Burning siege eqip. almost impossible (for me)

[Steph]

Same for me. Few luck when trying to set a ram in fire.
However here a good trick to slow them down and pin them down at your gate:

Usually the ladders arrive long before the ram, because they charge. Just take them down, then, when the ram is at your gate, climb down with your troops and attack the ram. The other enemy units won't move, normally. The unit controlling the ram will move it back and defend themselves. At that moment go to your wall. Then the enemy will move their ram again, so you have to climb down again (actually some of your men are still downstairs).
And during all this time, you can kill them with whatever arrows you have.

Stéphane

[maestro]

I think you guys aren't using enough archers perchance?

I always try to defend with at least 4-6 units of longbows or above and nearly always successfully burn anything that comes close

I always aim all my archers at a ram first cause I always protect the gate. I can defend the walls easily against towers and ladders with leet troops but I never let cavalry into my cities. I've always been successful so i'm not sure where you're giong wrong

[Forward Observer]

I think you guys aren't using enough archers perchance?

I always try to defend with at least 4-6 units of longbows or above and nearly always successfully burn anything that comes close

I always aim all my archers at a ram first cause I always protect the gate. I can defend the walls easily against towers and ladders with leet troops but I never let cavalry into my cities. I've always been successful so i'm not sure where you're giong wrong

I have had the same experience as you playing the English. I love the longbowmen and so I usually have plenty of them to man the ramparts.

When defending against towers, rams, and ladders I also take them off fire at will and assign targets, which I think you are say that you also do. Mostly the rams and ladders first, and then towers which are usually the slowest and the last to approach.

The good thing about the retenue longbowmen is that they are decent melee troops in a pinch, so if a tower does make the wall they can sometimes hold on their own or at least until you can get stronger melee troops to the rescue.

I'm playing Spain now, and although peasant archers suck in melee, in sufficient quantities they have also managed to set fire to well over half of the rams and towers that they have come up against.

I also park a unit of my best melee troops in the space between the gate towers in such situations. I don't think the area is wide enough for archers to be that effective, but a melee unit is fairly safe there and will be well positioned to rush to the walls on either side of the gate towers as the need arises.

Cheers

[gardibolt]

Using the English on M/M, patched, no mods, I have a city in Egypt that has been besieged repeatedly by the Mongols, using rams and siege towers--at least 8 times in the last 16 turns. I have about 10 archer units on the walls, and only once in all that fighting has a siege tower made it to the walls, and a ram has never made it. Always, they go up in flames. But if they make it to the wall then the flame arrows don't seem to do anything and it's time for plan B.

Could the difficulty setting make a difference, I wonder?

[seneschal.the]

I'm actually glad it is very hard to burn siege equipment. It is not that defending against assaults is hard; machine gun towers, magic that makes knights lose against peasants on the walls and the unbreakable town square combined with the laughable AI... The only real danger is enemy cavalry, and if you burn the ram (I've never seen em go back and pick up the other ram, they just freeze and die) then that's it.

And just for the record, I've also noticed that you can sometimes fire flaming arrows from several units of archers and towers onto siege equipment and it seems to do nothing while it sometimes catches fire on the first or second volley. Random seed fixed at start of battle probably.

[gardibolt]

I don't get these references to the "unbreakable town square." If I'm ever reduced to a situation where I'm defending the square, I'm virtually always annihilated.

[danfda]

I've seen some similar problems. I've not yet been able to burn any enemy seige equipment, though to be fair I generally have 1 to 3 units of archers per city/castle, no more. On the other hand, I find I have to build at least 4 seige towers and 2 rams, since at least one ram and 2 or 3 towers get burned by the AI, even if they only have DFK on the walls and zero archer units. Gah! The universe hates me.

On a different note, I've seen multiple instances of my sallying out to murder the enemy at his rams and ladders, and the enemy troops being relpaced by others after I retreat. Both with ladders and rams this has happened. Though, if there are seige towers, they will simply run and try to use those. Silly men.