, and were, very tricky to do properly without massive amounts of casualties.

[Damiel]

I lost a battle yesterday because my men REFUSED to move onto the town center elevated area. They sat there and I lost 3 units as they just sat and were charged by the cavalry guarding it. This had better be fixed in a patch.

yeah just ungroup (so they are all ungrouped but still selected) and issue your move orders, then immediatly regroup. You can do that for the "no running" bug as well.