I love this game. And I particularly love the changes to 'castle' assaults. They sucked in Shogun, were much improved in Medieval, and flat out rule in Rome. But that said, they do have a few issues that I think should be discussed.

1) The timer. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, because I think everyone realizes that it's quite broken for large city assaults. You don't even have enough time to get to the plaza in a huge city, much less kill the bad people. Even removing the timer won't quite do the trick, because the countdown will still kick in for the defenders eventually.


2) Does anyone know if it costs the attacker anything to keep a siege up? Because as far as I can tell it doesn't, and that's a real shame.

It's a problem for two reasons...

• It doesn't jive with history. Historically, a siege was almost as hard on the attackers as it was on the defenders. When people saw the attackers coming, they gathered all the food in the area within the walls of the city. Unless the enemy army was very well prepared, they quickly stripped the nearby area of food and started to get hungry themselves. Disease was another common factor. If fact, attackers frequently performed assaults because they knew that there was a good chance the defenders would outlast them. Right now, though, only the defenders suffer casualties. (though not very many, which is a very positive change from Medieval.)
• It doesn't jive with gameplay. One thing we can surely all agree on is the city assaults kick ass. The cities look beautiful, fights on the walls are exciting, and boiling oil is just plain mean. Once the timer issue is fixed, these things will be one of the highlights of the Rome experience. So we should do everything we can to encourage them, and allowing the attacker to unrealistically sit outside the walls at no cost does the exact opposite.

These problems existed in the initial build of Medieval, too. Eventually, a patch caused the upkeep of an army performing a siege to double or triple. That was a good change, though I think the upkeep costs should probably be even higher. (remember, performing a siege should be a very expensive option for the attacker) Another idea would be to cause the attacker to suffer casualties as well, especially after the first turn. (to reflect the fact that the attacker has stripped the area of life and is beginning to starve themselves) This would also give added incentive to build large and epic stone walls, which currently have problems. (see 3)


3) There's very little reason to upgrade beyond stone walls. All that does is allow the attackers to build better siege towers. And what's really strange is that the biggest, meanest siege tower costs just the same as the rickety wooden one. Also, every stone wall is equally vulnerable to sappers. So why bother spending time and money building a better wall? Even the greater food stocks don't help you, because there's no penalty for the attacker waiting around, so why should he care if it take 5 or 8 turns to starve you?

Fortunately, this has an easy fix.

• Towers: Make better siege towers more expensive. Personally, I lean towards making each level of tower twice as expensive as the one before it, but at least make the iron-plated juggernaughts a little more expensive than the wooden deals.
• Sap points: Two options here. The best would be to require multiple sap points to bring down large and epic stone walls. So while a sap point completely destroys a stone wall, it only does 50% damage to a large stone wall, and 35% damage to an epic stone wall. That way the attacker has to build three sap points to bring down a single epic wall, and expend three units to dig them. This one would enhance the walls the most, but would probably be the trickiest to implement. In fact it may be beyond the scope of a patch. So, option 2: Make sap points against large and epic stone walls more expensive. Again, I'd go for each level being twice as expensive as the one before it. So sapping a regular stone wall costs 75 points, sapping a large one costs 150, and sapping an epic wall costs 300.

What do you guys think?

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