use of onagers and other heavy artillery

**mxlm** · 05-09-2005, 10:14

I once did a custom bridge battle in which i had 10 heavy onagers and 10 repeating ballistas, and the AI had whatever it whipped up with an equivalent cost.

My arty was slaughtered. Horribly. Looked pretty cool, though ;)

**Strongsword** · 05-09-2005, 19:29

A battery of three or four onager units in open battlefield (supporting infantry and cav., of course) with flaming ammunition against a large force is especially devasting to morale. At various points of the battle, you can focus all of the onagers to "carpet bomb" a particular enemy unit. The collateral damage from explosions make up for lack of pin-point accuracy.

**pezhetairoi** · 05-10-2005, 02:12

I had one onager unit on a hill firing at a full stack of greek hoplites while my archers shot them down on the plains. The onagers conducted themselves well, when I later checked the kill count. I balanced out by alternatively firing firepots and standard boulders. A little bit of each effect.

**Ramboost** · 05-10-2005, 12:21

I never use artillery units........I play vanilla 1.2 campaign and I rarely don't wan't to use artillery on the expense of other combat units. But I must admit that in some battles where you are the attacker and the enemy just sit back and wait, onagers would have been nice.

I have rarely experienced the AI use onagers until I (Jullii) was outlawed by the Senate and now face the other Roman factions. I have had several battles against the Scipii and they make extensively use of artillery. Yesterday I was fighting a full Scipii army with at least half of the units being onagers. This caught me completely by surprise and I was forced to rush my attack instantly........I won the battle, but it was nice to see diversity in the AI strategy;-)

**ZZR Puig** · 05-10-2005, 13:01

Siege artillery has a problem when used in the battlefield, and not just to breach enemy walls. The problem is that their numbers don't increase with the unit size option. So you get two onagers per unit in small size and also two onagers on huge.

There may be some reasons for this, basically if you get only one onager in small unit size you wouldn't probably be able to breach a wall with a single unit of onagers. By contrast, with 6 onagers on huge you would be able to destroy half of the city walls with a single unit.

The result of that situation is that siege units are only worth it in combat on smaller unit sizes. The right solution would have been to change the walls resistance with the unit size and also increase the number of onagers with it. In addition, some other siege engines like scorpions that can't attack walls get the very same limitation as onagers, which doesn't make much sense.

Personally, playing on large unit size, I recently changed the siege engines per unit for all types from 2 to 3. On large unit size, it should have been 4, but I left it in 3 not to get them to powerful against walls. This way are a bit more useful in the battlefield and may be worth using in some situations.

Note: Another solution that has come to my mind right now to really balance their usefulness either in combat or sieges is to also change their damage to buildings value. For example, you could mod the number of onagers per unit from 2 to 4 for large unit size and also reduce their damage against buildings to one half. This way they would be as effective against troops and buildings as they are on medium unit size. All these changes can be made in a few minutes, so it don't involve any problem.