Siege equipment

[PBI]

I've only just noticed that it is no longer possible to sap the enemy walls during sieges as it was in RTW. Anyone know why it was removed? I hardly ever used it in RTW due to the plentiful heavy infantry for almost every faction but in my current Polish campaign it is occuring to me that it would be a very useful ability, to let me take a city with an all-cav army and one unit of cheap mercenary infantry (without autoresolving).

Also, why do my guys bother to build a shelter around the rams if they're not going to use it? Would be better not to bother and have the rams able to run.

[ataribaby]

Maybe they left sapping out because it reduces the necessity for rams and artillery in sieges. I always used towers, ladders and sapping in RTW and rarely bothered waiting around for artillery to arrive.

I never used rams in RTW because of the high blood price. You could pretty much kiss goodbye to whatever unit manned the ram and a good proportion of any units making it through the gate. The arrow towers seemed to be even more efficient than M2TW, and if you remember every tower was actively firing whether there was an enemy unit nearby or not. Also rams seemed very rarely to actually reach the gates before being burnt. The boiling oil was pretty lethal too and made using the gateway a very unattractive prospect (although I'm glad oil has returned in Kingdoms and the Retrofit Mod).

Conversely, in M2TW I never use ladders or towers except as feints to divert enemy troops away from my chosen breach point. I find the bonus that enemy troops on the walls get is ludicrous. Even heavy heavies seem to get pulped by peasant archers brandishing kitchen utensils.

I always build a couple of rams, but like you, I can't stand the sight of supposedly sentient men standing patiently in a nice block, getting systematically skewered while just ten of them are busy with the ram itself. Surely they should hunker up against the sides of the gate or find some other blind spot.

[PBI]

Yes, I never found much use for either sapping or artillery in RTW, mostly because I found those towers too valuable to waste. My aim in a siege would always be to storm the walls and capture the towers, which would then turn on the enemy troops who would always inevitably mill about behind the gateway rather than trying to retake the walls. Especially using decent Roman legionaries, it was possible to take a city very cheaply.

However now I almost never try to take the walls unless I have much better infantry than the enemy and no alternative. My preference is always to bring down the walls with artillery, so having sapping would be very useful, especially in the early sieges before I can get any decent artillery.

So I kind of feel they put sapping in the wrong game: RTW, where I never needed it, rather than M2TW, where it would be useful.

[ataribaby]

Yeah, taking over the towers was a pretty irresistable tactic given that they'd poot out arrows ad infinitum even after your unit had long since buggered off to the next tower. I remember It's A Knockout style races where a unit of hastati would zoom around atop the perimeter capping towers. Effective, but a bit ludicrous (although I'd love to have heard Stuart Hall commentate - he'd have been in bits ).

What I meant was that I did use sapping in RTW - to create wall breaches without artillery - especially to get cavalry inside the city. Cavalry charges in city streets were much easier to pull off with the RTW engine. If sapping was in M2TW I'm not sure I'd make the effort to train and transport arty units to sieges.

With artillery, instead of creating breaches I'll tend to pop the gates and then concentrate the fire on the gate towers. That nullifies any advantage the wall defenders have: they've no arrow towers and no reason to stay on their walls with their defence bonus once you've got a unit or two inside the walls. You can then just surround the exit doors at the base of the gate towers and cream the exiting units man by man.

[Ethelred Unread]

Sapping would be a bit of an exploit as it's too easy to bring a wall down. There's no defence against it as there are no moats in the game.

[ReiseReise]

There was one defense - It was possible to set the sap points on fire if you had long range flaming arrows.

My opinion on why they removed sapping is because they wanted to make sure that gunpowder artillery was the ultimate wall destroyer to emphasize the fact that after advanced cannons were invented, walls became virtually useless. This transition would not take place if walls were useless from the start because of invincible sappers.

However it would have been possible to implement sappers without ruining cannons, it would just have to be different than in RTW. First of all lets point out that in the RTW implementation, the little 'mole path' going towards the wall is a convenient representation of the sappers' progress. Obviously the tunnel has been completed before the assault battle begins, and is not being dug in 3 minutes. But it wouldn't be fun to have your walls collapse instantly when the battle begins, so its only purpose is to cause some sort of delay. My proposed system uses the same 'mole path' method of RTW but with some changes.
1) It takes a long time. Something like 200 build points per tunnel (twice as much as a siege tower) would make it take an extremely long time to take a settlement by sapping, as it should, you can't dig a 300 yard tunnel overnight.
2) Peasants or soldiers do not have the expertise necessary to dig an underground tunnel. Therefore a special "Engineer" units would be required for each tunnel. They should be rather expensive for having such a limited use (400 to recruit, 100 upkeep, 20 men) and have very low combat stats.
3) Alternative for #2, or maybe in addition to it. Instead of the Engineer unit, normal units can sap, but take casualties as they progress due to cave-ins. Losses would be 30-50%. There would also be a 10-20% chance the entire unit would perish when the wall collapses.
4) The higher level walls would be resistant to sapping. Historically as walls got taller and thicker, they also extended deeper underground to protect against sapping. This could be represented by sapping sometimes only damaging the wall instead of collapsing it completely. Higher level walls would have a higher chance of surviving.

These changes could make sapping possible, but not the sure-fire way to take down any wall as it was in RTW. Once gunpowder comes along it would still be much preferred to just lob off 3 shots from the Mortar or what have you.

[ataribaby]

1) It takes a long time. Something like 200 build points per tunnel (twice as much as a siege tower) would make it take an extremely long time to take a settlement by sapping, as it should, you can't dig a 300 yard tunnel overnight.
2) Peasants or soldiers do not have the expertise necessary to dig an underground tunnel. Therefore a special "Engineer" units would be required for each tunnel. They should be rather expensive for having such a limited use (400 to recruit, 100 upkeep, 20 men) and have very low combat stats.
3) Alternative for #2, or maybe in addition to it. Instead of the Engineer unit, normal units can sap, but take casualties as they progress due to cave-ins. Losses would be 30-50%. There would also be a 10-20% chance the entire unit would perish when the wall collapses.

I like these ideas Reise, especially the engineer unit. Perhaps they could be recruited from a Siege Works and be armed with crude pick axes and shovels. Their advantage over say a trebuchet unit would be that they'd have the same amount of movement as any other infantry unit on the campaign map. So although it'd take them a while to build their sap point, at least they'd be able to arrive at the walls in plenty of time to begin.

The high Build Point cost is a good and fair idea too. Although if a single sapping point was the only thing that a whole stack could build in one turn, there'd need to be some protection for a sieging general against the Bad Engineer trait line.

The casualty rate sounds pretty harsh, but why not? Sapping would have been an extremely perilous enterprise so I guess you should consider each engineer unit to have a certain amount of expendability. In RTW I remember the sapping unit would be utterly exhausted and have suffered some arrow-tower casualties anyway.

One thing you could add to neo-sapping would be the ability to choose where to create the breach, perhaps during deployment. A massive downer to sapping in RTW was the often ridiculous choice of location that the AI would choose for your much anticipated method of infiltration.