Gatling towers

Does anyone know how to mod siege towers to reduce their rate of fire? Right now there's no incentive to upgrade the walls beyond stone because the next two wall sizes give the attackers towers with ballistae. This by itself wouldn't be a problem, but these towers-of-death fire 2-3 ballistae shots per second, and basically mean that you cannot have any units defending the walls, because they'll get annihilated before the assault towers get in place. To top it off, these towers don't seem to have an arc of fire, so if you're in range, you're under fire.

This didn't use to be a problem because the AI never turned tower fire on before BI 1.6, and I chose not to use it myself to avoid giving me a huge advantage when assaulting towns. This gatling-ballistae is very unpleasant, unrealistic, and frustrating. Aren't bigger walls supposed to be an asset to the *defender* as opposed to the attacker?

don't worry about the seige towers- just place your men one wall section across from where you think the seige tower will arrive and rush them in at the last minute

Tried that, got a bunch of my guys killed like that. The reason in this situation was because the towers were coming in at an angle, and I didn't expect such a wide field of fire.

Now I keep my guys below the walls, and rush them up when the towers do their final approach (when the machineguns ... er ... ballistae stop firing). I've also got a no-large/epic walls policy now, as there is really no reason to build them except to increase siege hold-out times.

That is one option, removing large/epic walls altogether. Maybe I'll give that a try.

descr_engines.txt contains that stats for all siege engines including the towers. The arrow_generator, dir, arc, and interval are the lines you are interested in.

As always, back up any file before modding it!

small question... did anyone ever tried to stop the gattling towers (as an attacker) in front of the wall, at a nice distance to keep them gattling?

perhaps while you land a 3rd or 4th tower all the way to the side on the walls..

The siege towers' rate of fire is high IMO, but then again the defenders get the ballistae missiles from gateways and towers with epic stone walls. These impale a few men at a time, and if you get too close whilst attacking, your units will soon be weakened even before they reach the walls.

Also, these epic stone wall projectiles can fire horizontally along the walls. So when you face melee, you will take additonal casualties from nearby enemy towers / gateways, which is another disadvantage when attacking. Its best to occupy these as soon as possible, otherwise you may not have enough units left to deal with the remaining opposition inside the settlement.

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Originally Posted by Cras

small question... did anyone ever tried to stop the gattling towers (as an attacker) in front of the wall, at a nice distance to keep them gattling?

perhaps while you land a 3rd or 4th tower all the way to the side on the walls..

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Yep, I generally use my siege towers in groups of three - two attack while the third provides covering fire, as well as being on hand to replace a tower that burns.

I think I've solved my problem. The regular towers have 5 "shooters" (with different arcs of fire that overlaps) that fire arrows at 1.5 second intervals. The medium towers also have 5 "shooters", that fire scorpions at 1.5 second intervals. I timed a regular scorpion, they fire at 9 seconds intervals. Thus I changed the interval to 9 seconds, hopefully that will make it more "realistic".

The existing rate is fine. Otherwise walls are almost pointless. They provide little enough of a defence as it is. Surely the point of walls is to allow a small army to halt a larger one. Even with the current rate of fire the large army tends to win.

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Originally Posted by Patricius

The existing rate is fine. Otherwise walls are almost pointless. They provide little enough of a defence as it is. Surely the point of walls is to allow a small army to halt a larger one. Even with the current rate of fire the large army tends to win.

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I agree. The wall towers represent the inherent defense of the city in addition to whatever garrison we provide as players. If the fire is too galling, take some engines and nock down the towers. Otherwise, show up with plenty of men. Assaulting a stone wall ought to be expensive.

I'm not talking about the wall towers, but the siege towers. The Siege towers on medium walls have 5 scoprions, firing at 1.5 second intervals. They have the ability to clear a section of wall of defenders in about 20-30 seconds.

You're concerned that the walls don't provide enough defence as it is, the siege tower's auto-fire gatling fire capability firing ballistae make the situation much much worse, esp. since the AI actually uses it now (previous versions the AI didn't turn on "fire at will" for the siege towers).

Not all 5 fire at you, you usually have 1-3 of them firing at your guys. But this means that you get 1-2 ballistae shots *per second*. Considering each shot can kill 3 men, that can kill 30 men in 10 seconds of fire. That's ridiculous, and makes the medium/large stone walls a liability instead of an asset vs the small walls. Increasing their fire delay to 9 seconds makes much more sense, you still get the offensive capability of the siege tower that's better than the smaller siege tower, but w/o the ability to completely neutralize any wall defenders w/o even trying hard.

Is the gatling Siege Tower effect solved in the latest patch - I've noticed it on 1.2, haven't upgraded to 1.6 yet, but hope it's been resolved by now as it is a pain when a whole unit is effectively wiped out by siege towers.

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Originally Posted by Black Prince

Is the gatling Siege Tower effect solved in the latest patch - I've noticed it on 1.2, haven't upgraded to 1.6 yet, but hope it's been resolved by now as it is a pain when a whole unit is effectively wiped out by siege towers.

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Nope, they're still just as fast. I took hoof's advice and modified the rate of fire - works a treat!:2thumbsup:

I was very annoyed by the gatling towers at first, so much that was considering modding it away.
However, several reasons made me abstain from that:

The towers have very little ammuition. So the exployt of just sweeping the walls empty (if you are the attacker) does not work.

After a few battles you can figure out where your troops are save from the fire, and place them there, as allready suggested.

And lastly, if you spread you units out thin, 1 or 2 rows deep, casualities are drasticly reduced. That way you can keep you bowmen in a useful position.


I would still go for great and epic walls, if only for one reason: Siege-towers can be eventually destroyed (at least from epic walls). After the 3. unit climbed up, the tower usually crumbles. This can save you if the enemy has vast numbers. On normal stone walls, they will just keep coming up the ladders.

I just put a unit of peasants directly in front of each siege tower. They take the hits, and it allows me to have my combat troops nearby, unscathed, ready for action.

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Originally Posted by hoof

I think I've solved my problem. The regular towers have 5 "shooters" (with different arcs of fire that overlaps) that fire arrows at 1.5 second intervals. The medium towers also have 5 "shooters", that fire scorpions at 1.5 second intervals. I timed a regular scorpion, they fire at 9 seconds intervals. Thus I changed the interval to 9 seconds, hopefully that will make it more "realistic".

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Have you also modded the engine_health values for all 3 siege towers? If you look at the default values you will see that:

* small siege towers (vs stone walls) have 130 health;
* medium siege towers (vs large stone walls) have 150 health;
* large siege towers, aka heliopolis (vs epic stone walls) have 1000 health.

To put this engine_health into some kind of perspective, a standard battering ram's health is 100, and these regularly go up in flames against any type of stone walls. The only tower type I've seen destroyed by wall defences is the small siege tower, but this is only on rare occasions.

If you want to improve the chances of the defenders being able to destroy siege towers, I would lower the engine_health values. Also note that you need to set engine_flammable to true in order for the towers to take damage and become destroyed.

Actually, the epic ballistas do 1% or 2% every second, so even the very large siege towers go down very fast once they are targeted. The only problem is that they are only shot at if no units can be reached.

Do the towers fire automatically? The reason I ask is that I was playing a siege last night and one of my towers moved towards a large wall full of archers. The towers did not fire!! What am I doing wrong?:help:

That might depend on your version of the game, in 1.2 fire at will is off by default, you have to activate it yourself. About 1.3/1.5 I don´t know, but it might be good to check whether fire at will is active or not.

It's off in 1.5 too, so I'd bet that it's also off in 1.3.

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Originally Posted by hoof

This didn't use to be a problem because the AI never turned tower fire on before BI 1.6

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im only playing on v1.3 and when the AI attack my in my cities they use shoot with their towers.

i just put my defending wall units far away and when the towers are realy close i just ran over with my melee units to defend.

thou my archers always take heavy causulties, between 10-25 men per 80 unit, cause i have them infront of the towers just to shoot down as many as possible. or if i dont have so many of archer units i have them on the ground where the towers are heading so they can shoot on enemies when they enter my walls.

As said above the those siege towers do not hold much ammunition. I keep wall units if I am defending the wall at a distance. Only fire arrow archers are allowed near in the hope of setting them alight.

BTW

I have noticed how with epic walls the exact damage is registers on siege towers, otherwise it seems like chance to take them down.

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Originally Posted by Patricius

BTW

I have noticed how with epic walls the exact damage is registers on siege towers, otherwise it seems like chance to take them down.

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I've noticed this as well after running a few tests in custom battles, whilst tweaking a few features in descr_engines and descr_projectile_new. What I've basically done is increased the fire_interval (as hoof has pointed out above) of each projectile, but to also decrease the projectile's damage / attack attributes.

Remember to create backups before you edit the text files.

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The attack attributes in descr_engines look like this (this is for the standard siege tower that goes up against standard / small stone walls):

Code:

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

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Underneath this you should see each arrow projectile that can be fired from the siege tower, as below:

Code:

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arrow_generator        2 21.8 3.3
aim_dir                0.0 0.0 1.0
aim_arc                1.0
fire_interval        1.5

arrow_generator        1 21.8 3.3
aim_dir                0.0 0.0 1.0
aim_arc                1.0
fire_interval        1.5

arrow_generator        0 21.8 3.3
aim_dir                0.0 0.0 1.0
aim_arc                1.0
fire_interval        1.5

arrow_generator        -1 21.8 3.3
aim_dir                0.0 0.0 1.0
aim_arc                1.0
fire_interval        1.5

arrow_generator        -2 21.8 3.3
aim_dir                0.0 0.0 1.0
aim_arc                1.0
fire_interval        1.5

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Simply change fire_interval to a higher value to reduce the rate of fire.

To edit the siege tower's health value / flamability chance, you need to edit these attributes (above the attack attributes):

Code:

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engine_flammable    true
engine_ignition        0.20

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And further down:

Code:

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engine_health        130

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Edit the same values for the other 2 siege towers, which are middle_tower (vs large stone walls) and heliopolis (vs epic stone walls).

It looks like the siege_tower doesn't use the scorpion projectiles, but instead arrows. To make it fire like the other 2 siege tower types, simply edit the following:

Code:

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

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Make it look like as below:

Code:

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attack_stat        8, 2, scorpion, 100, 30, siege_missile, siege, piercing
attack_stat_attr    ap

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And also change this:

Code:

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projectile            arrow

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to this:

Code:

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projectile            scorpion

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In descr_projectiles_new, scroll down until you reach the ballistas / scorpions section (they're near the end of the file). There are several variations of each one, the actual ballista is the ballista siege weapon, whereas the tower_ballista is the ballista projectile used with epic stone walls.

To edit the damage impact of these projectiles, simply edit these:

Code:

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damage        12
damage_to_troops 5

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Anybody tried moding "fire_interval" to 0.15 ?
Boy that was quick and fun...
Now if only towers had more ammo...

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Originally Posted by Seasoned Alcoholic

Have you also modded the engine_health values for all 3 siege towers? If you look at the default values you will see that:

* small siege towers (vs stone walls) have 130 health;
* medium siege towers (vs large stone walls) have 150 health;
* large siege towers, aka heliopolis (vs epic stone walls) have 1000 health.

To put this engine_health into some kind of perspective, a standard battering ram's health is 100, and these regularly go up in flames against any type of stone walls. The only tower type I've seen destroyed by wall defences is the small siege tower, but this is only on rare occasions.

If you want to improve the chances of the defenders being able to destroy siege towers, I would lower the engine_health values. Also note that you need to set engine_flammable to true in order for the towers to take damage and become destroyed.

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Does health really matter?
As far as I understand, after towers gets catched in flames, the amount of hp it not important, it will burn away eventually (but those with more hp just slower).

if you change the towers rate of fire you might also want to change the effecteveness of archers on the ground firing at those on the wall..

it's really strange that if you should with 160 men arrows you maybe kill, wound 1 or 2 guys when the walls are packed with men...

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Originally Posted by player1

Does health really matter?
As far as I understand, after towers gets catched in flames, the amount of hp it not important, it will burn away eventually (but those with more hp just slower).

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It seems that the small and medium siege towers are invunerable to any damage, be it from towers or wall defenders. However, they are not invunerable to flaming projectiles. If you increase the flammability chance, the flaming arrows that are fired from both wall towers and archers will have an improved chance of setting the tower alight. As you've mentioned, once the tower is burning, its damage rating increases dramatically until it reaches 100% and is destroyed.

The large siege tower (heliopolis) actually receives damage from wall towers (but not archers), depending on what damage value you specify in descr_projectiles_new (tower_ballista). You can make archers damage siege towers by increasing their damage rating, but I've noticed that they will shed the health from siege towers in no time unless you modify the default health value.

my tactic when defending against towers: send a disposable unit out to meet the tower in the field, while my archers pepper the tower with fire-arrows from the walls. even the epic towers go up in the flames eventually.

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Originally Posted by Slaists

my tactic when defending against towers: send a disposable unit out to meet the tower in the field, while my archers pepper the tower with fire-arrows from the walls. even the epic towers go up in the flames eventually.

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Sounds interesting. Never tried that myself.