How to capture Paris from Belgium

[Marcus Caelius]

yes, this is more or less how i do it.

of course it is ridiculous that yet again, for the third iteration of sieges, the best (and perhaps only) strategy is to surrender the walls, but there it is

[Servius]

Huh, so essentially, it's a mousetrap. The AI is so drawn to the center flag that it will drive for it first rather than wiping out your relatively puny force of defenders? If that's true, then I should just surround the hunk of cheese as you've suggested. I'd worry about running out of ammo, but as you say, I could include some cannons with shrapnel shot, as cannons have unlimited ammo.

[Slaists]

Huh, so essentially, it's a mousetrap. The AI is so drawn to the center flag that it will drive for it first rather than wiping out your relatively puny force of defenders? If that's true, then I should just surround the hunk of cheese as you've suggested. I'd worry about running out of ammo, but as you say, I could include some cannons with shrapnel shot, as cannons have unlimited ammo.

Yes, it's a mousetrap. As to ammo my line infantry (4 of them) does not run out of it while wiping out full stacks.

The mousetrap works in the reverse too. The AI is absolutely clueless about how to defend when IT is the side defending a fort too. That's probably one of the easiest battles: taking a fort from the AI...

[A1_Unit]

They even ignore my units that are garrisoned in a building right next to the flag.

[Dreadnought2]

In two battles, I've had the attacker (Spanish in one case, Prussian in the other) send troops into the fort buildings to melee with the defenders while other units ran for the flagpole. In the Spanish case, two enemy units went in to melee with my grenadiers in the small armoury, only to be both broken because of exhaustion and casualties.

I've played around with the cheval-de-frise:
- on the 'side' of the front corners of the fort. It doesn't do much to infantry but if a side/rear gate opens and the enemy cavalry makes a run to get in, they'll take the shortest path and end up as horse-kebabs...
- across the inside of a couple of the entrances (especially the rear gate as the AI likes to run around the entire fort first...) so if I let them take the gate, they'll open it and try to surge their cavalry into the fort with the same result.

Cheers,
Dreadnought2