Hello, Org. Been reading these forums for some time, after I discovered Total War for myself, which has not been so long ago, and I would like to thank all contributors for the wealth of information provided here over all those years, and for the friendly and helpful atmosphere of the forum - a rare find on the Internet these days.
Never wrote here before, as I thought it would be of not much use to ask any questions regarding MTW 1, a game that has been around for quite a while already, but since the forum is still active, I would like to ask for your help on a problem still not described elsewhere - at least I haven`t been able to find any mentions. The game is so great that it just won`t age for me, never get tired of it. I am sorry if the post turned out to be a little longer than it would be necessary.
So... the thing is, I like castle defence battles in MTW. The reasons behind this involve painful experience with 10000 Mongols... ah, never mind. :) After the shock of that hopeless battle (happened during my first game, when I just did not know what to expect from the Horde), the remnants of my lightly armoured Egyptian troops fled to the Khazar castle, and mounted a surprisingly effective defence there, despite being vastly outnumbered. The small garrison in Volga-Bulgaria had no chance at all, so they have fortified themselves in the friendly local Citadel and Barbican; being fresh and at full strength, they fared even better. It was comforting to see the dreaded Mongol Heavy Cavalry, who seemed unbeatable in the field at first, as well as those nasty Horse Archers, going SPLAT! under those flying rocks.
Since then, it has always been a pleasure for me to be able to lure a sizeable enemy force to a well-built castle, even more so with the mobile Mongols. With previous Shogun experience, I learned the basics quite soon, and later, in my Danish game, I moved on to capture the North-Eastern steppe provinces early just to have the time to build them up and give the Horde a warm welcome at a later stage.
Remembering the lovely rock rain hurled by my Egyptian Citadel, I thought I would develop my Khazar castle to the maximum, which would supposedly be even better. So, by the time 1231 struck, everything was ready - there was a great big Fortress towering over the steppe lands, with a handful of proficient spearmen and halberdiers inside, donning the best armour from the frosty Sweden, a couple of random undersized mercenary horsemen for suicide attacks on siege contraptions, a lone peasant to stand idly at the back of the Fortress and a nice little commander. With the success of past Egyptian siege defences in mind, I was planning on halving the Khazar Mongol force at least.
Everyone was set and in position, and the Begin Battle button was pushed. As with my Citadel, I expected the Fortress to start bombarding the Mongols with whatever rocks they had stashed inside, and was anxious to hear those heartwarming bang sounds from the Mongol side of the map.
What I got instead was... silence. Just nothing there except for the thuds of Mongol horse hoofs and the occasional clanks of rare arrows pecking helplessly at the Heavy Cavalry`s armour. No rocks, no ballista bolts, no nothing. The Mongol vanguard just marched calmly towards my first gate.
While the Mongols were gnawing happily at my gates (I could swear I heard them giggling mischievously at the failure of my plans in the process!), I had several minutes to try and figure out what went wrong. Therefore, I started examining the great big useless tombstone that my Fortress would soon become, trying to figure out the malfunctioning Catapult Towers. There were none - I was moving on from one tower to another... an Arrow Tower, another one... yet another Arrow Tower... oh wait, here`s something - a Gun Tower!
Further inspection revealed that the Fortress was indeed only armed with Arrow Towers and Gun Towers. The latter, however, never fired a shot, and just stood there idly. Arrows alone were definitely not enough, the approaching waves of Mongols could barely control themselves to laughter. I kept looking at all those obsolete Gun Towers, remembering my good old Catapults and searching desperately for the possible tower faults; there were none.
Just as the Mongol Heavies were about to crush my third and final gate, a rather logical explanation occurred to me. Never knew whether it was true or not, but it was the only one I could think of: my ingenious engineers invented them guns, they even produced some and placed those inside the Fortress towers, but... yes! they forgot to invent gunpowder!!! It was only going to be around by 1260, and right now it`s 1231.
The men inside the Fortress fought hard, but could do little against the endless Mongols without artillery support. As the last defenders were being slaughtered, I was thinking that the lesson was, in fact, quite simple: do not build above Citadel and Barbican while waiting for Mongols, as there is no gunpowder for the Fortress. The Citadel and Barbican option brought me a number of rewarding sieges in later games.
Recently, however, I was playing as the Russians, and have already built a very nice empire, but without Constantinople, didn`t want to have any beef with the Turks until I would get rid of the English problem to the west. Nevertheless, it grew more interesting as the Constantinople province became the ground for a number of battles between the Turks and the Hungarians. The flag above Constantinople has already changed a couple of times, so I thought it would be unwise to let them destroy all those tasty buildings in the great city. Next turn, while Constantinople was held by the Hungarians and targeted by a Turkish Jihad, I noticed a lone Hungarian Chivalric MAA troop with a low loyalty rating sitting tight just inside the Constantinople fortress - and, naturally, could not resist the temptation. My Emissaries moved in and bribed the swordsmen.
Enraged by such impudence, while the Jihad had yet to reach Constantinople, the Hungarians launched an assault on the Fortress. The year was 1287, gunpowder has already been around for a while, so I was hoping I would finally see them mighty Fortress cannons in action.
Nope. No cannonballs again. The Hungarians were not numerous enough to take the Fortress anyway, but the question remains -
Why am I unable to get my Fortress Gun Towers to fire? Has anyone encountered that problem before? Maybe something is wrong with my game settings? Please help if you can, gentlemen; it is not that it would be of major importance for the progress of the game, but, as I said, I just like MTW siege defences. Thank you for taking the time to read through this long post.
