Auto resolving sieges

[Hamburglar]

I think anyone who claims to adhere to Iron Man rules or No Cheesy Tactics when playing a campaign game should NEVER autoresolve a siege.

I see posts on siege tactics involving "just autoresolve it" because you get less losses. Yeah, because its a bug. You see how bad the AI is - do you really think its that much smarter than you in sieges that it loses less men? I'm thinking the castle defences just might not be factored in or something.

Either way, if you claim to be good at the game, play out your sieges. And I don't want to hear people say that it "takes too long". That's a lie. If you're really impatient, all you need to do is set up your siege engines to fire at the walls, and then turn speed up to 10x until your siege engines die or the walls break down, then send in your men. Takes 5 minutes. Autoresolving is VERY cheesy because it is taking advantage of the AI. You KNOW for a fact you'll get less losses by autoing it, and thats just a lot of cheese.

[pdoan8]

True (unless your attacking force is weaker than the AI defending force).

My record for auto-resolve a siege battle: I attack a Fortress with all upgrades (except cannon towers) defending by 400+ early and high era troops commanded by a 4 stars general. My force is about 1800+ of quality troops (RK, FK, FSer, FMAA, Viking,...) command by a 3 stars prince without any siege weapon. I wouldn't believe my eyes when I see that I lost only 2 in the assault. When I assaulted the fortress myself, I still won but lost 200+ troops.

[Obex]

Ive always wondered how a handfull of defenders are capable of manning all of the siege towers and catapults needed to protect the fortress. Maybe the castle has its own men? Are these inheirited when you take control of the castle?

[andy119]

Auto resolve is a hell of alot easier bu takes alot of fun out of it

[andy119]

Auto resolve is a hell of alot easier bu takes alot of fun out of it

[USMCNJ]

I believe sieges are pretty cool, the only thing that i would change is demage memory.
Like one year you would send an army pund one wall, take your loses and retreat. Next year send enother army, and the castle wall should not be up to 100%, maybe 50%. So the more sieges you do on one castle the more chances you have to win.

As i side note: Yesterday. I was playing as the Italians, and was sieged in two provinces(both were the highest castle posible). One i used the auto resolve an lost, killing about 2 of theirs for one of mine. On the second one with my son, i played my self and a 1600 army never even reached me.

[mav3434]

siege battles themselves are cheesy too though, and not exactly realistic. Come on, a handful of crappy units can hold their castle for years? Or is it with the help of their magical invisible arrow shooting pals on the ramparts? Or how about when the 10 militiamen that have been holding the castle for years get killed, then the magical inivisible arrow shooting pals that murdered entire units of knights just decide to give up or vanish. Come on.

[Foreign Devil]

We could take quite a long trip down the reality road, but it doesn't do us much good. Castle assaults are no more or less realistic than anything else in this game.

That said, assaults can be fun. I do autoresolve, and more often than I do with normal battles, but still only when I don't feel like fighting an actuall assault. I try to fight most of them, but I'm not overly strict about it.

Meh. I'll play the game the way I want, and the rest of you do the same.

[USMCNJ]

Quote[/b] (mav3434 @ Mar. 04 2003,10:58)]siege battles themselves are cheesy too though, and not exactly realistic. Come on, a handful of crappy units can hold their castle for years? Or is it with the help of their magical invisible arrow shooting pals on the ramparts? Or how about when the 10 militiamen that have been holding the castle for years get killed, then the magical inivisible arrow shooting pals that murdered entire units of knights just decide to give up or vanish. Come on.

ok true about the arrows.
But a few crappy units can hold their castle for years. To prove my point just look at the spartens. WHen they sieged Athens, they couldn't do anything, cause they had no siege weapons. They just set there for a while.

[Hakonarson]

I almost always lose FEWER men playing a seige than auto-resolving - so I only do it when I'm bored.

As for the Spartans beseiging Athens.........cough......well yeah....... an interesting post.....

Actualy they never beseiged Athens until they defeated the Athenian fleet at Aegespotomai and cut the grain trade from eth Black Sea.

then they starved them out. There were successful Greek assaults on fortresses, but they were few and far between and usually Greek states didn't bother trying - they just cut down the local olive groves and harvested the enemy's grain for them

[Red Harvest]

Quote[/b] (Hakonarson @ Mar. 04 2003,22:33)]I almost always lose FEWER men playing a seige than auto-resolving - so I only do it when I'm bored.

Gotta ask how you do this against a citadel or even a castle with upgrades. With a few hundred men in a province and seige equipment against a few defenders an autoresolve on "expert" usually costs only about 1 to 15 men. Busting into a citadel or upgraded castle often costs 100 to 200 men or even 400 or 500 if the AI has a decent army in a large fortress or citadel. It can be done with 50 losses or less at times, but it depends on a lot of factors--often ones that you lack control over. All the AI has to do is "hide" a few men in the back some where. Running the arrow gauntlet is what causes most losses. Are you using 15 units of siege gear then marching them off when every single defense is gone (and reinforcing with castle stormers?) That is the only way I can see manual attack even equaling "autoresolve." Even then, losses among the arty will probably be about a dozen or more if catapult towers are present.

Forts are no brainers, since once you knock down the center portion, archer fire is a non issue.

[Kalle]

Hello people

Just wanna go down that realism road a little bit.

If we want game historically correct (and im not saying we do, but if) then sieges are far far to easy.

Why, for example, does only defenders die when the years of sieging goes on. In history very many sieges had to be abandoned cause the attackers could not provide for their army, and this is a serius miss in the game i think. It is at least equally hard for the attacker to get food as it is for the castlecrew + there would be sickness both inside and outside castle and more of it outside i say.

And in the actual battle, if the siege for once ended in a battle, the attackers sure would have to outnumber the defenders by about 10 to 1 if they would have any hope of success no matter if defenders are knights or peasants. (yes you read correctly - i think peasents could tip a ladder just as easily as a knight) Yes, it of course depends on the quality of the place being defended and lots of other factors to. And their are examples of smaller forces taking places defended by larger ones. But as a rule of thumb attackers had to be many more in order to win.

Well much more could be said but the ones thinking defending is to easy and towerarrows are unfair i say they are wrong. If anything sieging is to easy for the attacker autoresolve or not.

[Foreign Devil]

I'm usually wary of making changes purely to satisfy historical accuracy, but I like the idea of having the seiging army taking losses too.

Kalle is quite right, there was often as big a problem with feeding the army outside the castle as there was feeding the people inside it.

[Hamburglar]

I think that the "magic arrows" are part of an inherent garrison in the castle.

If you put no men in a castle, is it realllly empty? I bet a castle would aways have some guards around as caretakers and security.


And see those little houses in the castle courtyard? I assume people live there. I think the locals could be firing those artillery things pretty easy. I mean sure, maybe one guy in a catapult crew is skilled. But really, the whole crew is one guy aiming the thing and 7 guys hefting that big ole rock into the arm.


I think that castles need to be this way from a game design decision too. You can't put men in the towers and the walls, and you can't split units up either.

If I was to defend a castle with one unit of archers, they'd barely be able to fire over the walls. They can really only hit guys standing rather close. Plus they can only look one way at once. If it was real life those 120 archers would be scattered all along the walls and towers taking shots at any attacker that gets too close.



And don't say it's too hard to take down a castle during a siege because of the magic wonder arrows. The attackers have their own advantages too.

Let's see - hacking down a gate in like 2 minutes? I doubt that could happen. In a real castle those things were steel. And knocking down walls with a few shots from a catapult? I doubt that too. It'd take a LOT more bombardment than that to take down such a giant wall.

All in all, it's pretty balanced. BUT, the game doesn't take the arrow towers into its autoresolve computations so the autoresolve does have an advantage. The battle where you take less losses than an autoresolve from fighting it out would be rare indeed.

[mav3434]

I just think there are enough quirks on both sides to not make playing out a castle siege significantly more "realistic" than auto-resolving it. Take siege weapons; would I really wait 3-5 years for my catapults to arrive from a few provinces over before storming the castle? or would I chop down all those nice little trees surrounding the castle and build my own? probably the latter.

Sure, castle assaults are harder than autoresolve in that you usually take more losses, but they're about as realistic as star trek vs. star wars. Plus they're pretty darned boring after the first few IMO.

[Hakonarson]

Red Harvest - I rarely have more than 3-4 siege engines, but then I rarely play against fully upgraded castles because I usually get bored with a campaign by 1300 or so and start a new one

As for hitorical accuracy - few sieges went beyond weeks, even fewer beyond months, and probably less than a handfull throughout all of history went beyond a year - Troy being the most famous, but would you call that a seige? I gues it is in MTW terms.

[Hamburglar]

Yeah but Medieval's time scale being in years does screw it up.


I can see a castle being easily sieged into submission in less than a year, but the game makes it take at least a year to send a relief effort.

I really wish it was seasons instead of years. It just makes me feel sad when my King ages 5 years riding a horse from Scotland to Normandy. And Crusades? Marching from France to the Holy Land without taking a boat is a LONG time.

[cugel]

"Let's see - hacking down a gate in like 2 minutes? I doubt that could happen. In a real castle those things were steel. And knocking down walls with a few shots from a catapult? I doubt that too. It'd take a LOT more bombardment than that to take down such a giant wall. "

Not only would it take more than a few shots to break down the wall, but the defenders, if they had enough men and women defending, would pile up stones and debris to try to re-build the wall as well. They're not just going to sit there and do nothing while their walls get knocked down In some seiges the defenders built the walls higher or thicker on the side where the siege engines were. This means you need a great many siege engines or consistent effort to break in. Hunger and disease were much more likely to break the will of the defender than a direct assault was to succeed.

[hoom]

Well, I am glad to be able to say that the total number of sieges I have autoresolved =1 as far as I can remember.

That one was in Shogun.

In MTW, from what I have heard on this board, the autoresolve ignores fortifications.
To take advantage of that knowing that there is an error is really cheezy.
Like running round till the time limit runs out to save your lame ass (I only used the timer until my first battle in Shogun where I did that), or turning on unlimited ammo etc.


A good many historical seiges lasted several years.

And a good many small garrisons held off enemies easily if the castle was strong.

Krak Des Chevaliers was only conquored by deception even though its garrison was severely depleted.
Basically the guy had finally, with great effort, managed to breach the outer wall only to find the inner wall there was essentially impregnable at that tech level; moat, very tall, sitting on stone, thicker at the bottom than it was tall (60 degree slope) three big towers, fully enclosed archery spaces...

BTW, walking and horsing (normally would be at walking pace anyway along with the rest of the army) around Europe actually would take a long time.
It is quite a large area and walking is slow.

[Hamburglar]

It sure isn't THAT slow as is shown in game. Having even seasons would be too slow but I can at least have an easier time believing that.


The 1st Crusade started in France and Germany and went mostly by foot all the way through Constantinople and into enemy territory. It took them a long time to get to Jerusalem from there because they had to fight and siege, but the MARCH from Western Europe to Constantinople took less than a year. In game to go from somewhere like Normandy to Constantinople would take like 10 years.

[hoom]

Then the movement is too slow.

[ToranagaSama]

JMO, but sieges are BORING

The best part are the Catapults, but once you've done that a few times...yawnn.

I certainly agree that using auto-resolve to conserve your losses is Cheesy, but auto-resolving is better than another boring siege. Unless, its a key province, I'll most often let the it fall.

My time is limited, so 20-30 minutes of boring siege vs. 20-30 minutes of additional Strat Map time, and I choose auto-resolve sieges.

The whole siege/castle thing needs to be reworded, so that its more effective defensively and MUCH less boring.

[LordKhaine]

I usually always auto resolve. Why? Well usually my attacking force outnumbers the defenders so much I could win the battle with my eyes closed. I always auto resolve massively one sided battles, since they are never fun to play.

[Red Harvest]

Quote[/b] (LordKhaine @ Mar. 09 2003,19:55)]I usually always auto resolve. Why? Well usually my attacking force outnumbers the defenders so much I could win the battle with my eyes closed. I always auto resolve massively one sided battles, since they are never fun to play.

That may be the case, but against castles with curtain walls, or catapult towers or other high level structures you can expect to take many casualties from the defenses if you actually fight the battle. Doesn't matter if you have 300 men or 3,000. Citadel's and Fortresses are absolute nightmares to storm even with good siege weapons and placement. The same cannot be said of autoresolve, so you are in essence saving yourself a couple of units on average, or sometimes nearly a whole army. About the only sieges that seem "fair" to the AI to autoresolve that way are forts that can easily be neutralized with 1 or 2 catapults. No others can be so easily subdued (the keeps aren't difficult to bust, but the keeps themselves do cause a number of archer fatalities.)

Can't argue with those who want to save time, but recognize that it is skewing the game in your favor (the AI doesn't need another handicap. ) You could actually adjust for it by disbanding a few units from your army after the battle...hmmm...I like that idea...I might start my own list of casualties from various castle sieges. That way I could autoresolve, but still emulate a real battle by eliminating some of my own units.