Editing sieges

[SigniferOne]

Ok, have you guys figured out yet if we can alter which siege options are available for the besieging party? I mean it is SO easy for a guy to build Helopolis-style siege towers that Epic Walls are nearly useless. If we could, like, triple or quadruple the amount of build points required for them, that would be nice. Or better yet, make building of them contingent on some outside factors, like having Archimedes as your ancilliary or something like that.

I dream of a time when cities will take 20 years to build Epic Walls, and once those are done no one will ever be able to take them head on, and will have to destroy all outside armies, and then lay siege to it for 12 years to starve it out. Where Nebuchadnezzar failed, someone else might succeed ~;)

I'm interested in any and all ways to limit siege options for the besieging party. Maybe that involves editing the siege tower models or something like that, so I ask everyone who deals with these things and know how they work.

[Epistolary Richard]

I'd also be interested to know anywhere that we can mod attacking siege options, specificially if we can enable 0 build time siege engines.

[Shigawire]

We should be able to impose severe limitations on the siege tower's deployability. Anyone know if this is possible?
In reality, walls were built on slopes precisely so that siege towers could not be used there, and so the defenders would know precisely where the siege towers would be coming.. So if a wall had 20% facing perfect flat ground.. and 80% facing slopes, it was a very fair bet that the siege tower was coming in the 20% direction, and you could build the city walls around that fact. They would expect nothing more than ladders to be used on the walls placed on sloped terrain.

The calculated path of the siege-tower was always prepared 2-3 weeks beforehand. This was done by small rolling shacks called "chelones" in greek, or "testudo". Turtles essentially. Engineers would be digging the ground underneath these rolling houses, and making the terrain perfectly flat, and would fill in any ditches that were in the way. Indeed, the EXACT PATH of the siege tower would be known to the defenders many weeks before it would even come. And so I'm happy with the deployment system in vanilla RTW, since the defender always sees the attacker's positions first, and can deploy accordingly.

What I want to see most of all are siege works, such as the greek "periteichismos" (encirclement) which were walls (sometimes twin) built around a city they were besieging. This was used multiple times, even by the Spartans at one time. Athens built a periteichismos when they besieged Syracuse in 415 during the Peloponnesian war. The Romans used it when they were besieging Lilibeo during the 1st Punic War.

Let's just say that Julius Caesar's "circumvellatvs" around Alesia was by no means a new thing when he was employing it..

Is there any ideas on how this could be achieved?

[Epistolary Richard]

The only way I can think of would be to put a custom tile down for each settlement and place the besieger's earthwork elements there. The only trouble would be that the earthworks would always be there. In a sense that wouldn't be a problem as pretty much the only time you see a city is when it's besieged, but you couldn't vary the earthworks by faction at all.

eadingas was having some luck with placing a dynamic city on top of a custom tile.

The ideal way would be to tie your 'under siege' model to appear on the battle map (in a similar way to wonders/ships/settlements etc.) but I wouldn't have a clue how to do that.

[Shigawire]

Well. Great. Keep the ideas flowing out.

Solution-oriented is the right frame of mind.

We've done so much already.. no need to stop now.

Periteichismos (and aperiteichismos) were extremely common in siege warfare.. by many civilizations.

Can someone please look at this more deeply?

[Simetrical]

Nobody's yet figured out a way to mod siege engine construction costs—it's assumed to be unmoddable. Siegeworks of a sort could be made on a per-culture basis at least, or so I expect—the underlying terrain can be changed across the board, as evidenced by the fact that barbarian town centers are on top of a hill. Impassibility is trickier, I suspect, but it might still be doable.

As for siege engine availability, I'm currently testing to see whether the stats in descr_engines affect AI choice of siege engines. If they do, we might be able to use that.

Edit: No, the AI doesn't care what siege engine stats are.

-Simetrical