Does anyone build walls? Suggestion for simple modding of walls.

I don't build walls are general rule(palisades only), because I'm always expanding and spend my time and money building other stuff. I rarely need to use upgraded walls for a serious defense.

The corollary is that the human player rarely needs walls whilst the ai need the best it can get as it is mostly under the hammer.

So my conclusion is that walls should give a bonus (like law+10%)to

1.encourage the ai as it needs as much help as it can get

2. Make the human player consider building walls for the bonus.

Walls are incredibly useful in case of siege. Putting archers on stone walls gives a definite advantage.

The only bad point is that, as siege towers automatically improve at the same time of the wall, plain regular stone walls are better than the ones above against siege towers, as the basic siege towers don't have the insane machineballista that can annihilate a whole unit standing on the walls in a matter of seconds.

that never happened to me but i hope it never does

I haven't been besieged enought to make building walls worthwhile; the enemy just falls down, their empire chain routs and the game is over.

Taking into account purely functional considerations, I always build wooden walls as a just-in-case measure to give me time to rush a field army to my settlement's defence in the event of a surprise attack - something more likely now that rebels are more aggresive.

If the local enemy or neutral factions are fielding elephants and/or siege engines then I'd consider upgrading to stone walls but it would depend on the value of the city - and I might highly value a city simply for the temple it holds, for example, or because it's in a strategic location, not just monetary terms or troop building capability.

On rare occasions I like to build up the defences of a city because I know an enemy faction will keep trying to take it and it's a great way to weaken them by getting them to break their teeth as they try to storm the city or counter a sally.

(I'm currently having fun in my latest Julii campaign doing this to the Carthaginians and Greeks on Sicilly: with some help from my agents the Scipii are gone and I managed to acquire Messana, although the damned Brutii beat me to Capua due to the sheer luck of having an army marching past at the time. :( My main armies are busy in northern europe, but with a new general and some veteran troops I'd luckily just sent back from the front for retraining to the latest upgrades I'm able to tie up both factions until I'm free to crush them.)

Eventually I like to upgrade all my cities to stone walls, but that's simply because I don't like the image of them being protected by some scrappy wooden fence. By the time I get around to this I'm usually flush with cash and it doesn't really matter that I'm 'wasting' money.

I go for at least palisades, but beyond that, I only upgrade the walls when everything else is already built. I don't like my settlements exposed, but they don't need any more than the basics. If it's a case where I need big walls in my settlements, there's clearly something wrong with my... foreign policy.

*

To be fair, I conduct most of my city defences in the streets, not bothering with the walls - which I regard as useful for delaying the assault on the campaign map until the AI can build up some siege equipment, and also for channeling their forces once a breach has been made, so that I can rip them apart, piecemeal, as they progress to the town square.

I always try to get at least stone walls on all of my sttlements, because then i can just put some archers at the top and they will be able to fire away at the enemy! Its an incredible usefulthing to have when you're being besieged, especially if the enemy has no missile weaponry. ~D

Enemies rarely get past my Large stone walls - They are a great upgrade to get and not really that expensive.

You can use those walls agressively in Sallying forth (1.2 changed this a bit) the enemy mostly sat within firing range of my archers on the wall till half of them were dead, then they shouted "run for the hills" and my cav waiting behind the gate charge forth and cut them down - no need for inf.

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Originally Posted by Razor1952

walls should give a bonus (like law+10%)

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Amen, brother!
I just thought about this the other night.
It's not logical that whether you have no walls at all or epic stone walls is of no consequence to the happiness or lawfulness of your citizens. Walls should make them feel safe->happy, and solid, guarded gates should reduce crime compared to a city where one may enter or exit at any point.
I think I'll mod this.
In my current campaign, I have stubbornly refused to build even palisades at Thapsis and Corduba, while most cities have stone walls and Carthage is building epic ones. I was kind of surprised not to see any kind of positive effect from having those epic thingies, but I build them all the same just so I can have a look. Money's not a problem
~:)

I personally find wooden walls to be practically useless. Other than delaying an assault by about a turn or two, they give very little advantage to the defenders. I have to arc my missiles over the wall because apparently my men are all fat lards and they would cause the whole thing to collapse or something.

The ONLY wall type worth having is a STONE wall. The only problem with that is that my frontier towns are the ones getting attacked. They arent large or advanced enough to build stone walls most of the time. While those that are able to construct them, tend to be in the heart of my empire, far away from enemy lines, and are normally my troop producing/economic powerhouses and are therefore most likely far too busy building more and better militray/economic improvements and dont have the time (or even a good reason) to construct a stone wall. If anything the wall should be upgradeable to at least a STONE wall once you hit large town status or something, either that or make it so you can put troops on the second tier wooden wall. It may not be that great of a height advantage, but its something...ok nevermind...just give me stone walls...please?

I usually never bother with walls as the enemy never reaches my towns. They are intercepted as soon as they cross my border or try to siege one of the many passage blocking forts.

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Originally Posted by Akka

Walls are incredibly useful in case of siege. Putting archers on stone walls gives a definite advantage.

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You know, I used to think that until I finally got to defend a city with stone walls today.

I had two units of cretan archers on the walls which I'd brought along specifically for the purpose and what with the fire from the walls themselves, not to mention some velites, I was anticipating great carnage.

Now the sneaky pontic army managed to get a spy into my city to open the gates, but no matter, I had some mercenary phalangites to deal with that.

I placed my archers and velites on the walls near the gate and put my phalangites in front of the gate. I figured the archers were going to absolutely slaughter the pontic infantry as they marched up, imagine my suprise when they only got off a couple of volleys before the infantry were at the gates!

And then I noticed something that really bothered me, a lot - and that is that archers and velites don't seem to be able to aim at units anywhere near the walls. It seems they can only shoot units which are quite a way off, which makes them next to useless as wall defenders!

That really, really p*ssed me off.

I won the battle anyhow, the infantry and chariots just charged in the front gate and immolated themselves on the pointy sticks until they all freaked out and ran, but the fact that missile units turn out to be of very limited use defending walls was a big disappointment.

Even so, I ALWAYS build walls as soon as I can, and upgrade them to stone as soon as possible. It forces the enemy to delay their attack and walls create a good defensible bottleneck, and finally I like to defend in front of stone walls because the fire from them is really good at decimating the enemy as long as you can hold them there.

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insane machineballista

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As much as i love the insane machineballista, i have to say, it is very unrealistic. How could the ancients have fired those ballistas so fast and so many? After all, have you compared the size of the bolts to an average person? They are huge!! It would take ages to reload. But they are cool when you have two towers mowing down the enemy with them. Whol 120 man peasant unit annhialated in seconds. They all flew off the walls, screaming.

The wooden walls are actually very useful for resisting sieges.

Yes, they'll break like paper and it's hard to fire your missiles over them, but that's not the point; they create battlenecks the enemy will have to squeeze through to get at you. That means if you have a phalanx unit defending it, they're extremely hard to kill, because the enemy will be in disarray when moving through the gap, and they wont be able to flank you either.

I have defeated a Macedonian army about 4 times my size defending wooden walls with my Greek army, which was made up almost entirely of infantry(hoplites and some javelins), with only the general being mounted and no archers.