New Artillery for .8

[fatsweets]

I haven't seen any posts regarding the new artillery for .8 and just wanted to see what everyone thought. I love the new balistas, practically the whole city starts burning when you have one of these firing randomly with fire enabled and the stone thrower takes out gates in one shot sometimes. Sorry I can't remember the names. Good job EB Team on the artillery.

[Shigawire]

Unfortunately the models aren't changed from vanilla.. until we can add custom siege artillery animations..

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

Do the Romans not have any artillery? I have gone up against them, but can't make them.

I can't wait till they look different/awesome though!

[keravnos]

Shigawhire has done a magnificent job in here, as well. It is pity that artillery is SO limited by the RTW engine, or you would see... all of the different siege engines in action.

[Zaknafien]

The Romans have quite a bit but not until post-Marian I believe. Roman siegecraft was never very complicated until the later era, with circumvallation and earthen-ramps being the most prodigiously used methods--aside from the most popular--treachery.

[Shigawire]

The Romans were slow at adopting the advances in siege warfare in their armies. Their first recorded use of a crude siege tower (turris ambulatoria) was in 210 BC, when the Romans had been impressed with the Macedonian siege train of Philippos V. Although they had began constructing their own siege artillery earlier in 105 BC with smaller manufacture, first recorded mass-scale production of siege artillery didn't begin until 80-75 BC, when Caesar's personal siege engineer MARCVS VITRIVIVS POLLIO (Vitruvius) and his team started setting things in motion.

In the beginning of the republic, the Romans were generally VERY slow at learning new things.
But later on the Romans become really quick learners.

In the 1st and 2nd punic war, the Romans didn't construct any siege artillery, even though they were fighting Qarthadast, a nation with the experience of 300 years of more-or-less constant siege warfare in the island of Sicilia. Sometimes when the Romans captured a city from the Qarthadast or the Greeks (Syracuse and settlements in Macedonia), they got lucky and captured a large stock of siege artillery. In one instance we even know exactly how many they captured, at the capture of Carthagena in the 2nd Punic War, it is recorded:
120 catapults (arrow-throwers) of the largest sort, 281 smaller ones, 23 large ballistae (stone-throwers), 52 smaller ballistae

Circumvallation (CIRCVMVNNITVS) was not so groundbreaking as most believe though. The Romans just took use of an old Greek stratagem from the Peloponnesian wars (430s BC), when they called it "PERITEICHISMOS." The difference was that the Greeks built stone circumvallations which took time, whereas the Romans built wooden circumunnitus at a breathtaking pace. Of course, the Romans fighting the Gauls had that luxury, since Gauls were really backwards in the art of siege warfare. Greeks fighting Greeks did not have that luxury. In the East, Romans were more weary about building wooden circumunnitus, since that was where the art of siege warfare had originated. A different beast alltogether.