castle defense

[myz]

are the new castles pretty much impregnable now? It seems from the readings of the previews that there are now 3 layers of defenses the attackers have to breach. You can camp archers in the outermost and innermost layers, and pikemen in between and everywhere else, whoever attacks will either die off trying, or suffer huuuge losses. So how is this castle defense handled? is it possible to win clear victory in storming castles?

[Polemists]

I think. I think that while it's true Castles are much heavier fortified realize you have better weapons to knock down there walls. Sure when you try a straight on charge you'll suffer huge losses, and yes catapaults and trebuchets will prolly run out of ammo before you completely take down first ring.

Then again keep in mind that not everything is a castle, we have castles and cities. Plus I'm quite sure no one will have three ring walls starting you have to build up. So strike early or bring gun powder, and lots and lots of men. Blood strewned battles feels, ahhhhhh

[Hochmeister]

Yes it sounds like it will be bloody but not impossible which is how it should be. Did you read in the Sicilian review about Mortars, sounds like they will be a handy unit for castle defence as well as attack due to their high trajectory.

[hoom]

Or do the historically accurate & just blockade them till they surrender

Should be interesting, I always assaulted early in previous TWs, never found much satisfaction from use of wall destruction in RTW so almost exclusively have just assaulted the walls.

[Furious Mental]

I believe the developers said somewhere that it will probably require multiple battles to take the largest castles, i.e. you'll have to break through one layer of defense at a time.

[TB666]

Also you can note that in order for the towers to fire you need to have a unit standing next to them.

[hoom]

Oh, thats interesting, where did they say that?

[TB666]

Soulflame's question thread
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...t=68970&page=2

3. You can't station artillery on the walls, but the towers are upgradable. One very nice thing is that towers don't shoot unless there is actually a unit on the walls next to it. Yes, this means that if there is only 1 unit garrissoned in a castle, most of the defenses don't work.

[Denizar]

Thats indeed a very good point.

I wonder if there are connections between the layers of wall so that once you get your men on the first ring, they can walk their way to the inner ring. Or will we have to get them on walls, then on ground again, then on the second layer, then on ground again, and then the third layer? If so, how will we get ladders and siege towers to the second and third rings? Does this mean we have to knock down walls, no towers or ladders will work?

Will the tunnel digging guys be able to crush down the entire wall system at once or one layer at a time? Will we have the chance to dig a tunnel into the city so that we can get our men through the tunnel inside? Which is what happened in certain battles in history. Maybe having a spy inside the city could let you have this possibility.

[timsemand]

Thats indeed a very good point.

I wonder if there are connections between the layers of wall so that once you get your men on the first ring, they can walk their way to the inner ring. Or will we have to get them on walls, then on ground again, then on the second layer, then on ground again, and then the third layer? If so, how will we get ladders and siege towers to the second and third rings? Does this mean we have to knock down walls, no towers or ladders will work?

Will the tunnel digging guys be able to crush down the entire wall system at once or one layer at a time? Will we have the chance to dig a tunnel into the city so that we can get our men through the tunnel inside? Which is what happened in certain battles in history. Maybe having a spy inside the city could let you have this possibility.

I see your point, but if the enemy use the siege towers or ladders to get up on first ring, then they can walk at connections and then take the whole castle without any problems. And if that is the case why make three wall rings.

[Denizar]

I see your point, but if the enemy use the siege towers or ladders to get up on first ring, then they can walk at connections and then take the whole castle without any problems. And if that is the case why make three wall rings.

If that is the case why bother with siege towers?

[Polemists]

Because, I don't think it's that easy.

Mainly because even assume you take outter wall, I'm willing to guarentee there will be a little town square, center, whatever we will have to hold again for two minutes and as comp retreats they'll fall back to that.

Further I would like to think that while you can take first wall, if you have to take it down by layers that probably means it's not interconnected. I am assuming though there is prep time so the key is stationing correct units. Also you can always do like with mideval and send units out up to walls, they just kind of slow to get up there.

[Azog 150]

Now i really cant wait for the seige battles

[Martok]

One other thing to keep in mind is that it's likely that cities/castles will often times not have a full garrison. Therefore it should be a little easier to successfully assault fortifications, since the enemy probably won't have as many troops to man the walls.

[Kourutsu]

Castles are easily breached! All you have to do is send your finest soldier up the latrine run-off shoot. And I say this with all seriousness. Happened at castle Gaillard in France I think.

[Polemists]

Yes and one time Romans were saved by the flight of geese, when the stupid birds honked as intruders approached from a cliff, Needless to say these factors arn't in. These are on average how did castle assaults go. While some you seem to want this wayyyyy easy, I don't think it will be. Personally I'm glad it's not, I don't want to build three rings just to have someone surround me for 18 years.

Hopefully AI will be intelligent enough to send armies from else where to break seiges. If they could do this in Barbarian Invasion i dunno why not in MTW.
PREPARE FOR BLOODSHED

[Bob the Insane]

BI did show greater willingness by the AI to assault, and it usually built a combination of Ram, Ladders and Tower to do it... Of everthing the Ladders are the scariest as they are indestructable and when there are 3 or 4 full stacks of a horde out there your only chance to keeping them outside the walls or they will do you will sheer weight of numbers...

I think the dismountable cavalry will make a bif difference in M2TW too, as you could often see off a an attacking Hunnic horde if you could decimate their merge infantry. But if all those HAs and generals out there could start the battle dismounted then there would be much more to worry about...

[Grumfoss]

I'm sure that castles in this period rarely had huge garrisons. For example most of the castles in Wales had very small garrisons of maybe as small as 50 men. The castles were designed in such a way that a small force could defend them against a much larger force.

I think that the idea of having wall towers operational only if they have a unit next to them is great. However I do think that if you have one unit on the walls then all the towers should be active, until that unit either routs or is destroyed.

[Furious Mental]

Since fortifications can sustain a number of militia units for nothing it shouldn't be too difficult to have enough troops to keep the fortifications firing. It also means not having to worry so much about a city with a one unit garrison being taken by FREAKIN BANDITS!!!

I noticed in some screenshots of building types that there are "improved towers" and "castle_cannon" (obviously not a final name). If the cannon are indeed cannon, hopefully they will know not to fire at one's own walls.

[{BHC}KingWarman88{KTCC}]

Castles in MTW 1 had 3 layers of defense depening the Castle itself, so I'm quite happy that they making the ones in MTW2 better.

[professorspatula]

I'm not wholly impressed with the 'you need a unit next to a defence for it to work'. It's good in theory, but really how many men do you need to work/protect a tower? If you could split a unit into smaller groups for siege defence, each manning a defensive position, then that would work well. It's silly to think you could have a unit of 120 men at arms only able to use 1 tower, and you have another unit of 6 peasants allowing use of another. In reality, you'd position the men where they could be of most use to get the best from the fortifications you have. It's going to be beneficial to dump all your small weakened units from previous battles into a settlement to provide garrison support just so you get to use as many towers as possible with the minimum of cost. Then again, if RTW is anything to go by, the AI will only attack from 1 or 2 directions so a few towers will be sufficient to man.

[CrackerJap]

Yea the idea of a whole unit needed to man a tower in order to operate it seems silly to me. I remember reading about how small garrisons of 40-60 men were quite capable of holding out against a force of several hundred for months until relief forces could arrive.

[SirGrotius]

One thing I wonder is if it's feasible to direct the attack of castles or will auto-siege be too appealing. Perhaps I'm a minority here, but I just found castle sieges too time consuming in the previous games, so I'd just auto-resolve which I found would cause me less losses than if I had stormed the castle myself.

[hoom]

Mmm, I'm starting to believe that siege assaults are going to be vastly harder in M2TW than Rome.

Multiple free militia garrison, multi layer defenses (ie inner defenses will hammer your guys on outer walls), cannon towers & dismounted cavalry all are going to make weakening up the walls before assault important or just starving them out a distinctly viable solution.

The towers only shooting with a unit nearby bit is sort of good & sort of bad, it'll reduce that danger of the other defences but it'll also make it much harder for me to turtle in a castle/well defended town relying on the towers to do their thing.

I always thought each tower should have say 5 militia missile soldiers on it shooting out.
They could be shot dead by missile units or when you're storming the walls, soldiers have to chop'em dead before the tower can be taken.

So deeply looking forward to seeing a fully fledged Rome period mod on the M2TW engine

[Bulawayo]

Maybe this screen can tell us something about castle defences. The fact that it has several layers of walls inside the settlement tells me it probably is a castle, but I am not sure about it. Anyway it surely gives away some information to those who know more than me.

[Bob the Insane]

Interesting image...

It shows us that at least in this case all the 3 rings are connected with the castle not in the centre but in the bottom left corner...

I wonder if they will use impassible terrain to prevent a direct assault on the castle proper?

Notice also that the town square appears to be inside the second layer of defences not the third. I wonder how that will work?

[professorspatula]

Looks more like a city to me. Important buildings in the inner rings in the left hand side probably. It's well fortified, but easy prey for a large siege prepared force. I expect the large castles to be more traditional multi rings of walls type thing.

[Bob the Insane]

Looks more like a city to me. Important buildings in the inner rings in the left hand side probably. It's well fortified, but easy prey for a large siege prepared force. I expect the large castles to be more traditional multi rings of walls type thing.

I don't know, while I hope you are correct I suspect the cities will have only one wall as in Rome...

[professorspatula]

Well I expected that as well, considering just how bad the AI was in sieges in RTW. But we live in hope that they've improved things since. There have certainly been some impressive shots of large castle type buildings before I'm sure.

[Tiberius maximus]

im a patient person i can wait untill either they sally forth or they surrender if i think ill take too much casualties