Siege Towers without internal ladders?

[Celt Centurion]

Recently I am having difficulty with up to a third of my siege towers. Fortunately for me, I build so many of them, sometimes as many as twelve to seventeen.

What happens is that the tower rolls up to the walls, and then the soldiers assigned to move the tower and hopefully go up it, don't. They stop at the wall and start trying to enter the tower but there seems to be no ladder in there for them to go up, or perhaps a locked trap door up there. Here is what is really crazy, the tower will be at the wall, I will see about 76 to 80 Armoured hoplites at the base of the tower trying to go in, and one will be standing on the wall. The ramp between the tower and the wall is still closed.

How did the one guy get up on the wall? Why can't the others go up the tower? Because I might have three or four tower teams stop like this while the other seven or eight are struggling through the rest of the battle taking higher casualties. If all of these groups went up the towers and engaged, I could hit the enemy on the walls from more places.

Does anyone know what causes this? Is there anything that I might be able to do to keep them moving?

Strength and Honor

Celt Centurion

[SubRosa]

I am not positive if it is the same thing, but I have seen an issue when using the giant siege towers (for use against the extra large walls), where my unit will roll the tower up to the wall, and then just mill around the base, not entering it. Sometimes a few will enter, and the others just remain in the log-jam at the bottom.

I found that hitting the "drop siege tower" button, then having them pick it up again, then drop again, etc... usually gets them to go up the tower. But I often have to cycle through the keystokes many times.

[Omanes Alexandrapolites]

Sounds like a pathfinding bug. I don't really know that you can do much about it other than put up with it. Admittedly I've had nothing like this happen myself so I'm probably not best positioned as to give advice. If you're not on the latest patch, you could try updating, but I'm not sure whether it would be fixed by even doing that.

[Jxrc]

As Subrosa pointed out, it does happen but only, AFAIK, with giant siege towers.

I always build only four tower and get that problem generally with one or two towers.

I have not found any satisfactory way to deal with this.

Clicking as often as possible on the wall will get your men on the wall after a while but it's quite a drag. After several orders , the unit will eventually get on the wall but Once it's there, be carefull if you try to move the unit around because there is quite a good chance that a few soldiers are still running silly at the tower's entrance. Thus the affected unit will (after a while and quite a few click) be able to get on the wall and fight but do not expect it to be available to sprint around the wall to capture towers and gates ...

IMHO, trying to get the unit to abandon the tower without even trying to climb is risky cause you have good chance that some silly men will remain "attached" to the tower despite whatever you tell them to do ... Hence a good chance to get your unit stuck in the no-man's land when it will just get is very fair share of arrows ...

Pretty annoying stuff thus ...

When I have to assault "mega-walls", I usually sap if the city is heavily defended. If the city is lightly defended, getting one or two units on the wall is usually enough to capture all the necessary towers and gates. You'll have one or two useless units down the wall but they will be safe once you get the nearby towers.

[caravel]

I tend to stick to ladders in general or for the larger walls I have to give in and use towers, when ladders aren't available (unfortunately it seems that in the ancient world there was a maximum allowed ladder length). Sapping is costly as your troops get quickly shot to pieces on the way in.