Quote Originally Posted by Lucius Verenus View Post
I dont know if you would call this a bug or a feature

I had an army besieging Alsace-Lorraine having decided to end the interminable (and non-eventful) 'wars' with Hannover and that was their last province.
During the AI turn,they sallied out with a full stack and retreated back into the city with 2 units - however the siege continued.

During the same AI turn, moments later, a small army of Hessens who I was not at war with and had reciprocal miliary access with, walked up and took the city !!!

Never saw that happen before - all I got was a 'Siege lifted' voice and at the beginning of my turn there was my army standing there looking stunned

As I had given Hessen Flanders and the UP (which I had earlier conquered and given to Westphalia - and then took again after that same interminable and non-eventful 'war) I was not amused (well I was but my government wouldn't be ) so I attacked them (not allies) and took all four of their provinces in two turns.
The other thing then was that my friendly relations with Spain, Austria, Prussia etc suddenly turned hostile and it was because I had 'broken treaties' - the only treaty I had was military access and I cancelled that before declaring war on Hessen so seemed a big hit for nothing ??
I suspect, this is an outcome (intentional or unintentional) of how ETW treats the turns. The player's "turn" is always the very last and player initiated actions from the previous turn get complete only after all AI's have made their moves.

Example: if you queue up some units for training because you have noticed enemy near the city's borders and that enemy attacks you the next turn you get only your original units to fight with. The newly queued units do not appear until after the fight and all the other AI's have completed their turns.

So, in the case of a city siege, the surrounded AI sallied and got defeated by your army on its turn. However, your army did not take control of the city YET because all the other AI's needed to complete their turns. When the player turn finally came up, some other AI faction had already taken the city...

This has happened to me a few times. Once I was besieging a Moghul city with a full stack sitting inside. I thought, it would be smart to wait for the stack to attack me rather than assaulting the city. Wrong I was. A Maratha stack came out of the bushes and took the city while I was besieging it. In this case, there was not even an AI sally.