Quote Originally Posted by Magraev
I think you're missing the point - you won't lose per se, but without timer the battle will never end, thus forcing you to fortfeit the battle.
Last night I did a sally battle without the timer and eventually it ground down to a stalemate.

I had run out of arrows and rocks to fire at the enemy and despite the best efforts of my own onagers my wall was only 40% damaged so the battle just petered out.

I'm not sure what would have happened at this point if I had quit from the battle and I was not in a mood to experiment last night. Would I have lost the town?

Personally, I don't care if I would have lost the battle as I had inflicted heavy losses on the enemy and it was a hopeless sally anyway so I didn't expect to win. But I certainly didn't want to lose the city on a technicality.

What I actually did instead was move two units of cavalry out of the cities side gate. This got the AI interested and they began to move their units around the town to attack the new target. Taking fire from all my wall towers enroute.

Their lead unit eventually arrive with only 14 horsemen left alive which I attacked and slaughtered. I then withdrew into the town before their main infantry force arrived.

The cavalry then moved across town and exited by the opposite gate. The AI tried to counter-march and got stuck on the walls. Several units were wiped out by tower fire others managed to find dead-ground under my walls that kept them alive. I used my light infantry to pepper these with javelins until I ran out.

Finally, I exited the city with my cavalry and four cohorts of heavy infantry and began taking out the isolated enemy units one by one. Charging them face on with my infantry and then hitting them in the flank or rear with the cavalry so that they broke and fled before wiping them out to a man.

I worked my way round the walls dealing with each pocket of resistance in turn until their general finally lost his nerve and tried to quit the field. I then chased him down and killed him.

There were no survivors out of an army of over 1,400 men. However, the key point was that the Scipii army had no seige artillery I think if they had it could have got a bit awkward.