Capturing archer towers

Hello people of the .org,

New to the forum, but not unknown to the Total War series as i own all of the games. So I believe you can take a guess at my enthusiasm over the newest release.

However as I started to play with the Turks I encountered an annoying obstacle. In R:TW it was possible for troops to capture the pesky archer towers located on the city walls by simply marching your troops inside or through them. However now as i march my troops through the gate section of the city walls they capture the gate which opens up quite nice, but the archers keep on firing from the towers onto the poor bastards!

This is extremely enfuriating. Has this simply been changed in Medieval 2 or am I missing something? Is artillery like ballistae or trebuchets the only way to silence the towers? Or should I just rush quickly through the gates deeper into the city?

Thank you for your "READ the faq!" reply...

You are not missing something, it has been changed. You can no longer capture any part of a castle or city except the gates themselves. Note that this does not include the gatehouse towers. All city and castle towers will continue to fire arrows while any friendly unit is nearby. If you want to silence the towers, you need to kill or run off any nearby enemy unit. Even after that is done, there is no possible way to gain control of the towers yourself and have them fire at the defenders.

The upside of this is that towers on an undefended section of wall will not fire at you. So, a city defended by one unit of peasants can no longer burn siege towers attacking multiple gates.

This is in the manual, but I don't know if it's correct. According to the manual, the towers fire for the owner of the settlement providing one of that owner's units is nearby. You can take control of the square while troops are still on the walls. If that bit in the manual is correct, taking the square will suddenly cause all towers to belong to you, and any near your units will begin firing on enemy units within line of sight and range. It's pg. 58 in the manual, under Using Defensive Fortifications.

Too see how it works, go into a custom battle or wait for one in the campaign and move your men around the fortifications during deployment, you'll see a flag pop out of the tower showing it is activated The tower gates will always be active as long as you have 1 unit within a certain distance of the gatehouse but as the defender you have to control both the top of the gatehouse and behind it, the attacker only has to capture 1 to gain control. Also a routing/fighting to the death unit will cause the owner to lose control of the tower.