i had a happy little surprise in a custom battle recently. i chose to attack rome with rome having epic walls, of course. i initially took a bunch of heavy onagers to bust the walls but i also noticed in the custom battles that i could add siege towers and rams to the mix, so i added a few of each. mind you, i dont play a lot of battles in campaign game; i auto-resolve most of them. so, i wasnt really familiar with siege battles.

it took me a while to figure out how the siege towers work, but i soon realized after several failed attempts and re-starts, that the onagers were preventing me from attacking the enemy units on the walls because i would break the walls and split the troops up there, not being able to cross the breeches in the walls once i had troops on the walls myself. one happy little surprise did come once doing this, though, by breaking a wall immediately supporting one enemy unit. the wall crashed to the ground and so did the enemy unit.

but the real surprise came when i started using siege towers to gain access to the city instead of the onagers. my siege towers moved to the walls and i instructed my units to attack enemies on the walls and they'd climb the siege towers and emerge up top and attack the enemy. cool. but even more cool was that once up on the walls, my units could capture the enemy wall towers! ok, now that's slick! i can capture enemy fortress towers and stop the rain of arrows on my troops below. and, once i hold the enemy tower, i can climb down through it to the city below! this is a HUGE improvement over mtw! i recall asking for this improvement when we saw mtw and was disappointed that it was never realized in that game, but now we've got it. tres cool.

after that, it was just a matter of wiping the enemy on the walls, going down into the city and fighting on the streets of Rome till i could make it to and capture the city center. very slick :)

K.