help assaulting stone walls

i need some advice assaulting stone walls. whenever i am forced to siege a city with stone walls, i usually sustain heavy casualties. units scaling the walls with ladders get wiped out almost immediately. siege towers usually get burned or even if they do get to the wall, the units get wiped out since i can't get other units to support them.

now i usually still win the siege by distracting one part of the defense while a unit sneaks onto an undefended part of the wall, and then moving to the nearest unguarded gatehouse, thus allowing the rest of my army to occupy the square, but i have to sacrifice many units to do this, usually up to half of my standing army if i'm facing a well defended city.

so my question is what kind of unit should i send to the walls with high survivability rates? how can i prevent the assaulting units from being isolated and surrounded on the walls from all sides? or simply put, how can i minimize my casualties when assaulting stone walls, other than just starving out the city?

i am playing as hayasdan by the way. the units i use to assault the walls are usually medium armenian infantry and persian hoplites. they get slaughtered by seleucid or ptolemaioi native or medium phalanxes on the walls.

I recommend assaulting stone walls with the greatest weapon of all: Time. Unless you're in a hurry for whatever reason, just wait out the siege.

If you're too impatient for that, be sure to bring a bit of siege weaponry along--catapults and the like, whatever they're calling them these days. The towers of a stone wall are absolute murder, so you want to be able to take them out to reduce casualties. The towers are also usually the primary cause of destroyed siege towers, and if you destroy them first, you can move the siege towers in unhindered. Of course, if you're going to do that, you may as well just knock down the wall itself. Then you don't have to deal with fighting the enemy atop the wall, and you might even kill a large number of the enemy unit that's standing on the wall when it collapses.

Cheers.

As you deploy your army, survey the city. Find a good angled wall where the towers have a blind spot. Deploy a ladder unit so that it can reach this spot easily. Make sure it is an assault unit. Follow with a couple of missile units and a non-essential unit.

Leave most of your army at the starting point. That will tie down the enemy defenders. If you have a reasonably strong army, set up two detachments for wall scaling. Make sure to use ladders. On turn one you should have built whatever you can: ladders, siege tower(-s) and sap points.

If a particularly nasty enemy unit is above a sap point, then send a skirmisher unit in to sap the wall. It will cost you to fix, but the enemy's losses will be significant.

As you scale the wall with help of ladders, place the assault unit in a defensive position away from the ladders and preferably so that it is in control of a tower. Sometimes, there is a unit on the ground behind a gate close by. Get a tower or the gate to fire at it. These missiles are free.
Send in unit #2 - a skirmisher unit or a 3rd rate unit and send it along the wall and take tower after tower. YOU want to be in control of as many towers as possible. Send in a missile unit and follow the assault unit towards the defenders on the wall. Let them come to you, while you shower them with stones or arrows. Send in another missile unit. This should be it for the initial detachment.

The defenses have been breached, and you now send more units to the ladders. Another assault unit, some missile units, etc. Once you have cleared the walls, the defenders haven't got a chance. Towers will decimate them and your missile units will destroy them. Drive them to the square. Get all your units in. Send spent units out (decimated and missile troops without ammo).

Advance with a strong defensive unit and block the exit from the square. Bring up missile units and shower the defenders in the middle. They will attack, but will be stopped by your defensive unit (phalanxes are superb for this job). Once you are confident that you can break their units, attack the square and take it.

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(Haven't read all replies in their entirety, so excuse me if I repeat your suggestions.)

• Forget rams and ladders.
• If you have sapping capable units, build one sap point.
• Sap or no, build two siege towers.
• Assign the siege towers to melee units with higher defence capabilities, most preferably armoured and shielded, to sustain as few losses as possible to the magic laser guns.
• Deploy before the front with the shortest possible route to the plaza.
• Group your melee units into two; one to follow each siege tower. (Three if you have a sap point.)
• Group your missile units into two, one for following each siege tower.
• Once the game starts, examine the enemy deployment on the walls. If they have so many capable units on the walls, the battle will be bloody.
• Draw your siege tower manually, without clicking any of the walls. Turn FAW on and off as you approach the defenders and use your magic bartixian auto-operating siege tower machine gun to decimate them. Spare your ammunition to divide between the enemy units. Then click a wall and start the storming.
• Have your support units approach as your initial assault regiment climbs up. Two at a time, or even one. Have fresh reserves. Don't make them run unless in emergency - such as enemy machine gun salvo from the towers.
• Micromanage your two towers to assault simultaneously to two walls, one at each side of the gatehouse, as close from the gatehouse and towers as possible.
• Invade the gatehouse and the nearby towers so that they can open to you.
• Once the wall defenders are taken care of, send your missile regiments up the walls via siege towers. There are still defenders below to be killed, although they are pretty good at getting themselves grinded by the captured gatehouse and towers.
• Once you are certain that the backbone of the enemy defence is broken, have the rest of your troops march through the gate. There will be counter-attacks originating from the plaza, so keep them in formation ready to battle, defence-high infantry first.
• Use your missile and skirmishers efficiently (turn FAW off and target manually) to decrease the number and morale of the remaining defence force even more.
• Advance organized and calmly towards the plaza.

Hth
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Bearing in mind that I've not played as Hayasdan (who I understand have pretty weak infantry) and I play on Huge:

Most of the time I find the AI generally has only fairly light defences but I've done pretty well with this technique (& really you should be taking pretty heavy casualties attacking a heavily defended town)

For assaults, you want an infantry heavy army with at least a couple of your heaviest, baddest mofos.

I generally build only one ladder & one tower or two towers.
I never bother with artillery, rams or saps.

Missiles are great against wooden walls which they can shoot over but generally hit a lot of stone & little flesh vs. stone walls so I take only 2 or maybe 3 on wall attacks.

Its important to understand the strengths & weaknesses of the ladder & tower. When you understand these, it makes your attacks easier.

The ladder.
Pros:
5 ladders enable you to put lots of soldiers onto the walls fast.
Can't be stopped without killing your whole unit (& you can just pick them up with another unit)
Cons:
Don't shoot or give any shelter to the carrying unit
Direction changes can get hairy.
The biggie is this though; If there is a good combat unit at the top, they get to surround your 5 ladder heads & chop your guys as they come over the parapet.

The tower.
Pros:
They can shoot at the guys on the walls (I only really use this as they approach but it is historically accurate to sit back & shoot the heck out of the guys on the wall)
Provide a modicum of shelter to your guys as they approach.
Your guys climb up, collect at the top & come out in a big bunch.
Cons:
They can be collapsed if exposed to too much enemy fire.
After that initial rush, your guys only trickle up one by one. (towers for large stone walls are faster but often bugged such that heaps of your guys will run in & out of the base & not go up)

So the deal is this:
Once you have a group of guys who span the width of the wall, its much harder for them to push you back off so you want to get this asap.

If you can get a bunch of guys up largely unchallenged (no defender or weak missile units), you can use ladders to reinforce quickly & continuously to win by attrition.

If you have weaker infantry or just a strong defender, the tower is the better option as you get that initial bunch of guys who can easily get a beach head.
You win as long as your reinforcements come up faster than the guys already there are dying.

A perfect attack would go something like this:
Your heaviest baddest ass mofos should man particularly the tower but if you think the ladder will take casualties, put them there too (yup you want the elite guys you hate taking casualties in the forefront, thats what they're for).
Assuming you are able to get the beach head with the ladder, attack heavy troops are better than defensive.

Attack one on each side of the gateway, go for the wall section near the towers rather than the gateway. (the gateway gets more shots off at your guys)
Preferably (but I normally forget) you want to have the ladder guys start scaling the wall just after the first guys pop out of the tower.
The AI will rush its wall infantry to attempt to push off the first on the wall.
With the AI concentrating on your tower units, you quickly take the other side of the gate (you'll normally be fighting light missiles initially & typcially from only one direction).
If its going to be a bit of a battle near the ladders, you want to get your guys to run in the direction the enemy is coming from asap.
Guys coming up from a ladder into even quite light units = lots of your guys dead.

Once you have control of one side of the gate, send guys through to start chopping the rear of the guys taking on your tower assault unit.
Sometimes its a good idea to send someone down, past & then back up to flank the defenders. (difficult if there are heavy cav/other heavy ground units hanging around down there)
Having gained control of both bits of wall, send some depleted guys around to capture enough towers to secure your route to the town centre & bring in fresh troops through the gate for the push to the town centre. (your wall troops are going to be exhausted & depleted)

@BerkeleyBoi

OFFTOPIC on!

heyho, a Victoria player!

nice to see that someone plays this game, too
in the case you don´t know it...

www.terranova.dk => VIP (Victoria Improvement Project), mod for Vic+VicRev.

OFFTOPIC off!

Problem is that your units (on hughe and often on large as well) will get seriously disoriented & disorganized from walking down a wall. In that case - you really shouldn't want to fight out a battle on the walls. Much better tactics would be to lure the enemy into sallying forth - then obliterating them. This way you will be able to capture the walls without losing so many men -- simply because the real fighting doesn't take place on the deadly walls.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BerkeleyBoi

i am playing as hayasdan by the way. the units i use to assault the walls are usually medium armenian infantry and persian hoplites. they get slaughtered by seleucid or ptolemaioi native or medium phalanxes on the walls.

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Others have covered the general case; I'll simply add that I don't think Srakir Martikner are quite tough enough to take a contested wall - they're basically Hastati, after all. Pantodapoi Phalangitai are amazingly good defending walls - that AP axe they carry is nasty! You can get them yourself (Regional MIC-3, I think), so it's worth experimenting to see if they work well as assault troops (assuming the game lets you send a phalanx unit up a tower, that is) too. I don't recommend fighting on walls for Hayasdan, though. If all the garrison has is Pantodapoi, skirmishers, Nizag Gund, etc., fine, but AS (and the Ptolemies, too) has so very many ways to produce infantry you just can't match. Beat 'em in the open field, then starve 'em to death.

If you really really want to attack instead of letting they surrender or sally out, in your especific case I wuold say three things toghether with everything else said here, sap, sap and sap this way you may enter the city and make your heavy cavalry advantage worthy!

I have actually found that in terms of losing men attacking stone walls is preferable to attacking "cheap" wooden walls, primarily because of one reason- the towers can be captured. I generally build 2 siege towers and at least 4 ladders. First deploy most of your units in the front and then take two relatively weak and expendable units (but with moderately good defense, something like levy hoplites of the non-phalanx variety work pretty well here) and put them on ladders. Then look for two blind spots on the walls to the far right and left of your main force and have the two aforementioned units scale them. As soon as they reach the top have them start capturing the towers around the entire city, since almost all of your troops are concentrating one one side the defenders on top of the walls will only be on the same side that your army is on, meaning you can capture every single tower except for the 4 or 5 that are either right next to the enemy troops or close enough to them that capturing them would provoke an attack before we are ready, from now on any enemy that gets close to our brand new towers will quickly be cut down by our arrows, and the AI for some reason will never attempt to recapture them!

The next step is to move all but two of your assault units (high defense, high attack, preferably armed with swords and units you don't care about too much as these are the only units they will take significant casualties) in between towers that have already been captured and make sure they are approximately split in half and arranged on either side of the enemies still holding the front walls. The two units that are being held back should be attached to your siege towers. When every single one of the other soldiers are all on top of the walls have them charge the enemy, after a few minutes when everyone is busy fighting deploy your siege towers right in the middle of the melee so that the enemy is cut in half and being attacked from both sides. Relatively quickly they will be dead to the last man.

By now just about every enemy not in the city center will also be dead thanks to the captured towers. The only thing left is to charge the town square from all sides, and capture the town with an incredible kill-to-loss ratio. Though if you are playing with no time limit first you may want to take your missile units around the walls and try to find a sweet spot where you can pick off soldiers in the town center without worrying about counterattacks, predictable this will further reduce your losses.

I much dislike attacking stone walls of any sort with any sort of good/bad infantry, but this is because I never played any good-assault-infantry faction to the stage where they actually could train good assault infantry. I prefer to attack wooden walls because they give my slingers and archers a clear field of fire over them, and because the defenders all start out just behind the walls, it means my slingers get a wonderful chance to decimate them as they scatter like quails to run out of range. Then as they get out of range, i advance my rams, prompting them to move forwards again to defend the breaches, allowing my slingers to kill more of them! And get this: while archers have only 12 or 15 arrows, slingers have 40 bullets, and their lethality IIRC is higher.

If I HAVE to attack stone walls, though, I prefer to advance at most two towers. Location is not a priority as long as I advance them at blind spots. I sometimes like to put two towers at two corners of the city, then advance towards the gatehouse. THat way I capture an entire front of the walls while I'm at it. Defending units don't really suffer from my captured towers nowadays, because they know to keep themselves in the town square, and anyhow, the cities I capture don't seem to have very effective machineguns when turned inwards to face the city interior. And has anyone noted Eastern stone walls don't fire inwards, fullstop? THat happened to me when I captured Carthage.