Idea! Interception

[The Stranger]

maybe add the option scorched earth (destroy the province and evacuate)

[Bhruic]

I just wish there was some way to get around the turn-order issue. For example, I was playing the Greeks, and the Scipii had attacked me in Sicily. I fought them off, but then Carthage attacked. Because Carthage comes after the Scipii in the turn-order, they were able to attack right away. Had Carthage sieged first, there would have been a turn in between where I could have retrained units and such.

That was one of the things I liked about MTW, everyone plotted moves "together" (even if the AI did cheat ), so if you had 2 enemies move into your territory, everyone fought together, instead of bizarre order system.

Bh

[RexDomin]

Sounds like a good idea to make the siege part a bit more interesting, but if we are to strive for historical correctness, it's really not that appliccable. At some points of their frontier, the Romans did have an organized defence, as described by Edward Luttwak in his "the Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire," where they organized a "defence in depth", where they had fortified grain supplies, strategicly placed observations etc. However, modern scholars believe that this did not represent the overall situation. Territory was not concieved in the same way as we do today! It was more "spheres of influence", and it was often hard to decide actual borders. The Romans used the rivers of Germania and Dacia as borders, mostly because they were more easily defendable (Actually, they called them "frontiers" not borders) . But there was no way they could control the entire frontier. Ammelianus Marcellianus tells us about an event where the emperor, moving down from campaign in Germania, came across a city, that to their surprise had been occupied by barbarians! "Border incursions" were frequent, sometimes they were even recognized by the emperor, but often, they never learned about them before rumours started spreading of smoking villages in certain regions.

When barbarians repeatedly sacked Rome in the late empire, they often came upon the city with surprise, moving down all of Italy, almost uninterrupted.

I believe that the current system of watchtowers already gives us a more than adequate "early warning system", which is a lot more than the Romans ever had. It also appears to me that the time for preparation etc. already is allowed for in the number of turns a city can survive. Besides, the siege mode in this game is so full of bugs already... do we really want to add more to that?

[screwtype]

I think the real problem lies in the fact that you lose your income from a province the minute a siege is put in place - even it's by a single unit against a city with a 20 unit garrison.

The easy fix is to just make it so that you don't start losing income from a siege until the second turn of the siege. That way you get a chance to break the siege before losing any dough.

Most of my sieges I break right away with an immediate sally from the city, but I've already lost the income for a turn, which just isn't fair.