How to make a projectile damage walls?

[Zarax]

I've been trying to mod the naphta trowers in order to be capable of doing some damage to walls, but with little success so far...

Does anyone have any idea about how to mod that?

[lugh]

None! I can't remeber seeing anything in the projectile sheet like that (damages walls? yes/no) or whatever.
I'd post this in the mod forum though, maybe someones tried it already?

[EatYerGreens]

I don't think you even need to mod them. They do come out from the siege engineer after all.

I did once try to get them to break down a gate (at a wooden stockade type fort) but even two units together were only good enough to cause maye 50-60% damage by the time they ran out of ammo and I had to bash my way in using other types of troops. They would have been better employed to throw bombs in through the gateway and blow up defenders who bunched together too much.

What I will say for them is that, being such a tiny unit, the arrow fire off the walls wasn't accurate enough to score many hits. I did lose some but nowhere near as many as bigger units tend to suffer if left standing still within range.

For some reason, I still picture the Naptha weapon as being more incendiary, like a petrol bomb, than explosive and hence not good for blowing holes through walls, especially masonry.

It would be demanding on the graphics power but it would be kind of cool if using them in woods would (unintentionally?) start a fire that set both sides' troops fleeing the scene, or using them in arid lands started a wildfire spreading across the grass, to the same effect, smoke affecting your view and so on.

[Zarax]

Well, as far as I know you can only attack gatehouses with their grenades, while I would have liked to use them to damage walls too (not a big problem on stone walls since they can barely scratch them, given the low power of their grenades)...

[Don Corleone]

I think EYG has a good point. How much damage is a molotov cocktail going to do to a 2 foot thick wall of granite? It'll spash it's incidiary contents on the wall, burn, and that's all folks.

EYG's idea for setting the woods and grasslands on fire, with both armies fleeing in terror had me in stitches. Too bad I'm locked in a quarterly business review at the moment. Had to blame it on a 'stupid customer support' email.

[Zarax]

Of course EYG is right, in fact if you don't change the grenade's power they will manage to damage a wooden wall, while the full ammo used by a naphta trower squad will do approximately 3% damage to anything in stone, this if you're lucky.

Suming up, grenades would be like a portable ballista: good against people, useful when you have to attack a fort but next to useless against stone walls.

[EatYerGreens]

EYG's idea for setting the woods and grasslands on fire, with both armies fleeing in terror had me in stitches.

Good stuff. I do like to sneak in some humour every now and then. Glad to hear it's not lost on people.

There was an interesting documentary on recently where they were trying to reconstruct the 'Greek Fire' weapon which the Byzantines used on their galleys.

There's not a whole load of information in the history books, so some parts they had to use a bit of artistic licence with. The end result was an apparatus not dissimilar to what fire brigades used to put fires out. A big lever for two or three men to push up and down, a pair of cylinders to pump the fuel with, bronze pipes leading to a metal tube at the bow.

The wierd part was one of the few details they got from the history books. The flammable mixture was held in an open dish, about the diameter of an oil drum, suspended over a hearth (anyone's guess how they never set their own ship on fire!!!). There were places in that part of the world where oil would seep out of the ground (like a tar pit, only it's the same stuff we drill for nowadays), so raw materials were not a problem. They'd mix in some powder which they described as being 'tree resin', which would make the mixture stick to surfaces, heat it over this fire to make it runny, pump it out through the bow nozzle and past a burning wick to light it. Basically a flame-thrower, then.

They built a scale model target ship (about 15-20 feet long) and didn't take too many attempts to set it ablaze with this stuff. They also tried using a ballista type thing to hurl glass pots of incendiary goo at it, which also worked, once they'd got the range right. Of course, the target was obliging by keeping still but you get the general idea. In an age when not many people could swim, having your ship set on fire basically gave you two choices, neither of them pleasant.

Anyway, my guess is that the naptha weapons contained the same kind of stuff and it's more or less like napalm. The pot smashes, burning stuff splashes everywhere, sticks to whatever it hits and sets your clothes on fire. Nasty.