Siege Towers without ladders

[Celt Centurion]

Does anyone else have the problem of some of your siege towers missing the ladders?

This is especially common when I'm attacking a city with a large or epic stone wall.

I'll build between 12 and 17 towers, usually enough so that every infantry unit in my army can take one. Last night, I went after one such city and when the men should have been climbing the towers, about a third of them they looked like they were doing the "moon walk", wiping their feet on the grass at the base of the tower. While 2/3 were climbing towers, the other third were not doing anything. I scrolled in closely and saw that there was not even a ladder nor stairways inside the towers. Then, I tried to pull them back and move away from the enemy's towers shooting at them but they seemed chained to the siege towers, useless to me.

I did learn that if I roll up an onager behind the tower and shoot at the wall with it, four hits destroy the tower and then the men (the survivors anyway) are able to escape from the fire and at least get to the gate or another tower. Bad thing is that destroying one's own tower with an onager kills about 60% of the unit attempting to use it. I try not to do that.

There have been two battles when the men in the towers not being of any use nearly caused my army to be defeated. Imagine, the clock runs out and a third of your army is still standing at the base of the siege tower.

Is this normal? Have others had this situation?

Strength and Honor

[Alrik]

Yes I've had the same deal with siegetowers, though in my case I only had two or three and one of them did like you said, I think mine was the kind with a covered back, so if there was a ladder or not inside I do no know. Luckily I didn't need that unit, I got i back under my control when I had already won the battle more or less, the rest of the army being in the town center when they decided to loosen their deathgrip on the tower and come inside the now open gate instead.

[Guyus Germanicus]

Ahhh yes, the ole fumble at the base of the siege tower trick. This is a bug in the game. It's not a case of a missing ladder. It's irritating and I don't know if anyone has ever found a cure for it from a programmatic standpoint.

It only happens with the larger siege towers for big and epic stone walls. The only cure I've found to get your soldiers up the inside of the tower to the top of the wall is to do the following:

1) select the unit that's fumbling about at the base of the siege tower.

2) Fast 'right click' the top of the wall (where you want them to end up).

3) then click 'stop'. (This brings the men to a halt.)

4) repeat steps two and three until all of the men have entered the bottom of the siege tower.

Each time you 'halt' the fumbling men after the quick 'right click', some of the men will be 'halted' just inside the base of the siege tower. Once they're inside the siege tower, they will proceed on their own up the tower to the top of the wall with your next 'quick right click' on the top of the city wall. Some soldiers will still be fumbling about at the base of the siege tower. So you have to repeat this process (halt - quick right click) until all the men enter the siege tower. It's tedious and annoying. But it's the only way I've found to get the men up the tower.

Thankfully, it doesn't happen all the time. I've had city battles where none of my men fumbled at the base of a large siege tower. But then, I've had battles where every siege tower was afflicted. You want to be choosy, too, about what location along the city wall you want to send your tower forward at. If your men are fumbling about at the base of a siege tower that is located between two wall towers, your fumblers are going to get picked off by the city's wall tower archers. Very high casualties will result. Not a good thing. ;)

Yes, this is THE most annoying bug in the game. And as I siad, I don't know if any of our cleverer colleagues in The Guild have ever come up with a 'fix' for it.

[Whacker]

Unfortunately this is probably a symptom of the game's age coupled with graphics card driver changes and updates over time.

I've seen this happen over the years with dozens of games, they end up changing behavior rather drastically from when they were newly released or in their prime. The old Janes/EA games are like this. Lots of the older racing games, like Need For Speed 5, which relied on heavily contrived "physics" are like this.

I've also noticed RTW hasn't aged too well the past few years. A bug I'm pretty sure I never used to have but have seen more than a few times is the unit "scattering" bug, where units will sometimes diverge completely, especially when broken and fleeing. Units get caught in 'dead areas' inside cities much more often than they used to. Sounds like this is another one.

The only thing one can really do is bug ATI and Nvidia to ensure they maintain some reasonable level of support of these games, but as I understand it their legacy gaming driver support folks are pretty minimal. After all, there's not much money to be had in making sure RTW works, but there's lots of denari involved in making sure the newest games like Battlefield 83 and Medal of Honor 23402 all run lightning fast.

[gollum]

Its not a symptom of teh games age coupled with graphics card drivers at all as wacker says, but a well known bug since 2005, and together with the civil war bug one of the most annoying of those that were left in the game (there are many others). It was termed "dance of death" because the men kept being shot by the tower ballistas while "dancing" up and down at the base of the tower.

As you say its from large to epic stone walls only and the associated towers. There is no cure, except bringing two towers and use the otherif the first gets the bug, which might of course screw up your plans in getting the city. Just consider it as a potentiality when you attack these types of walls and plan your strategy with it in mind.

[Whacker]

Meh, I could be wrong. I do recall the dance of death bug with siege towers, but it didn't sound to me like what the OP described.

[gollum]

The siege towers from large stone walls and above don't have a ladder inside them anyway as the back of the tower is walled and so not visible from a distance - only siege towers on normal stone walls show the ladders. The OP says its 1/3 that stays at the bottom of the tower in his case, and that varies in the bug - sometimes its more than that and the whole unit stays put on the ground. Guys Germanicus suggestion for making them move up the tower works sometimes, and sometimes not, especially if you have to be doing other things during that time. As Guys says, the bug is not always present - sometimes you may get lucky.

Generally, the large stone walls and above were somewhat too much from a playablity perspective (it was too difficult to maintain vision of what was going on due to the sieze of teh walls/towers that needed lots of zooming in and out and scroll of the camera) and so where removed in M2TW and siege warfare is much better in that game.

[Guyus Germanicus]

There is also a corollary bug to the tumbling troops at the base of your siege towers. Supposedly this one was fixed by a patch early on in a subsequent release of RTW, and for the most part it was. But it does appear every once in awhile for whatever reason. So the patch wasn't perfect. It's called the falling-off-the-siege-tower-ramp bug. It happened to me in BI just the other day while I was playing the Vandals. Albeit, it doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's very irritating. What happens is this - your men have successfully negotiated their way up the inside of your siege tower. The ramp drops down and your troops start pouring out of the tower onto the ramp. Some of them literally just fall off the ramp and some jump out onto the city wall and proceed to walk over the edge of the wall and fall into the city. It's maddening.

As for the tumbling at the base of the siege tower, I do expect it to be a problem whenever I'm besieging a city with large or epic stone walls. To compensate for the extra time I may need to play the little stop-start game to get my men up the siege towers I have tended to spread my siege towers out around the circumference of the city, prefering to approach walls that have either one or no wall towers, as well as sending the towers where there are no wall defenders to intercept my men when they come out of the siege tower. To be sure, it's not as exciting a combat. But my army is there to take the city, not perfect some combat aesthetic. As someone pointed out, CA resolved this issue in M2TW in their redesign of siege tower combat in that game. Sadly I never liked the animation movement in M2TW compared to RTW. It just seemed like the player had less control over his units and their movement wasn't nearly as fluid.

[gollum]

yeah, i've seen that one too. Tighter rstrictions of substance use in my camps pre-battle is due for the next campaign ;)

But seriously, RTW is full of bugs, and also has some bugs and a few bugs as well as some more bugs.

Good game for entomologists.