town militia defeating a horde of britons...

[Slaists]

the other night, the british finally decided to betray their 60-year old aliance with julii and attacked. a huge stack of britons (about 2000 playing on large unit size) besieged a city in the gaul. i figured, they'd be building seige equipment so i sallied with my garrison (10 militia units + a general). to my amazement, the self-confident horde charged towards the city gate where a lone militia unit awaited and got shot to pieces by the wall defences... i made another militia unit exit through another gate after the first one was decimated: the horde just strolled along the city walls to attack that one... once they made it back to the main gate, not much was left of them. a charge by my remaining militia units and the general decimated the exhausted bunch and sent off the map routing... a completely unrealistic scenario... i reloaded the game and did not sally this time: the britons had built seige equipment and took the town by the next turn. i guess, some fixing needs to be done to make the AI more cautios around the walls... also, sallying and withdrawing should not result in seige being lifted. it's enough if it's called a "draw".

[Bob the Insane]

Agree and disagree...

One, if withdrawing did not end a siege how could a siege be ended with destroying the sieging army to a man... And if you were the one attacking you could escape a bad sally just by withdrawing and the seige would still be there!! (Of course what happens to a large intact army which withdraws in good order is a completely different thread.. )

But total agree on the towers thing... In any Seige (wood walls and massive stone ones) the AI can easily be tempted into range of the towers and will just stand there getting slowly killed off... I have seen it once back off a short distance after losing a lot of man, but it was not do anything else at the time... If you distract the AI and get it in close it will ignore casualties from the towers until it has taken sufficient caualties to rout it off the map...

All it has to do is stand a little futher from the walls when waiting for you... I mean it is one thing to get into position to pounce on any units coming out of the gate, but it really spoils the "willing suppension of disbelief" when the AI allows itself to be slaughter and routed by standing to close to some towers....

[Slaists]

Actually, i've seen the AI behave pretty good when beseiging wooden walls: they'd actually back off if they started taking casualties from the towers. In the scenario that I just described above, I actually lured the whole army to the towers by putting a single town militia unit out in the field. But rather than sending one or two units to decimate the militia, they sent in the whole army... Towers had a feast...