Why do I die???

[PWNedbyPeasants]

New to the forums and this has probably been asked before but what is the deal with my wall attackers being mauled by inferior units. How can 1 peasant ARCHER unit take on 2 spearmen militia units and win??! This makes sieging incredibly hard so what is the problem? Is it this mythical shield bug thing I've been hearing about or what? Or is it the weapon types (spears vs. swords)? Any help offered will be much appreciated.

Thx in advance

[dunno]

The shield bug contributes in this situation, but I think what is more significant is that defenders gain huge combat bonuses when fighting on their own walls.

[pike master]

it also depends upon what kind of foods they eat.

while some prefer junk food to get started for the day perhaps those archers ate wheaties that morning.

[dumas]

while some prefer junk food to get started for the day perhaps those archers ate wheaties that morning.

That's where you're wrong man. Cheerios is the real breakfast of champions!

On a serious note, imagine you hauled your ladder to a wall under a barrage of arrow fire. You climb up three stories of it, and if you've ever climbed a ladder in real life, you're probably freaked as hell climbing just one story. You muster the courage to climb all the way up and jump off the ladder, to be greeted by a company of enemies and all your friends are either dead at the point where you landed or still climbing on the ladder. At that point, it matters little if the enemy is holding a bunch of daggers or pikes: They could probably beat you to death on the spot with their bare fists.

Defending a wall is, and should be, easier than attacking--even to overwhelming odds. If the odds were the same, what would be the point of having a wall in the first place?

[vonsch]

The lesson is: Don't send men up a ladder on a defended wall. Find a nice empty one. Assuming such exists! Once they are down inside the city the odds even up a lot. Especially if they are suddenly "behind" the defenders.

[sapi]

Either that or use a tower, as in doing that you give yourself some chance to overwhelm the defenders and carve out a bridgehead.

Ladders are good for speed attacks (ie undefended walls) and towers for slow but steady attacks on heavily defended areas.

[Whacker]

It's also a real pain in the butt now that they removed the ability to capture towers. This was always an integral part of my strategy in taking cities in RTW/BI. Another really really annoying point is the fact that they removed sapping points, sapping was a major part of siege warfare throughout the classical and middle ages. I suspect that both of these, the towers and sapping, were removed for so called "balance" issues, mainly for MP. My response is that CA should provide the ability down the road to mod these functions back into the game, if they're going to enforce stuff like that. Sieges should be hard and biased toward the defender, but I think that was taken way too far from RTW to M2TW.

My $0.02.

[TevashSzat]

Just use artillery and blast those walls down along with everyone on it

[Philbert]

I think sapping was overpowered in RTW. I only use siege equipment up to the point where I can build artillery.

Once I have breached the wall the second thing I try to do, after sending my infantry inside and up the walls to conquer the walls, is sending up my crossbowmen onto the walls. Once I have them there the town is lost because I can take all the time I want to prepare my last push to the center square or inner walls, and any sallying by the defender is drowned in my crossbow bolts. That is a good substitute for capturing the towers that basically only fire 1 bolt every 2 seconds.

[RJJ101]

Just use artillery and blast those walls down along with everyone on it

This works, but can be very expensive to repair after the battle, especially if you have pulverised all the towers as well.

Much cheaper to retrain a few units

Doesnt always work, but if you can send some fast cav through a side gate and get to the central Square the enemy will abandon the walls.

Now you can walk into the city and sacrifice them all to the God of your choosing.

Death by camel Gunner is currently my prefered option.

[Quillan]

You lose far, far more men to the towers than the wall defenders. The missiles fired from the towers are high attack rating (comparable to crossbows, if I remember correctly), armor piercing, and strike from the side or rear most of the time so you don't get your shield against it. Try a test sometime in a campaign battle. Save the game before the battle. Send up a unit of dismounted knights onto a wall section defended by something like the peasant archers you mentioned, and count the casualties. Then reload the game from before the battle and replay it, but this time destroy the towers with artillery before sending the knights up, and see how much of a difference there is.

[anders]

I think sapping was overpowered in RTW. I only use siege equipment up to the point where I can build artillery.

Once I have breached the wall the second thing I try to do, after sending my infantry inside and up the walls to conquer the walls, is sending up my crossbowmen onto the walls. Once I have them there the town is lost because I can take all the time I want to prepare my last push to the center square or inner walls, and any sallying by the defender is drowned in my crossbow bolts. That is a good substitute for capturing the towers that basically only fire 1 bolt every 2 seconds.

Overpowered indeed, not that theres anything wrong in sappers bringing down a wall, but that takes weeks of digging, in RTW a unit could just mole their way right trhow the wall and bring it tumbling down.

[Carl]

The missiles fired from the towers are high attack rating (comparable to crossbows, if I remember correctly), armor piercing, and strike from the side or rear most of the time so you don't get your shield against it.

Actually they're not AP, and whilst they have an attack of 12, tests have shown me anything over 10 produces no kill rate increases. They are also shorter ranged than your average bow.

Likewise the same goes for Ballista and Cannon towers and the Ballista Towers aren't body-piercing either.

[Whacker]

You lose far, far more men to the towers than the wall defenders. The missiles fired from the towers are high attack rating (comparable to crossbows, if I remember correctly), armor piercing, and strike from the side or rear most of the time so you don't get your shield against it. Try a test sometime in a campaign battle. Save the game before the battle. Send up a unit of dismounted knights onto a wall section defended by something like the peasant archers you mentioned, and count the casualties. Then reload the game from before the battle and replay it, but this time destroy the towers with artillery before sending the knights up, and see how much of a difference there is.

There's definitely a good amount of attrition associated with towers, BUT that's only if you have enough troops in range to activate them. If you don't park enough troops close enough to the outside walls, then you won't get this ability and as such the assaulter will suffer far less casualties from this when breaching the outermost walls. The bad part is if you have troops in proximity here, then you risk them getting butchered by overwhelming force, as opposed to like in RTW or MTW where you could let your defenses do their intended job of softening up the assaulter before combat is joined. Hell the whole POINT of overlapping defenses was so that the assaulter would have to fight for every square inch and be under constant fire the entire way. I almost considered changing the activation range to something insane so that all of the towers were always active in M2TW, but decided against this because you can't friggin' capture them!

I remember in RTW, the highest level walls were WELL worth the cash, because they took a huge chunk out of whatever was assaulting. Even in BI where they improved the AI assault tactics so they always used those machinegun towers, they still more often than naught had some very heavy casualties. Even if you lost, you could still make them pay dearly. Funny as it is I loved the 1.2 AI that you could simply lure in close to your walls and let them do the rest of the work, too bad they fixed that in 1.3 on.

In MTW, Citadels were also WELL worth the investment. I can't count the number of times I fended off an assaulting force that was easily 5+ times bigger than my 4 measly urban militia units. All I had to do was park them near the keep, and let the walls/defenses do their work. It made sense also in that when the attackers penetrated a layer of defenses, the outer rings deactivated sequentially, therefore I always had a layer of defense until they breached the innermost walls. More often than naught when they finally did get through the last gates, they'd taken severe losses, and all I had to do was funnel/pincer and mass routes ensued, all the while the remaining defenses plowing away.

For the record I completely and totally disagree about sapping being overpowered/cheap in RTW. Sap points were expensive enough to make them viable but not overly so, but you still had to use them effectively and fight your way into the hole(s) you made.

My stance remains.

1. Give us back the non-interlocking concentric walls that were in MTW.
2. Give us back the ability to capture towers like in RTW.
3. Give us back the autofiring towers regardless of unit proximity like in RTW.
4. Give us back sap points, dangit!

AND/OR

Just give us the friggin ability to mod all this behavior back in if we want it! Even better IMO as everyone wins, and can make the game behave like they want it to.

[pike master]

although the pre-patch ai was pathetic on the field i felt that it was trememdously tough when attacking the ai when it was in a castle. after pre-patch it seemed more tamer.

maybe its just i kept my eyes out more and learned to counter it. but when i first played i could hardly take a castle wall and when i did get the upper hand the ai would withdraw its troops before i could crush them and withdraw to another level.

and i can remember that if i didnt keep some unit directly behind my artillery you could bet everytime that the ai would send cav out to wipe your artillery out.

the ai can be tricky sometimes when it wakes up.