Seiges

[Vades]

What is EB's possition on sieges, i'v read that actual assaults on citys were rare, and if so are you going to change the way sieges/assaulting citys works? or if your not going to change the amount of sieges, the length of time it takes to siege a city and have the enemy surrender? I dont really know anything so if im completely off on this or it doesn't make sense for some reason i'd suggest ignoring me

[Rodion Romanovich]

I'l like it if rams could have build time 0 turns, or if small towns/cities with ridiculously small 2-3 unit peasant/town watch/skirmishers garrisons and wooden walls would surrender instantly when a 20 unit high quality army puts it on siege.

If there, historically, were so few sieges, how come so many cities could be conquered? Well, obviously because not all cities needed and assualt or siege in order to be conquered!

If rebellions would be beefed up for compensation I think it would be more historically accurate.

[Vades]

hmm i think i worded that wrong, and i guess there would have been lots of sieges, but the actual assault is what i'm talking about. i dont think that happened all that often but im not sure.

[curufinwe_91]

Yeah cities were taken but if a conquerer made an example of one city, then the rest of the faction's cities in the area would probably surrender when asked to. Could you not get the diplomat to have a "surrender" demand to cities under siege?

[Furious Mental]

If taking one city allowed the player to instantly force the surrender of every adjacent city, the game would be not be chalenging and therefore not fun. Whole factions would disappear or be rendered impotent with the fall of a single province.

[Steppe Merc]

Well sieges did happen. And rember, there were a lot more real towns than the one in the game. So in a way if you do take over the one big one, the other "near by" (non existant in the game) towns do give up.
But sieges did happen. Also about the whole surrendering, that is what bribing is for. That is the "surrendering": bribe the town.

That said, sieges will be different... not quite sure how, as my factions rarely if ever use as complex siege equipment, as they only had captive Greek engineers.

[Rodion Romanovich]

If taking one city allowed the player to instantly force the surrender of every adjacent city, the game would be not be chalenging and therefore not fun. Whole factions would disappear or be rendered impotent with the fall of a single province.

That's not what I meant. I meant that if a faction holds a very small town with say 1000 population and a garrison of 100 peasants, it's pretty ridiculous that they'll try a stand against an army of 10 legionaries, 4 archers, 1 artillery and 5 cavalry, or whatever you happen to have brought to besiege the town. All larger cities should still try to fight, just not the almost abandoned towns, especially not if you're seen as a liberator. Also making exampes should work for quicker surrender, but not if you exterminate all cities blindly - that should lead to fiercer resistance. BUT - even if the actual conquering of the cities become easier, they should be harder to hold, with larger rebel armies spawning outside cities.

In vanilla R:TW the pattern is like this: kill all larger enemy armies, put cities under siege, assault. Every fifth turn a new brigand army of 3-7 low quality units will be spawned outside the city.

The pattern I want is: kill all larger enemy armies in very hard battles and with strategic cleverness shown by the enemy. Eventually the player gets an advantage and can start conquering. He puts larger cities under siege (and maintaining a siege should IMO give besieger casualties like in M:TW) with losses due to disease, harassing, night raids etc., then conquer the larger cities by assault or starving them. Some sallying attempts and relief attempts, then the city falls. If you've conquered all major cities (perhaps the 5 largest of the 7-8 the faction holds), the others should just surrender and let you occupy them without any fight, at least if the garrison is small. A few pockets of small rebel armies move around in the newly conquered lands - they're the last defenders who try to hold out, but then the area becomes completely calm. But then, 10-20 turns later, a large rebellion of 3 full stacks is spawned in the area, with around 8 units of high-quality footmen supported by many lower-quality footmen and (fewer) missile and militia cavalry units. You beat that rebellion, and things become calmer again for a while, but then after 30-40 turns another rebellion is spawned - maybe not as large if the last one was beaten quickly. If a rebellion would be successful, it should grow and get more stacks spawned, especially if the player was a cruel conqueror (high taxes, unprovoked attack, many exterminations, much tearing down of enemy temples and culture buildings*), but not if the player is popular.

In total I think those changes would make the game HARDER, not EASIER, than it is now.

* That's also a feature I'd like to see - a possibility to be respect local religions when conquering a faction, without getting a penalty from it. It's strange that for example a shrine to dionysos means a culture penalty if you're a faction that can build a shrine to bacchus - bacchus is almost the same guy as dionysos (please correct me if I'm wrong)!

[khelvan]

That's not what I meant. I meant that if a faction holds a very small town with say 1000 population and a garrison of 100 peasants, it's pretty ridiculous that they'll try a stand against an army of 10 legionaries, 4 archers, 1 artillery and 5 cavalry, or whatever you happen to have brought to besiege the town.

Assault the city in this case. The results are the same.

[Southern Hunter]

Khelvan,

I think he is complaining that he is not allowed to assault them, at least for 6 months (while he builds a battering RAM).

Hunter

[Rodion Romanovich]

Yes that, the fact that it's boring and the fact that it's unrealistic. Auto-calculating it would give me 300 casualties and if I play out the battle it takes 15 minutes with loading, ramming down walls etc., plus - I can't assault until after one turn of waiting.

But I'd like to add something I forgot in my post above. I'd like it if it would be impossible to retrain/train units in newly conquered cities, you'd have to hold them for at least a few turns before being able to recruit, and the lower the public order, the less men available to recruit, for example by taking "part of the population available for recruit" * (100-"public order"), as the number of people available for recruiting. This way, losing a city would not be extremely critical - but in return it conquering a city wouldn't be instantly rewarding. I find that in vanilla R:TW, holding a piece of ground is valued far too high. Strategically it doesn't matter much if I conquer my enemy's smallest town in the wilderness if his armies out in the open are still as strong as before.

With that system, I wouldn't be able to play R:TW like I've always been playing R:TW and M:TW - by rush-expanding quickly early in the campaign and hardly ever building any own troops buildings because my conquered cities usually get them before me early in the campaign. It would definitely be harder to go to war, as you'd be forced to bring not only an army for fighting, but also troops to leave as garrisons in the newly conquered cities. Usually the first thing I do in a conquered city is to retrain my army. Well, without that possibility the conqueror would be forced to return to his homelands if he lost too many units, and maybe get caught up by a large enemy army on the way back... This would create some really interesting scenarios that we know of from real life history. He'd have to make a decision - should I in the meantime leave a small garrison in that heavily fortified city I took while my main army is returning home for reinforcements, or will it be chanceless in the event of a siege/assault?

If larger cities would also make more profit than the smaller ones (something I haven't seen in vanilla R:TW), it would be more critical to lose a large city like the capital, which means conquering an enemy's capital would be a more severe blow, and justify the player to go for the capital immediately even if it's "behind enemy lines" (there are unconquered provinces on the way to the capital). That's also a realism improvement, as it was common to go for a capital when conquering a country.

ALGORITHMS?
Now, regarding algorithm for determining whether the city has any recruits available or not, there'd of course be problems if you lose a city with your culture and retake it a few turns later, so you might want to use the culture data for the settlements to decide whether you can recruit/retrain in it or not.

One way, not causality and quite cheap but still working (most of the time), of achieving the system with units only being recruitable after a while could be to make all units require a shrine in order to be trained, because a shrine always takes some time to build and will also be one of the first things you build in a conquered city.

Is nobody as excited as I am about changing these parameters to create a game that's more realistic in the strategical perspective?

[khelvan]

None of that can be affected in any way. We're dealing with hard code that can't be changed.

[Rodion Romanovich]

None of that can be affected in any way. We're dealing with hard code that can't be changed.

Was that a reply to my post?

SOLVING REBELLIONS INSTEAD OF BRIGANDS
Well, I think some of the things can be affected. First of all - number of brigand appearances can be affected, as can brigand army compositions. Brigands could be made less common but they could instead get larger armies. These would symbolize the rebellions I'm talking about.

MAKING LARGER CITIES MORE IMPORTANT TO HOLD
Profit for cities I'm sure you can affect, can't you? At least make the tax bonus and economical bonus that depends on population a little larger, ins't that possible either?

MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO RETRAIN YOUR ARMY RIGHT AFTER CONQUERING A CITY
Finally, making all troops require a basic shrine (apart from the other buildings they require) in order to be trained is something that could simulate the unability to retrain your army right after conquering the city. This is really an important strategical aspect in which vanilla R:TW is REALLY unrealistic and even if this means reducing number of shrine types for each faction to one (for easier implementation of the dependency), I think it's an improvement. In fact I think it's strange that you can build shrines to different gods with different bonuses in vanilla R:TW, there should be something else like a building just called shrine, which would simulate the player is spending money on religion in the city with the result that the people get happier. So I don't see why reducing number of shrines to one would be bad for the game, I'd rather see it as an improvement. Historically you can't have recieved different "bonuses" in a city depending on what particular god you honored most in that city...


Edit: An even better way of making it harder to retrain your troops after conquering a city could be to simply make barbarian/roman/greek etc. troop buildings incompatible. Then you don't have to abandon multiple shrine types. To avoid peasants/basic militia from being trained in a newly conquered city, you could make peasants/basic militia require a "muster field" building that takes 1 turn to build.

MAKING SMALLER CITIES EASIER TO TAKE (can't be solved)
The final aspect - about making small cities easier to take over, is something that might not be possible to fix after all. The build points can be affected, right? But even if they can, the R:TW hardcoded algorithm is probably to see after each turn if the siege equipment item could be built or not, so even if build points are zero, the construction of the ram won't happen until the end of the turn. So I believe that part is impossible to implement unless the source code is released.

I guess these solutions aren't as good as the ones that would involve changing the code, but they're at least better than vanilla R:TW IMO. What do you think? I understand if you don't like these suggestions because they're somewhat a type of "emergency solution", but I think they could work...