Cities>Castles

Cities>Castles

I haven't seen much discussion on this topic so far & its something that I think needs to be looked at.
My main problem with this new feature is that it weakens a very important part of the campaign without adding any improvements to the campaign. I find the castle/city feature contributes to a problem that has been around since STW. In STW we had the full stack of Uesugi samurai archers or the hojo horde would be 50% YA, 40% YS & 10% all other units. In MTW we had the large amount of pesants/urban militia that would make up a large part of the AI armies even in the late period of the game. In RTW we had the AI depleting its settlements to build hordes of spear warband/phalanxs, but probably the most annoying part was having to face full stacks of wardogs/armoured elephants.
In MTW2 the problem is aggrevated by this new feature which forces the AI to specialize its production centres, the funny thing is the AI is totally unaware of this new feature. So what does this feature add to the game,
BattleMap
Castles are smaller than cities with stronger walls & towers so you need more ammo for your seige equipment to force an entry. Because Castles are smaller inside its much easiar to get units around the streets and into the flanks of the defending units. Add to this the AI's tendency to leave castles with very few units defending(normally just a generals bodyguard). So in my opinion castles in general are much easiar to assault then cities. As for defending them they are slightly easiar to defend early on but cities soon become easiar to defend especially considering the towers bug & the extra income that the city will provide.
So on the battlemap I find castles to be pretty much a complete failure at what they are supposed to do & since the AI nearly always assaults any bonus for holding out is pointless.
CampaignMap
First off I need to point out that the AI will never convert a city/castle this is probably for the best as the AI would need a lot of scripting to be able to use this properly or without problems. The main effects of the castle/city system are economic & army compostion both are very important when it comes to making a stronger campaign AI.
Economics
This is very important and the castle/city system has a big effect on this. I'll use Sicily as an example
Sicily get an excellent unit lineup from cities & from castles.
Palermo is the best province apart from Constantinople in the med. It has 4 trade goods & plently of ports that have none of the trade goods to trade with. When I play as Sicily I convert Palermo to a city asap its a real money maker. With the new naval invasion AI(which is great although needs a lot of fine tunning) the Sicilians expand to Tunis, Sardinia, Tripoli etc but all these provinces start as castles which means the AI is stuck with 4-5 castles & only 1 city Naples which the pope often likes to take. This is an economic downward spiral for the AI as castles aren't very profitable and the units produced in them tend to have more expensive upkeep.
Army Composition
Well the amount of siege units that you come across on the campaign map is a shinning example of the city/castle system, Siege units are one of the few units that be trained in both castles/cities regardless of faction or religion.
The HRE have the worst unit lineup from a city in the game which is probably one of the reasons they don't do so well on campaign map. Tbh an AI controlled HRE really dosen't stand a chance due to its unit lineup from cities, the european halberd militia is probably the best unit they get from cities but in auto resolve its pretty useless due to its very low unit stats.

It would be interesting to see how campaigns play out without this feature, it would also add more buildings to the all too quickly built building lineup and it would actually make some buildings worth building(stables). Some of the units could be got rid of aswell ie peasant crossbow = militia crossbow

I could probably babble on about this for days but I think this post is long enough as it is I hope that someone can take up the cause of the castle/city system as I can't see any benifits for me as a player or for the AI.

Actally partly I have to agree, but only partly. I get what you're saying BUT the castle/city system gives a new strategic depth to the game, which is quite good. But there could be a better implementation. And the AI really does it all wrong. For me the best idea would be, that provinces could have both castles and cities (this would seem quite logical), of course the problem is that this could not be done by modding alone.

I agree that the balance between them is a problem. I do wish they gave the AI some programming to decide whether or not to alter them, as castles become huge money sinks that need a couple cities to back up. 4 half-developed castles and 4 cities are far inferior to 2 well-developed castles and 6 cities, for instance. A couple things I would change:

-AI programming to allow for changing city types
-AI programming to de-stress forming armies from city militia units (barring the exceptional ones like gunpowder units, some siege units, saracen militia, italian militia, etc.)
-AI programming to de-stress so many siege engines. I've made some minor changes to my game to effect this, but it's still a problem.
-Increase citadel's recruitment slots to 4. Cities catch up to 3 pretty quickly, so you need to give the castle an edge. Especially in the late game when some factions can just run completely out of cities. Take spain, for example. You can recruit Gendarmes, Jinetes, gunpowder troops, Tercio Pikemen, and siege engines out of cities. Why bother with castles at that point if they've both got the same number of recruitment slots, cities have a higher population pool, and cities make far more money?
-Allow castles to garrison units for free as well. I'm highly considering modding castle farms to work a little differently and increase the free upkeep slots of castles. This, of course, does no good if the castle produces no such units. So I'd also mod all the peasant-type units to have the "free_upkeep" ability to represent local peasant militia. Compared to town militia, spear militia, crossbow militia, (and if you're lucky, billmen militia, sword militia) etc. peasants, peasant archers, and peasant crossbowmen come out equal to or more often worse than their township competitors, so I don't feel this is a bad solution. City units are still better for garrisoning and cities would still get far more free upkeep slots.

I think that'd be sufficient, really. Mostly about AI behavior and a little bit of castle-tweaking. I don't think castles should have gunpowder troops, so I'm okay with that being left out (other than big guns, of course).

One thing I did want to mention was that castles are good for building up characters. It's a good place to drop a character to pick up the chivalrous rule traits as well as picking up further chivalry bonuses from jousting buildings. Also, high-level military buildings often grant command-boosting ancillaries. At the very least, it establishes some decent positive traits that can stand to bolster your character against the often-debilitating influence of governing a city.

the AI isnt intelligent, so adding depth to the game makes the game worse, until the AI is made to work as well as the player with said depth.

As it is, they have armies of town militia and siege weapons. That is stupid

The city/castle feature was very poorly implemented, unless there was a real multiplayer campaign (the one we have now is only half complete).

99 % of the campaigns being played are against the AI (correct me if Im wrong). So such features that only help the player, make it too easy.

The city vs castle debate is quite interesting, in the sense that for provinces with ports, it almost always make more sense to have a city. I mean, who has beaten the game with only land trade to rely on?

I'll even go as far as to suggest that ALL provinces with ports should be made cities so that the AI gets his dough. Otherwise, you could mod it so that u have highways, making inland cities more valuable.

Part of the intention for castles/cities is that as time goes on, more and better militia emerge from the cities, until at last you can operate your military almost exclusively from cities. Of course, certain factions do this better than others. I think only Spain and Italian factions can do completely without castles, while factions like England are crippled without castles.

If you like, you can modify the money earned from castles and cities via the settlement_mechanics file. I think castles are set to halve virtually everything that cities get. This includes public order penalties, so castles earn less but are much easier to manage.

This may be a little off topic, but does anyone else have the problem with the AI not being able to effectively assault the 2nd/3rd wall when you are defending a fortress/citadel? Citadel's have been great for me, if for no other reason than a couple of peasant archers can do huge damage to full stack armies while defending.

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Originally Posted by Diadochoi

This may be a little off topic, but does anyone else have the problem with the AI not being able to effectively assault the 2nd/3rd wall when you are defending a fortress/citadel? Citadel's have been great for me, if for no other reason than a couple of peasant archers can do huge damage to full stack armies while defending.

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I've occasionally had problems doing this myself, lol. If you happen to lose all your rams, or assaulted with only catapult-type siege equipment, it can be painful. Getting the equipment in position to pummel down a gate can be really impractical, and the pathfinding AI isn't always good about making your troops move between the wall levels to assault the next one with a closed gate. The AI is worse at that, but I seem to recall some of the wall levels in higher level castles don't even correctly connect, so if you can't get a piece of siege equipment safely setup to break the gate, it can in fact be impossible even for a human player to take the second or third level of walls. As I said the AI seems to be worse at this, but we should not assume that in all (or even most) cases it is the fault of the AI that it cannot correctly take the inner levels of walls.

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Originally Posted by the_foz_4

I've occasionally had problems doing this myself, lol. If you happen to lose all your rams, or assaulted with only catapult-type siege equipment, it can be painful. Getting the equipment in position to pummel down a gate can be really impractical, and the pathfinding AI isn't always good about making your troops move between the wall levels to assault the next one with a closed gate. The AI is worse at that, but I seem to recall some of the wall levels in higher level castles don't even correctly connect, so if you can't get a piece of siege equipment safely setup to break the gate, it can in fact be impossible even for a human player to take the second or third level of walls. As I said the AI seems to be worse at this, but we should not assume that in all (or even most) cases it is the fault of the AI that it cannot correctly take the inner levels of walls.

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I've had 5 instances where an enemy has attacked my citadel, each time with 3-4 battering rams (along with the usual ladders and siege towers). The second wall was is usually accessable from the first wall. Only once did they take the second wall, and that was due to 1 lucky unit moving along the first wall onto the 2nd wall. I've never had the AI bring siege equipment inside the city to assault the 2nd layer (and in my last instance, they actually had a unit go get the battering ram, only to retreat and take the ram with them :wall: ). In my case, it certainly appears to be an AI issue. Am I the only one who's experienced this?

the fact that Spys unlocks all three gates, means that i am virtually attacking a city... I just attack-rush all my heavy infantry into the square. they will fight anything on their way, and still fast enough to not take too much damage from the towers.