Problems with siege towers

[Afkazar]

I assualted a macedonian force.They had 1 unit of royalies guarding the walls.
No biggie i thought i had plenty of silver shield units and 2 siege towers.
My first tower reached the wall the soldiers went up.The second siege tower reached the wall.Then my soldiers kept going in then back out of the tower.They wouldnt climb. As that unit got shot to pieces my first unit that engaged the royalies was losing.As would have been expected.Lucikly i hand some 4 more divisions of silver shields so i was able to take the walls.

But i lost more guys then neccacary.What should have been a simple pincer move ended up costing me 1 and a half units of silver shields.

anyone else having this problem.

(this isnt the first time its happened either)

[Barbarossa82]

This is a well-known bug known as "the siege tower bug", which was introduced in its present form by RTW 1.5, probably in a half-assed attempt to correct the previous siege tower bug where men would occasionally fall down between the tower and the building. It's extremely annoying and hard to predict when it will happen, but apparently you can sometimes shake the affected unit out of its stupidity by repeatedly cancelling their orders (I think the hotkey is backspace) and then ordering them up onto the walls again until they get the idea.

CA apparently cannot be bothered to come up with a final patch for RTW to fix the stuff they messed up with the 1.5 patch (this, the Roman civil war bug, the messages bug), so the only solution is sadly to live with it and try to mitigate its effects by having plenty of alternative siege equipment.

[jhhowell]

I assualted a macedonian force.They had 1 unit of royalies guarding the walls.
No biggie i thought i had plenty of silver shield units and 2 siege towers.
My first tower reached the wall the soldiers went up.The second siege tower reached the wall.Then my soldiers kept going in then back out of the tower.They wouldnt climb. As that unit got shot to pieces my first unit that engaged the royalies was losing.As would have been expected.Lucikly i hand some 4 more divisions of silver shields so i was able to take the walls.

But i lost more guys then neccacary.What should have been a simple pincer move ended up costing me 1 and a half units of silver shields.

anyone else having this problem.


See RTW Bugs, posts 506 and 507. It may have been noted elsewhere too. There's no fix that I'm aware of.

Out of curiousity, did the city you attacked have large or epic walls? I've only seen this problem on those walls, never on the basic stone wall.

One idea that may or may not work is that the large or epic siege towers might have problems when used by units larger than 40 men. I had tons of problems in BI games on x2 unit scale (80 comitatenses), but have not had any difficulty in my current game on default scale (40 men). Likewise the RTW example I saw was one of those larger eastern units, either phalanx pikemen or eastern infantry (60 men). If you're on the default scale, this should be no hardship - basternae or thracians should be better for assult duty anyway, since your pikemen can't use their pikes on walls.

[Lord Fluffy]

Hi guys,

first post here. I ran into this problem two nights in a row. One time with a unit of arcani and the other one with LCs. I seem to recall both times I had pressed the turbo button to speed up the lumbering towers. Has anyone tried if that's the problem?

[Afkazar]

hmm surely my 121 unit size may have been a problem.....
I kinda didnt have alota mercs in that force and kinda thought that 242 men should easily crush a 100 man unit of royalies even in Hand to Hand wall fighting especially while out flanking.I mean i hand maybe a handful of thracians but they wouldnt have done that well.