Walls

[anubis88]

am i missing something, or are small stone walls much easier to defend that the large ones? When i'm playing huge sieges, i usually have no problems holding a settlement with smal stone walls, but when the huge ones are in question it's much more difficult. The towers destroy everything in their path, if i don't have enough archers i also usually get my walls destroyed by sappers and the enemy can come running in.

What do you guys think? Which ones are easier to defend and why?

[seienchin]

Small ones!
But you can defend the big ones easy too. Just deploy your troops out of range and let them sprint back to defend. One pig issue about the Big ones are the towers that fire to the sides. If you have heavy armoured troops yourself its good, but when I defended with gauls against romans my own towers shot more of my own troops then of the romans

[GnaeusCotta]

The siege towers kill lot's of my defenders when on big walls

[seienchin]

The siege towers kill lot's of my defenders when on big walls

Just as said before. Just deploy them away from the siege towers and then send them back...

[Elcmar]

I almost never build stone walls bigger than the small ones for the uber-tower reason, but if i do for some reason, you can just deploy your troops on the wall segment next to where the tower's going, then run them over when the tower gets close and stops shooting - annoying but it works!

[Raygereio]

What do you guys think? Which ones are easier to defend and why?

I usually don't let it come an actual siege; as soon as one of my cities is besieged, I sally and attack them with my garrisons of archers from atop my walls until I run out of arrows and the next turn I do the same thing again (the AI is dumb enough to just stand there and take it - not fair I know, but hey...).
After 2-4 turns a full stack army is pretty much gone and the AI just gives up and runs away.

Anyway; I usually build the larger walls for this because unless I'm imagining things archers get an elevation bonus of sorts for from how high up their shooting compared to the enemy they're targetting.

Note; this only works with eastern factions as western archers just don't have enough range to shoot from wall to where the AI deploys in a sally.
Slingers usually have enough range, but they have issues with walls. I found out everytime a slinger units fires when on a wall, they take a small step backwards. So if you're not paying attention; after a while of firing rocks the back row of your slinger unit can fall of the wall and die. Joy!

Also, now we're on the topic of bugs. Larger walls are easier to defend for another reason. It could be just me, but I find that the units-dancing-in-front-of-siegetower bug (where they refuse to enter the siegetower) only happens with the large-wall-siegetower-version.
A human can fix it when that happens (even though the sollution I found is somewhat tedious), but the AI is just helpless.

[TheStranger]

I have this siegetower bug nearly in every siege (when I am attacked). It's really annoying, because sometimes the AI doesn't attack anymore (when all other units are killed already) until I kill a few of the dancing units, which is only possible if you move a unit close enough to the dancers. The attack order won't let them attack. I have to say I can't remember I had this bug in vanilla rome.

[d'Arthez]

Small stone walls ones are easier to defend. Especially in some coastal cities (Alexandreia comes to mind), where playing out a battle is just waiting for the archers and slingers to kill the entire army, because of the "walking" through hostile missile fire issue. I think that is a part of the v1.0 bugs that was not fully quenched.

Sally defence = instant death to the attacker then. It does not work as well with the bigger stone walls. As cheap as it sounds, it is actually a useful way of getting rid of unrealistic amount of unit stacks, especially when such amounts of units cannot be justified (i.e. when you have control over the area for 20+ years, and Ptolemaic control of their heartlands is non-existent).

[Cute Wolf]

larger ones are easier to defend, and you can just place crappy units on the wall, while your main heavy units waits in the plaza, or your cavalry flank them from another gates.... at least the larger tower gives better punch to enemy too...