Cannon Towers

[PBI]

Last night I defended a city using cannon towers for the first and last time. I had a full stack of Turkish soldiers, mostly jannisary archers and infantry, with a few sipahis, defending the huge city of Antioch. The enemy were two full Timurid stacks.

I set up most of my infantry and archers defending the walls opposite the only enemy stack with any artillery, which also contained all the siege equipment. I resoned that even if my towers couldn't destroy their artillery, I could hold the breach long enough for the cannons to wipe out most of their troops. I positioned my Sipahis opposite the other stack to man the cannon towers, reasoning that as the second stack would have to march right around the city to attack the breach, I could keep them under cannon fire all the time and effectively neutralise them.

Of course, the first stack quickly punched several holes in my walls, while my cannon towers proved so inaccurate they barely inflicted any losses before the walls were down. Meanwhile, the second stack immediately raced from the maximum range of my cannons to the base of the walls, inside the minimum range of the towers. They then calmly marched right around the city in total safety, to attack the breaches. They made short work of the defenders despite of course being cavalry fighting against halberd infantry in close quarters, and rushed the centre, where the heavy cavalry effortlessly massacred a few hundred more heavy infantry for barely any losses. The only silver lining was that one of my JHIs managed to catch a unit of the hateful elephant artillery in close quarters, and wipe them out.

My conclusion: Cannon towers are useless. They are worse than a waste of money, they actually weaken your defenses since they have a minimum range, and the majority of the casualties caused by normal towers seem to happen at short range, when the enemy are on the wall or attacking the gate. The cannon crews are apparently incapable of simply dropping the cannonballs out of the windows on the heads of the attacking enemy.

From now on I will only ever be upgrading to ballista towers (which incidently I like very much, they seem to be infallible general-killers).

[Askthepizzaguy]

Frankly I've never used anything besides archer towers. I find that archer towers pour a steady stream of death and fire onto the opposition with far greater accuracy and effectiveness than any other type of tower (and when playing Broken Crescent mod, rams are less effective at taking out gates, and therefore archer towers are about 10 times more effective!).

Also, consider that when the enemy have means to breach your walls easily, it is unwise to try to hold the walls.

If you can confine their strike at the breach, or use the breach to sally effectively and then try to hold the breach, you might be able to stop thier cannons or catapults from inflicting major damage on your troops. If you have a great amount of archers that you can put on the walls AFTER they breach the walls, they will rain death and fire down on your enemies while you hold them with heavy infantry. If they have elephants (what fools!) target them with all your fire arrows and make them run amok just as they approach the breach. That will damage their infantry and cavalry more than it will hurt your own forces, possibly leading to a full rout of their entire stack.

If you have very effective crossbows or armour piercing projectiles, target the elephants as a priority once they pass your defenses, because then they will ravage your tightly packed infantry. Make them run amok or destroy them.

Your defenses can hold for a long time once the elephants are running amok or dead, as cavalry is useless in the narrow street fighting if you have the necessary heavy infantry and spearpoints. Set the soldiers on guard mode or any special defensive stance, and then rain projectile fire down upon them, targeting their heavy infantry and general as a priority. Guard your wall archers with heavy infantry as well.

The problem there is that with two full stacks of Timurids, without the proper equipment you cannot win. If the enemy have artillery and seige equipment, your walls will be toast no matter what type they are, and then they have the numbers advantage to force a win no matter how brilliantly you fight. They are too strong and too many.

I would ask someone to prove me wrong on that point. Defend ANY CITY against two Timurid stacks using whatever troops and weapons you like. Give the Timurids elephants, heavy infantry, and their best cavalry, and give them an artillery weapon for both armies and seige equipment.

Now hold the city, win the battle, and post the results as proof. I would actually like to witness such a thing. PS- don't use exploits or game bugs. I wanna see actual fighting.

[Ramses II CP]

Uhm, you should never, ever lose a city which has cannon towers. Not for any reason except limiting yourself to not exploiting the AI. Don't wait to be attacked, sally. Man the walls and sit there watching the havoc.

Personally I haven't built cannon towers since my first campaign because they utterly break the AI and make any attack laughable.

[Askthepizzaguy]

Exactly. If you use game bugs to win, that's fine.

However, if the enemy AI worked properly, it would be nigh impossible to defend against two full stacks of properly armed Timurids with artillery.

[Ramses II CP]

The problem with your challenge, ATPG, is that you don't have to deliberately exploit bugs for the AI to fail, it will happily exploit itself. Take attacking the ram crew, for example. It's the logical thing to do when the AI put it's weakest troops on it's most important bit of siege equipment, attack them to delay the ram... but the AI won't ever use that ram again, and if they've managed to build a second ram (Which they usually don't in an overwhelming odds siege attack) they'll send their weakest troops again, resulting in the same situation.

If the first army has the usual complement of Timurid artillery they still won't use it because by the time you see Timurids all your cities have huge walls, which means they build siege towers, and when the AI has siege towers in SP it refuses to use cannons. Sometimes the elephant artillery will shoot the walls, but only because they're trying to hit the troops on them, and they can't do enough damage to knock down huge walls.

Now the very worst of the bugs that you don't have to do anything to exploit, the AI cannot effectively climb siege towers to capture huge walls. Cannot do it. Their men will line up behind the tower and stand there getting shot while the tiniest trickle of them climbs up into the tower and, sometimes, makes their way onto the walls. In this case the high morale of the Timurids is also exploiting them, because if the first company would rout before time ran out the second would surge up the tower slightly more effectively, before falling back into the trickle effect.

Furthermore in my experience no matter what you give the second army for artillery they won't use it, and they won't build siege equipment under any circumstances.

I've held Antioch against three Timurid stacks with five or six companies of basic militia, and it wasn't even difficult. The two 'extra' stacks make their way to the main gate eventually, but they won't shoot their cannon either. The elephants sometimes put a crack or two in the walls, but they can't knock them down. Two companies of spear militia, parked on the walls right next to the gate, are all you need to hold the walls. Use one company to stop the ram(s). The other two just have to keep the towers firing.

Yeah, they'll lay siege again immediately. So what? They could do it every turn for a hundred years and not take the city. It's pathetic.

I assume you're talking about setting up a battle against the Timurids outside of the SP game, which I've never bothered doing, but in the actual game the AI exploits themselves to complete failure, over and over again. I deleted my old saves a few weeks ago, or I could've uploaded some examples from my first two English campaigns for you. I poked around and discovered I don't have any more recent campaigns where I let the Timurids get to the walls because I hated exploiting them so much. Now I only take them on in the field, much more fun.

[Ramses II CP]

What a game we would have if the AI worked properly! That's why I'm mostly playing BC now. The Mongols (Not even Timurids) took a city from me in that campaign even though I had 2000 men inside, and they did it despite facing most of the same bugs! Check the story out here:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...64#post1842264

edit: Part 3 is the siege.

[Askthepizzaguy]

Ouch. I withdraw the challenge then.

Take away the seige equipment and leave the artillery then. NOW you have a challenge.

[Monsieur Alphonse]

@ Ramses
Great AAR.

[PBI]

Hmm, I must say, Ramses, your description of the AI tactics doesn't seem to bear much resemblance to what I saw, mainly in that the AI didn't even bother with its siege equipment, but just began pummeling my walls with grand bombards right from the start.

Of course, I didn't defend very effectively; I didn't even consider sallying, as I assumed that having spent so much on expensive tower defenses, I could afford to sit behind my walls and duke it out with the enemy artillery. I also assumed that, cannon towers being so inaccurate, they would simply decimate my own men as they sallied.

I still don't really understand how it would help, however; it seemed to me that as long as the enemy were outside the minimum range, they were too far away for my cannons to ever hit them, and their artillery was safely nestled away inside the enemy army. I should point out that this was a night battle, so my cannons were firing flaming ammunition; maybe they are more effective during the day.

Besides, even if the AI had done everything you describe, it still seems to me that the defense would be easier with ballista or arrow towers. The second stack would have been decimated before they reached the breach for a start, and I'd have had a higher chance of knocking out the rams and towers.

[Ramses II CP]

Just load the old save and try a sally PBI. Cannon towers have a max range of the edge of the map on 95% of the siege battle maps. You don't actually have to 'sally' if you don't want to, just order a sally and sit on the walls.

I've never, ever seen the Timurids fire their cannons in a siege, but I've only ever had them siege Antioch... Are you playing Kingdoms? Maybe they adjusted their AI somehow for Kingdoms and it wasn't in patch 1.3?

To put it in perspective, in my first England game I broke the Timurids on the huge walls of Antioch. I didn't know yet that they only go after Antioch until they capture it, so I kept waiting for them to do something else. Finally I sallied with my cannon towers after holding 9 or 10 assaults off and discovered what those things could really do. End of Tims.

Since that game I haven't waited for them to get to any walls, I just go out and get them first.

edit: To clarify, the bugs I posted about are AI wide. That second post above wasn't just about the Timurids, it was about the gross incompetence of the AI to attack cities at all. I've fought countless sieges and assaults and consistently seen the AI behavior I listed. Even when the Mongols took that city in Broken Crescent they abandoned their rams, the 2nd (and 3rd, 4th, and 5th) armies didn't use their artillery, and the siege tower that they got to the walls was almost useless compared to that one ladder, which they used to take the city. That city didn't have huge walls either, it was just large IIRC, because it's much harder to get to huge in BC.

[Vladimir]

This is why it's important to stay awake in history class. Cannons helped make castles obsolete. Now you know; and knowing is half the battle.

[PBI]

Ah, Ramses, so the key is to order a sally before the enemy attack, rather than sending units out to attack the enemy during an actual assault? I can see that might work better, I guess the AI would just wait for you to attack them.

I don't generally keep my old saves, just the current one for each campaign, but I might try your tactic later in a custom battle. Unfortunately, I probably won't have any time to play until the weekend. Stupid job...

I do have Kingdoms installed, but I was playing the vanilla Grand Campaign, patched to 1.2 or 1.3 I think. I generally find that the AI always seems to use its artillery in preference to any siege equipment, which after all is the sensible way round. Not quite sure what's going on there, I might check it in a few custom battles later.

Incidentally, I get the feeling that the defenders' combat bonus on the walls may have been toned down a bit in BC. My medium infantry certainly seem to have a much better time of it against archers than they used to. I guess it would make sense, since there's no artillery and rams take forever to break a gate.

[batemonkey]

You seem to be suggesting that you can fight custom battles with castles & cities in, how do you do that?

Also i've never had the problem of the tirumids or any other faction not using their cannons to blow down my walls, they attacked me once at mosul with 4 full stacks against 2/3 full garrison. It was insane (infact i had to get a new computer to handle it after the battle crashed twice during play), i also won - just

[Askthepizzaguy]

You seem to be suggesting that you can fight custom battles with castles & cities in, how do you do that?

Also i've never had the problem of the tirumids or any other faction not using their cannons to blow down my walls, they attacked me once at mosul with 4 full stacks against 2/3 full garrison. It was insane (infact i had to get a new computer to handle it after the battle crashed twice during play), i also won - just

Custom battles:

Select a map roughly halfway down the list such as the sea of grass or the forest one, then select settlement size and type.

I know it isn't intuitive at all, but half of the maps can support castles and cities and the others cannot. You will be able to tell the difference because all the settlement types are grouped together.

EDIT: also, apparently some people are way better at handling Timurid seiges when their walls crumble than I am... very interesting, I will have to work on that.

[Eikon the Magistrate]

EDIT: also, apparently some people are way better at handling Timurid seiges when their walls crumble than I am... very interesting, I will have to work on that.

It actually makes it easier to defend a castle when the AI has broken thru a section of wall. The explanations being:

The AI has created an area where they will always send their troops..if they breach they will not ram your gate.

The breaches break up formations when they pass thru it.
The units get scattered as they walk through and then reform in range of your towers.
The AI will not take a ram thru a breach as the 1st unit. Attack their 1st ram at the gate... and their screwed.

There are many "walls" disguised as buildings in your settlement that cannot be destroyed.

On occasion the breach occurs in an area that actually makes it safer for your men on the walls since acess to them is removed. for example they breach directly to the left or right of the gate often which secures the other side of the gate for your archer or w/e.

In a castle the 2nd layer is higher than the 1st and so on.... which means the seige weapons will have a harder and harder time hitting the towers or gate.
Most towers on the 2nd or 3rd layer just do not get destroyed usually and the walls are usually only assaulted by ladder....

these things combined means that a fortress or citadel should not fall unless the troops manning it are of extremely poor quality.

[Ramses II CP]

PBI: Yes, order a sally before they attack, as in select your garrison and click them on the siege army. The AI handles it very poorly, mostly just sitting there getting shot unless you send out something to force them to move.

Hmm, perhaps the difference is huge walls? Since you can't use ladders against huge walls the AI only builds siege towers, and, at least in my experience, the AI doesn't use their cannons when they've built siege towers (When you think about it that way it makes a certain crude sense I guess, don't want to blow up your own towers). By the time the Timurids came around in my early campaigns Antioch was always huge walls.

I've had much better luck with the Mongols primary stack using their artillery, but secondary stacks never use artillery. I've never had to defend more than one stretch of wall in the vanilla SP game either.

Now that I think about it, before Broken Crescent came out I had more or less stopped fighting defensive sieges. I was always attacking the field or sallying if something actually made it to a city. A couple of weeks ago I fought a full 3x gold French stack in siege of huge walls Genoa against 5 companies of militia with a general to test a battle for KotR. I don't recall if they had any artillery, but despite have ~14 companies of triple gold high quality infantry the French couldn't take the walls from 1 company of Town militia and 1 of Spear militia. I know I still have that save somewhere too, if anyone wants to take a crack at it.

[PBI]

these things combined means that a fortress or citadel should not fall unless the troops manning it are of extremely poor quality.

But most of these points surely don't apply to a city? In a city, once the walls are gone, that's it, there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop the entire Timurid army rushing my town centre. My towers were useless by this point as the enemy were inside the minimum range. As for the troops on the walls, they didn't even bother trying to dislodge them, just waited for them to rout down into the waiting horde.

It would have been nice to be defending a citadel, but in my campaign the Timurids seem to have wisely avoided them like the plague.

Also, my original point wasn't really that it's hard to defend walls against cannons - that's only right and proper. My point was that my own cannon towers didn't seem to do very much.

Ramses: It definitely was a huge city, although I agree that the secondary stack didn't use its artillery, nor does it ever in my experience. Possibly my guns might have destroyed their siege towers, TBH I never really pay much attention to siege equipment except to put a unit of militia/peasants/archers in its way.

[Eikon the Magistrate]

As far as cannon/balista towers I usually dont upgrade to cannon... for many of the same reasons as others... Also, how does a cannon burn down a ram? can it? soo thats why

I agree that if the walls of a city are compromised your defense is much weaker. City defense is however more basic,primarily because there is only 1 point of defense (ur gate) and 1 objective (city center) however a city has what a castle dosent have which is space.

several points do apply no matter if its a city/castle:

Destruction of the 1st ram heading towards the gate almost guarantees that all AI infantry will take to ladders/towers as opposed to using the pefectly good replacemnt they have.
With this in mind if your AI attack is all infantry its sometimes better to stop them at the gate by not taking out the ram and if its alot of cav to destroy the ram and force them on the walls. The Mongols for example cannot win a seige castle or city w/o the gate being open because their stacks are mainly cav.

Many times the AI will continue to pound at the towers if you have enough of them manned... this wastes some of their valuable cannon ammo.

Eventually, your walls will obviously fall. Before this, try to determine where the breach/s will occur and place a spear in gaurd formation in front to take the 1st hit and slow down the army. The gatehouse is a powerful weapon and has the best towers, if they havent broken the gate down use it as your flank to the breach.

Use the long city streets to ur advantage. A street is essentially a long gate after all.The AI will 90% go for the most direct path to the center. Put ur army in the street in a tight row. spear---spear----archer----archer----spear---archer-- etc... take ur archers
off skirmish if your low on troops. Leave your best units in the center and wait for the AI to chew thru 600 spear militia b4 they get to your DFK or w/e u got. If you have cav send em out along the sides to flank the AI as it advances past the many side streets.

I assume PBI that you attempted to defend Kiev? And were assailed by 3 stacks of Tims. This has occured on my campaigns often. Staying in the center is the only option and its a poor 1 at that since you have no where to rout and are surrounded. I have NO strategy that would ENSURE victory in this scenario. The only time I have sucessfully defended Kiev from the Tims I took it early in the game and converted it straight away to a castle. That
combined with the 2 bridges makes attacking Kiev ludicrous. (Theyll still try tho)

[Eikon the Magistrate]

er guess u meant Antioch with 2 tims stacks PBI ...I read tooo fast I guess. The
scematics tho and the info is the same. Ill try to mimic your scenario to see my result but I think it will be similar.

Theres a min distance for all towers not just cannon...soo balista will have the same problems with range. Directly In front of your gate is the only spot where murder holes seem to be used aka "drop cannonball" or at least it appears so as if you engage in this area your losses and AI losses are much higher per unit. So more death to both sides...seems to make sense

1 last thing...the trebuchet is a superb defensive counter to seige engines and towers. Combine with stank cow for maximum results.

[Askthepizzaguy]

You mean the French tactic of throwing cows and chickens and piglets at the enemy from the walls? Which is of course only slightly more dangerous than the French Taunting.

Yes, indeed any castle held by French Taunters and Cattle Throwers has never been captured.

[WhiskeyGhost]

cannon towers work wonderfully, if the enemy is using siege towers. I've had an attacking enemy lose 7 siege towers long before they got close to the walls. Rams and ladders are just too small for the inaccurate cannons though. At least they cause morale penalties when they actually hit units.