How to I assualt cities?

I find it almost impossible to take cities guarded by massive amount of archers and have stone walls and higher. They pretty much drive back any attack by shooting my men to death or shooting their seige engines to death. I do have some onagers but they simply dont have enough ammo. 3 groups can barely take out two wall section and this doesnt help me at all.

The only thing I can think of is to make a full stack of onagers and completely level the city. However that's pretty hard and the onagers are pretty slow moving as well and I am far away from my heartland. I am not Egyptians so I cant form the turtle and wait for enemy archers to run out of ammo. Desert axemen will rout as soon as they get in the hole in the wall from the hail of arrow.

please help

Err, no edit...

I ll give some back ground.

It's the 220's and I am in war with the Seluceds, Parthians, Romans, Numidians.

Now every city has stone walls or greater and the Roman cities are all guarded by Archer Auxilia and Legion or Praetorian Cohorts. The Partians guard their cities with MASSIVE like 2000+ archers and horse archers. I dont have time to fight the numidians because of how my empire is soo stretched out right now. The Seluceds have one city left but it's guarded by 2 generals, massiv archers and phalanx pikemen (almost full stack so close to 3000).

I ve tried to assult these cities but my units often rout before they actually can reach the enemy within the walls! Siege towers and rams are useless as they get shoot dead before they can even reach the walls.

Need advice.

in cases like that i always use some cheap units with high numbers. eastern infantry or stuff like that. using siege ladders i climb the walls engaging the archers in hand-to-hand combat. once they are distracted i move in with the rest of my army. you of course suffer some casualties and have to actualy get your troops close to the walls. i found using quick paced light cavalry to distract enemy fire working quite good as well.

Coming from different angles with your troops all split up works well - then shuffle your troops around. You can move your troops around the city faster than they cam move theirs around inside the city.

The other obvious solution is to simply starve them out...

Archers on the walls are a very effective weapon defensively, but I find they rarely move them quickly enough if you decide to attack somewhere unexpected. They usually mass the archers around the gate, so attack some walls away from the gate, blow a hole, rush through to the city square and let the archers come to you. I did this to good effect as the seleucids against Capua (v-large stone walls).

In your situation i use saping points. They work well.

I find that multiple attacks is the only way to break into a heavily defended city. I too have found that attacking all the walls and capturing some of the towers gives me a chance to break through. The time limit during the battle causes some heavy losses on the attacking side. It gets pretty exiciting attacking cities.
If you don't succeed.......
The next wave does.

do like! starve them out, never attack a siege, and dont intend to either! :surrender:

forgot the me, cant edit... sry :(

Haven't tried this, but does using sappers and then going to "turtle" mode with the Romans work?

I ended up using extremely cheap strategy.

I waited until enemy relieve troop comes and attack them, they retreat to the edge of the city. Then I attack them again, now they draw the city garrison out as reenforcements and I then wipe them out. Now city is only left with a very small garrison so I can easily take it.


I find bribing large cities to be the most stupid thing to do after having done so. The population stays the same and the next round they revolt and you are left to face an even stronger force than before...

Sapping works wonders-and I try to have 2-3 units of nippy troops on hand.
I find the worst enemy is the timer in sieges (if I forget to switch off at start of campaign).