Werid Seige problems

Well i've played enough with different factions to know that there is something amiss with the seige option. To cut right to the point, if you take a full stack army with a 9 star gen and seige a settlment wi th half as many people, and then auto resolve you almost allways win. Your casulties will be anywhere form 20-200ish and thats that. However, i've noticed that EVERY time I play the attacker in a seige, even if i win i loose soooo many men! This is abit odd to me, because the same battles would be won if i had clicked auto resolve with not many casulties. Now i know this revolves around the difficulety you set for the game, but i first noted that on H/H my dismounted fudual knights were geting killed very easily ince they climbed up the ladders or got out of the tower against town milita! Now i can understand attackers geting some sort of penalty, thats fine with me. But when you take a unit in chain mail, sword and sheild and then tell me that "defeat is a distinct possibilty" against town militia, i just dont buy it.

Oddly enough, the same thing happens when the AI sends its very best up on my walls. I noticed my archers beating back armored sergents and then shoting them with arrows after they routed. Anyway i dont mind it to much, but i would like to know if anyone has figured out a way to actually win and not take massive losses? it seems like even if you scale an unoccupied section of the walls, you still take alot of losses fighting ON the walls as the attacker. Anyway i would defently like to hear how you guys are winning your seige battles? i mean sending good units to seize the towers was something i been doing since RTW but it seems much much harder now, any ideas?

As for the auto resolve they greatly improved it for annoying battles. For battles where you have 5-1 odds or greater you will usually actually take slightly less casualties than you normally would but also kill a lot less than you normally would. So slightly less experience at the cost of saving a few men. Just don't use it when the odds are close.

As for defending walls theres a few factors. First those archers probably arent making to many kills once they engage in melee, what is really happening is your towers are taking them out while your archers are there just holding them in place.

Taking the towers out of the equation, siege towers lets quite a few men out in 1 swarm so they should win vs archers. Now as for ladders your men are coming up in single file so at first they are getting double teamed at first until the unit looks like it gets a foothold. The hard part is getting men on the wall instead of ladder fighting. Also there just might be a penalty while fighting on a ladder, I have no proof but it does seem elite units fight poorly off a ladder. So ladders are best for unmanned sections or to take inner walls, or if you have very few build points.

Also Fortress/citadel are quite deadly no matter what you send up the wall.

If you zoom in, you'd see that the men from ladders and even siege towers are being camped as they move onto the walls. I've see 3 guys in my longbowmen unit (guys, not unit) take out an entire unit of merc spears trickling off a siege tower.

Thus, I've abandoned siege towers and ladders as an option and instead resort to ramming open the gate and charging a horde through. This usually allows me to bypass the enemy on the walls. My men then form up in the streets and destroy them as they try to get back to the town square.

I'm actually able to get 3:2 kills ratios (in my favor) in siege battles (with comparable troops) in this way. They seem to have nerfed the ladders/towers but also eliminated the burning oil, making a massive zerg rush at the gate the preferred strategy. Then again, sometimes autocalc is the way to go as you don't need to actually kill all defenders, only about 50% or so despite there being no retreat for them.

FWIW, I'm having a hard time with sieges too. I've about given up on ladders and siege towers, because anything I send up takes major losses, even when matched against very weak defenders. I think it's largely due to being shot up by the wall tower ballistas, and the way you can't turn them "off" by running through the tower and capturing it like we could in RTW. Instead, you have to drive ALL defenders away from ALL nearby towers, which takes a long time, and exposes your army to constant fire until you can break away from the walls and get deeper into the city.

So, I've been focusing more on breaking gates, making breaches in the walls, or having spies open the gates, and then doing the zerg ground rush (as Katank described it). If possible I do that at more than one place, to split up the defenders and get through the gates faster. Doing it in several places also allows the use of cavalry, because often there will be at least one undefended gate where I can rush in a few cav units. They do have trouble maneuvering and charging in city streets, but they're good for hitting the back of defenders at the other gates, who are engaged with my main infantry forces. Cav are also good (once they're inside the walls) for luring enemy off the walls and deeper int the city, where you can engage away from the fire of the blasted wall towers.

Also, I agree the auto-resolve is wacky. The end-result of taking the objective or losing is consistent with a manual battle. I always win if I go in with a slight advantage like 7:5 ratio and evenly-matched or superior units. But the losses for my army (and the enemy army) are way, way off. I always lose many more men in a manual battle, and end up with just a handful of survivors. With auto-resolve I still have most of my army left. I think the difference may be that the auto-resolve just matches up the attacking vs. defending army units, and doesn't factor in the effect of the wall tower ballistas? I'm not sure, but that seems the only reason why my forces would be so depleted... unless I just really suck as a field commander.

Unfortunately that makes it very attractive to just auto-resolve sieges, which I'd rather not do. I think either the fire rate of the wall tower ballistas needs to be reduced, or else a return of the ability to control towers by running through them would help.

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Well i've played enough with different factions to know that there is something amiss with the seige option. To cut right to the point, if you take a full stack army with a 9 star gen and seige a settlment wi th half as many people, and then auto resolve you almost allways win. Your casulties will be anywhere form 20-200ish and thats that. However, i've noticed that EVERY time I play the attacker in a seige, even if i win i loose soooo many men! This is abit odd to me, because the same battles would be won if i had clicked auto resolve with not many casulties. Now i know this revolves around the difficulety you set for the game, but i first noted that on H/H my dismounted fudual knights were geting killed very easily ince they climbed up the ladders or got out of the tower against town milita! Now i can understand attackers geting some sort of penalty, thats fine with me. But when you take a unit in chain mail, sword and sheild and then tell me that "defeat is a distinct possibilty" against town militia, i just dont buy it.

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Yes I feel those two problems are something that should be taken care of. Sometimes it gets so ridiculous.

/rant
So I had defeated this crusader army (m/m difficulty) and their 8 star general, also a faction heir, survived and decided to run away. Just to prove it to myself that my archer units suck hard even with 7 to ranged attack, I sent 5 units of desert archers to the general's lone, heavy cav unit that comprised of 9 people including the heroic general himself. The fight ensues after some time and the almost 300 weaklings in rags with clownish and clumsy bows and outfit and what not start firing volleys of toothpicks and wooden splinters, and hurl stones and whatnot, on these brave and heroic men of steel who smile and go 'Let me have it, heathen, har har..'. I moved the time warp slider to x3 and looked on as these brave men survived the rain of toothpicks, getting injured by them a lot, but never dying. Then a couple of them die (finally) to my amazement, with the archers almost out of toothpick missiles now asking each other if the general and his men were wearing that dreaded and fabled, european heavy mail that eastern arrows can just never penetrate no matter what?! *gasp*. That's when the steeley general bellows and makes a heroic charge, judging that the knaves are now full of fear. Running down the archers with their armored warhorses, who, in response, pull out their rusty and dull antique butter knives their mama had told them to take with 'em just in case, having old pride and trust in their horde of numbers. Anyway, after a lot of death and heroic slaughter, the general is left alone with some 80 archers still standing audaciously. The rest having taken each other to the afterlife, with the general's elite personal guard numbering as raisin in the flour of my archers. Little did these 80 men know that the general -was- indeed wearing the legendary heavy plate mail, carrying a special sword of spanish steel gifted to him by a great swordsmith, and that he was so scarred, that no puny knives ever made a slash painful enough to actually hurt him or rend his tough skin of coldworked steel. To make it short, the general kills these 80 or so desert archers alone! Charging into their midst repeatedly and unleashing a blade storm as he rode through each time. These poor bastards having already fired all their obsolete and unblessed toothpicks and having only rusted butter knives and no brains to improvise, gave their lives to their own foolishness.
/rant

Next I send two units of mamluks and press auto resolve and the fleeing enemy general is slain instantly with some mamluk casualities.

After that I reloaded the autosave and sent those same 5 archer units again to the general and click auto resolve and voila! The general is dead with my archers having taken considerable casualities. Now, I wonder what tactics I forgot to use that made Captain Mahmood a superior leader than I am. If I could promote or decorate this man, I would have done so.

The reason why I don't go beyond medium difficulty in battle map. The AI is improved, but also the enemies get huge bonuses to their offensive & defensive stats, which, for now, I'd rather avoid. That is because of the bug which is very noticable during city assaults. When you move all your forces into the flagged area inside enemy settlement, to capture it, you can see packets of the enemy troops killing your soldiers with your soldiers just walking to them blindly sometimes. The individual melee AI (if that even exists) is very sluggish for some reason in closely packed fights such as these. Generals can have largely varied power in a game, but as a thumb rule, if it's your general he WILL eventually die in melee. If it's your archers, and you're playing on hard, they WILL be penalised and made ineffective unless in vast numbers.