siege weapon field tactics

**vastator** · 07-19-2005, 21:02

Originally Posted by Nelson

I believe that Roman ballistas should move strategically like infantry and not like onagers. The legions had the wherewithal to get around quickly despite their organic light artillery.

Spot on! What really bugs me is that loading a couple of scorpions onto a ship slows it down, but a herd of

elephants doesn't! I asked one of the mods if there was a way of negating this penalty, but he reckons it's hardcoded.

**pezhetairoi** · 07-20-2005, 01:16

Ya! The hardcoded unit stereotypes (inf/cav/siege) are too...stereotypical. Some siege weapons can move around just as well as infantry can.

Y'know, the Napoleonix (that was a typo that I will not erase. As you can see Bartix is getting to me) era saw horse-drawn artillery... if only we could have horse-drawn ballistae... that would truly be a mobile force!

**Norxis** · 07-20-2005, 03:07

The simple fact is, and I'm glad that most people agree with me, siege weapons are fun! Normal battles pre-siege weapons are pretty easy and lets face it, you really don't need those extra 2 units that you can give to onagers, cause your going to beat the enemy in battle anyway. If you can get your best armies to rampage non-stop through enemy territory (ie., march up to a city, breach walls, take it), no complaints here. Especially for those boring battles with only wooden walls, battering rams are annoying, is it just me or does anyone else find those battles more annoying than fun? Stone wall battles are sooooo much better!

And if nothing else, as other people have said, do it in honour of the Romans, the forerunners in siege engineering! And because its fun, which is the reason why we're playing the game in the first place!

**Mahrabals apprentice** · 07-20-2005, 08:53

forerunners?

They just took greek technology and perfected it.

The fore runners were the assyrians, they were the first be be able to take walled cities by force

**eastsidehighrise** · 07-20-2005, 10:23

i can only assume that a couple onagers can cause some serious damage - when you're defending one end of a bridge and the enemy potentially have hundreds of men crammed on the bridge. sitting targets

**Ciaran** · 07-20-2005, 11:41

I like Onagers, each of my armies has at least two of them and I like to shoot them dry before closing in. Against highly mobile units like cavalry or chariots they aren´t that effective, that´s true, but they can reduce tightly packed infantry formations quite nicely. More often than not they won my day.
They´re especially nice if a lot of enemy units sit in a fort, all cramped up in the (relatively) tiny space. In that situation, they often leave next to no work for the infantry.

**vastator** · 07-20-2005, 13:06

I just watched a prog called "Ancient Discoveries" on UKTV History, and it was amazing. I knew the Greeks had wheeled flamethrowers for use in sieges, but it's possible that they also had hand-held versions that worked like a flit gun - perfect for city assaults.

Apparently the largest standard missile fired by Roman ballistae weighed close to 60 pounds, but some custom-built models fired 180 pounders. These monsters stood around 40 feet high and made an onager look puny!

They also demonstrated the scorpion and the later cheiroballistra. The scorpion had a missile velocity of around 39 m/s, and the cheiroballistra could manage over 50 m/s. Interestingly, Roman lorica segmentata could deflect the bolts, although they were capable of pinning a mail-clad warrior to a tree.

Personally, I've increased the number of ballistae/scorpions per unit to three (I think RTR uses four) to give them more firepower on the battlefiled. I may push scorpions up to four, but that will mean increasing the unit cost.