Shrapnel in EB?

I know it's something else, but it really looks like shrapnel, or even a medium sized Gatling cannon. I'm talking about that strange artillery that is mounted on AI siege towers. For some reason my own towers never have this weapon. Recently, Macedonians attacked Byzantium, which is under my control. The city has large walls, so they built two huge towers to storm the walls. When the towers approached they started to shoot at my troops on the walls. I lost 3/4 of peltastai unit and a toxotai unit. My FM who was stationed on the street behind the walls also took some damage. What's that strange weapon and why it seems only AI gets it? Not that I'm too concerned about it. In the end Macedonians were sent packing. Just that weapon looks extremely lethal, may be too lethal for that time frame.

Its a ballista on the tower. I posted a fix for it a while back if you just want normal arrows but I'm off to work in a few so I can't now.

You have access to it too. Just turn fire at will on when you command the large siege towers that are built to take large stone walls.

Thanks, didn't know that. That ballista can really be a weapon of mass destruction:hmg:

It is annoying that you cannot position your own artillery on the walls though, Scorpions fx, should be able to.

The ballistae on the towers are really pure ownage. I hate assaulting walls, since the defender gets a ridiculous advantage (which balances out considering I have more troops, but I still hate seeing my trained Romani troops lose vs Sphendonetai), so I just build LOTS of seige towers and pummel them out of the walls.

I still lose considerable numbers of troops though X(

If you have stone walls they will attack with wooden towers that shoot weak arrows.

If you have Large stone walls they will attack with metal plated towers who have a ballista machine gun on top which can shoot whole groups down the walls.

In RTW you had Epic Stone Walls which could be attack with massive metal towers with another mass destruction ballista.

~Fluvius

Here's the fix. Its not that hard to mod this. Even someone as ignorant as me can fix it.

Go into your EB folder, and search for a file named descr_engines. Look for medium tower (tower for large stone walls which are the largest you can get in EB) and look for two parts of the description. At the top, change the projectile from scorpion to arrow, then scroll down a bit. You'll see this...

attack_stat 12, 2, scorpion, 120, 30, siege_missile, siege, piercing
attack_stat_attr ap, bp, launching

Replace that with this....

attack_stat 8, 2, arrow, 100, 100, missile, archery, piercing
attack_stat_attr ap


Now you should have large towers that are not intensely deadly but will still pick off a few wall defenders on their way.

You can also mod the frequency of the firing but I didn't want to mess with that.