Quote Originally Posted by Urnamma
We could shrink the onager down to make it a viable ancient catapult. Give the ballista to every civilized faction. Give the repeating ballista to the Greek factions. Then we'd eliminate the need for any other siege engines. And we'd get rid of the ahistorical heavy onager. Maybe add one siege engine and we haven't added a single unit (in order to save space), and we've fixed the siege problem.
That is an interesting plan. In fact, analysing the files I've just reached an interesting conclusion. In the unit files, Siege Engines (Onagers, Heavy Onagers, Ballistas, Repeating Ballistas, etc...) have been made separate. This means there is one unit of each for Roman factions, another of each for Greek factions, etc...

This was surelly made because each of these similar devices had to use a different 3d model for the soldier (Roman, Greek, "Barbarian" engineer, etc...). But there is one advantage. We can have multiple 3d meshes and multiple textures for each unit, separated by faction. Therefore we can have a single general siege engine (ballista, onager, etc...) unit that will have in-game different soldiers according to each specific faction.

This means that, if we have a list of devices that are commonly available to the factions that had them historically, we can actually save about a lot of unit spaces. In fact, I've made a bit of research:

-1 unit for Scorpio - Roman factions (one 3d soldier model and 4 different soldier textures)
-1 unit for Ballistas - Greek, Roman, etc... factions (the number of 3d soldier models equal to number of cultures and the number of different soldier textures equal to factions)
-1 unit for Repeating Ballistas - Greek factions (one 3d soldier model and the number of different soldier textures equal to factions)
-1 unit for Onager (tonned down to early catapults level) - Greek, Roman, etc... factions (the number of 3d soldier models equal to number of cultures and the number of different soldier textures equal to factions)
-1 new unit for Bricoli - "Barbarian" factions (one 3d soldier model and the number of different soldier textures equal to factions)

5 units instead of the 17 currently present in the files. We can save 12 unit slots!!!

What do you think?