siege equipment

[Brogie]

just want to know your thaught on the lak of sappers and defensive siege equipment such as boiling hot oil, log, rocks etc

i would like tos ee my defenders on the wall throwing rocks as the enemy are climbing ladders or hot oil poured onto the battering ram, etc even some machicolation in the walls or even a murder-hole in the gate house...

[Bob the Insane]

Would love to see it all (a la Stronghold)...

I would love to see:

Ditches and moats as [optional] constructable improvements to Wall or Castle level. You would need a counter of some variety (it is still a game). No moat in the middle east, too sandy and hot? What are the effects? Immune to siege towers and ladders? Gate attcks only... Attackers would need to take out gate towers and use a ram? It will be interesting to see how this is actually handling in the Kingdoms expansion...

Boiling/burning oil at the gate (also in Kingdoms?).

In reintroducing tunneling I would like to see some form of counter. Not sure what though. Perhaps that fact that it only affects the outter wall is one item. How was sapping effected by moats historically? Perhaps if would only partially damage a wall requiring either mutliple attempts or support from siege engines too (but they destroy walls quick enough anyway)...

For tweaks to the existing:

Balista and cannon towers being able to fire to the sides as well as out or at least have them fire arrows (or muskets in the case of cannon towers maybe) to the sides and back.

Would be really happy if ladders could be knocked down from the the top rather than the bottom. With the low rate of fire from the towers it is almost impossible to stop footknights with ladders without your own uber warriors on top of the walls. To be honest I have no idea why anyone builds towers for anything the tallest walls especially as they lost the ability to fire at the defenders on the walls...

[TevashSzat]

I think that sapping was overpowered in RTW and that CA was right in taking them out of M2TW. As for defensive siege equipment, I feel that defenders already get enough bonuses and taht adding them would only help them even more. Furthermore, the ai will probably use defensive siege units poorly while the players will be able to use them very effectively further increasing the gap between the skills of computers and players

[Matt_Lane]

In reintroducing tunneling I would like to see some form of counter. Not sure what though. Perhaps that fact that it only affects the outter wall is one item. How was sapping effected by moats historically? Perhaps if would only partially damage a wall requiring either mutliple attempts or support from siege engines too (but they destroy walls quick enough anyway)...

As I understand it Moats were in part a counter to mining under the walls foundations.

I think tunnels could be a simple yet effective modification. You would select it in the 'Siege Tower, Ram, Ladder' window but it would involve a larger time penalty than the others. Then when you were ready to storm the walls the opening scene could be the crumbling wall animation.

Also I don't see the reason for not having the boiling oil present since it was there in the first Medieval War. This coupled with some rocks lobbed from the walls or gatehouse would add that extra realism.

Lastly in addition to being able to add different types of towers to your castle how about more advanced gatehouses. Instead of your gate opening into the castle interior they could lead to a second enclosed courtyard with a second gate to overcome.

I don't know how feasible any of these would be but I'd love to have the opportunity to try them out.

[Brogie]

it would be nice even just for quick battle mode, to design your own castle and each section of the castle cost youa certain amount of point walls would cost less than towers etc

attackers get 5000pts for it units, defender get 5000 for units and 2000 for castle etc

it would be awsome if you could design your own castle in the campaign, each section costing you lots and lots of time and gold, imagine that along with an online multiplayer campaign feature

[DVX BELLORVM]

Would be really happy if ladders could be knocked down from the the top rather than the bottom.

I would very much like to see this implemented in the next patch/expansion or whatever...

[Brogie]

to usesome of the stuff recommended, when you 1st start beign besiegd, a screen should appear with stuff you van build like it does for attack,

instead of showing ladders, rams and towers, it would show hot oil, rocks, logs also large pairs of poles for pushing the tops of ladders over,

the 1st one sup the ladder must quickly kill the pole hodler to stop them pushing over the ladders ( would you allow fallen ladders to be picke dup again?)

[Joshwa]

A thought on moats, perhaps in the siege menu you could get an option to attempt to fill in parts of the moat, this would obviously cost time, money, and men, but would make the walls accessible at a few key points.

It would be awesome to be able to custom build castles. What would be cooler would be if you could choose whereabouts to place them on the campaign map as well... though that would probably unbalance the game in terms of the AI being utterly useless at placing them. UNLESS you went back to all settlements being cities, and implimented some rule whereby you could only have one castle per 'x' cities, to prevent people making their own personal margiot line...

[Kraggenmor]

Would be really happy if ladders could be knocked down from the the top rather than the bottom. With the low rate of fire from the towers it is almost impossible to stop footknights with ladders without your own uber warriors on top of the walls....

Signed and thirded.

[Callahan9119]

i agree exactly with deathfire, sapping was overpowered, and while i would love to see boiling oil, rocks etc when ATTACKING the ai, i would be loathe to have such an advantage against the ai

anybody who cant defend a castle in this game without insurmountable odds against them dont deserve rocks or boiling oil

the ladders issue isnt a big deal to me, i always put good troops on the walls if i am expecting a fierce rumble

[Zarky]

It would be good idea to be able to knock down ladders and throwing rocks, boiling oil is added in Kingdoms (hope they make patch that allows boiling oil in normal TW, maybe not moated forts) I think towers can already shoot behind the wall to streets, not sure if cannon or ballista ones can but arrows can, there should be change to properly conquer towers and turning them against the defender. Taking something away from the defenders would balance enough (giving normal melee units ability to throw rocks when putting them on walls maybe?).
Moats shouldn´t be added to cities or castles without improving somehow attackers siege eguipment, preventing them using siege towers and ladders.

[Philbert]

Boiling oil: They are no issue for me. I always bring artillery anyway so I just create an extra door if needed. In RTW I just never entered through the designed door (which made spies of much less use). Therefore: I am not hindered by it, but probably the AI is, so boiling oil would be unbalanced in that respect.

Ladders: It is hard enough as it is to take a wall using ladders, they don't need further nerfing.

Sappers: I would say overpowered, though in RTW I also never used them once I had onagers.

[SadCat]

I like the ideas but do not want them added to the game. I have 3 places that are under assault almost all the time. They have lost the outer wall 4 or 5 times but never the inner most walls. Spain came close once as they were taking over the mid wall before route set in. If the AI can not get in now with me defending I do not need better defences. I am not very good. If only the AI got the improvements I may never take a wall again myself. As it is that 3rd wall has been the wall to far more than once. I do have 1 city that the Danes want real badly that post cannon towers has killed 8 army's so far. I think this is a problem with the AI as cannon towers reach father back than the AI sets up camp. SadCat

[crpcarrot]

i think the absourd moral bonus' on walls is to simulate the difficulty of taking them. at present its too easy for units to get onto walls and thats why any defenders get the big bonus's

although it would be nice to see the actual throwing of rocks/oil its not high priority for me. i think there will be more unit balancing in the next update so maybe things will change soon.

never played RTW to sap so cant compare it to anything however sapping wouldnt have been possible in every situation. IMHO wall upgrades come too quickly and walls are tooe asy to blow away with artillery. wall upgrades should be harder to get and canons shuld not be able to bring down walls with 4 volleys

edit: assulting should be a very big decision at the moment it is too easy to take a city for the human player. also waiitn out a seige till reinforcements arrive is also an easy option. ok i'm going too much off topic

[Didz]

@crpcarrot
But surely this a gameplay issue.

I don't think anyone would argue that seiges are realistic or historically accurate but trying to make them so by forcing artillery to fire for days at a section of wall before creating a breach would just be a drag for the player and not make a jot of difference to the final result. I'd just put the game on 'fast fwd' and go and make a cup of tea.

Likewise, boiling oil, stone throwing and the like would be cool from a gameplay point of view but wouldn't really make much difference to the end result of a seige.

If I had any quibble with the current way seiges play out it is that ladders seem overly effective as a means of assaulting walls. They seem more effective than seige towers which results in me using them in preference to seige towers in many instances.

I also like the idea someone mentioned of having seige engineers depicted as a unit in the game rather than seige engines, and having the seige engines constructed on-site like the towers and ladders.

[crpcarrot]

lol Didz i didnt mean for us to be pounding at walls for days its just that i can assault any castle/city without any fear of losing the battle with just 2 units of cannons and i just thought it should be more harder than that.

and the point i was trying to make about walls is that if cities grew slower/or neede more pop for the next step it would make the more effective seige weapons harder to comeby making assaults a ladder and ram affair. which in turn would make taking a city more of a challenge.

maybe i havent thought this through :D the more i think about it the more it looks like an overhaul of the system than and minor adjustment.

i agree the ladders are a bit over effective i just dont know how they can be adjusted. realisticall climbing up a ladder while some one is waiting at the top to poke u with a pointy stick/sword or chop you head off isn't very easy but in M2 the killing only starts once the attacking unit gets onto the walls. which allows another unit to follow easily. well i shouldnt complain really i hardly use ladders but it still doesn seem right.

[Didz]

lol Didz i didnt mean for us to be pounding at walls for days its just that i can assault any castle/city without any fear of losing the battle with just 2 units of cannons and i just thought it should be more harder than that.

Do you really men that?

To be honest I wouldn't know where to start an assault on a settlement with an army consisting of only two cannon. Having blown in the gate what on earth would you do next.

But assuming you didn't actually mean that, then I don't really have a problem with this situation. Given enough time, two cannon could easily make a breach in a wall or smash down a gate and given that each turn is supposed to represent 2 years the guns have plenty of time.

and the point i was trying to make about walls is that if cities grew slower/or neede more pop for the next step it would make the more effective seige weapons harder to comeby making assaults a ladder and ram affair. which in turn would make taking a city more of a challenge.

maybe i havent thought this through :D the more i think about it the more it looks like an overhaul of the system than and minor adjustment.

The problem I can see with that idea is that many players already complain about slow faction development relative to campaign events like the Mongol Invasion.

Delaying city development merely to slow down the availability of seige weapons is actually going to increase these problems and not acheive very much as slower development means weaker walls and less advanced garrissons, so more powerful seige units would not be needed anyway.

As far as I can see if a city is under seige then it is only a matter of time before its walls or gates are breached. To be completely realistic the assault battle itself should not be triggerred until after a breach has been made, ( the breaching of the walls ought to be a campaign event acheived during the period set aside for constructing the seige equipment) but in the interested of playability CA have allowed us to play with our own guns and do it after the assault has started.

Thats not realistic but it is more fun, however, it wouldn't be if it took days or even hours to make a hole in the wall.

My personal gripe is just about the relative effectiveness of ladders to seige towers. Even here i'm not sure if the problem is with the way ladders work or the way seige towers work. Ladders for example come in sets of four, and so if they operate correctly will deliver four soldiers at a time onto the enemy walls. The advantage of a seige tower should be that when the ramp drops the wall is swamped with a whole rush of troops. However, what I've noticed is that because the speed troops can reach the top of the tower is limited to the speed at which they can climb a single ladder, the actual rate they are delivered to the wall is a trickle equivalent to one seige ladder. You can see them running across the ramp one at a time to join the fight.

This doesn't really make sense and I suspect CA have missed a trick somewhere, because if ladders truly were more effective than seige towers I'm sure that seige towers would not have been used in real seiges.

[crpcarrot]

actually yes i did mean it when i say 2 cannons i mean 2 units so theres 4 cannons.

if its a city its much easier castles take a bit longer.

blow down gate take out towers get my archers on the wall after that its pretty easy.

if there are any men on the wall i just blow that down too. i hate to see my men die uneccesarily.

the above strategy seems to work in most situations mind u i rarely attack unless i'm certain i'm going to win. i dont play a quick game so it soent matter if the situation is not right for attack for a couple of turns or 10 for me.

i dont want seiges to take hours i just want them to be harder to win an assault on the walls. by making the walls harder to breach i'm thinking of the assets needed to breach it rather than the time factor.

assaulting huge walls should need a formidable battery of artillery. i dont mind the walls falling down in 5 mins but maybe you requirng maybe 4 units of good arty to do it or if more ammo is needed it would make the player think more about managing his arty rather than just blowing away anything that remotely resembles a threat. i dont know how changes like the AI behaviour though but for me it would certainly make the game more interesting.

towers are redundant nce canon towers appear. i rarely ever get a tower to reach my walls and i never build them when i assault. how ever when the AI contructs multiple tower it does manage to get some onto the walls but usually ends up with not enough men to storm the walls. the AI should be prevented from making 5 cos it seems to leave 5 units stading with those rams rather than running up the tower that already is at the wall.

[Didz]

@crpcarrot
Well we will have to disagreed on this point. I am quite happy to accept that one unit of seige guns is enough to represent an armies seige train and it doesn't bother me how quickly they cause a breach in the walls. In fact, it wouldn't bother me if they caused the breach before the start of the battle.

What I would not be happy with is having to use 25% of the unit slots in my army to haul around seige guns.

For me what matters is what happens afrter the walls have been breached and the seige assault begins. Thats what determines how hard cities are to capture and thats where the AI needs to be improved.

[WhiskeyGhost]

i don't see any problems with the siege equipment, since it performs its function as intended. I mean you could call a realism card on this, but then again, i could always call you one back on the fact that a destroyed wall doesn't leave rubble (which should hinder infantry, and perhaps even block cavalry) so its sorta a moot point.

i would like to see gunpowder weapons carry just a little less ammo (or less damage as an alternative)

[Von Nanega]

@crpcarrot
I also like the idea someone mentioned of having seige engineers depicted as a unit in the game rather than seige engines, and having the seige engines constructed on-site like the towers and ladders.

Now that is a good idea. Historically siege engineering was a trained and specific skill set. Having a unit that does it and gets more exp per seige is a Very Good Idea. I say one should not be able to do towers, sapping ect. without them!

[Kobal2fr]

My personal gripe is just about the relative effectiveness of ladders to seige towers. Even here i'm not sure if the problem is with the way ladders work or the way seige towers work. Ladders for example come in sets of four, and so if they operate correctly will deliver four soldiers at a time onto the enemy walls. The advantage of a seige tower should be that when the ramp drops the wall is swamped with a whole rush of troops. However, what I've noticed is that because the speed troops can reach the top of the tower is limited to the speed at which they can climb a single ladder, the actual rate they are delivered to the wall is a trickle equivalent to one seige ladder. You can see them running across the ramp one at a time to join the fight.

This doesn't really make sense and I suspect CA have missed a trick somewhere, because if ladders truly were more effective than seige towers I'm sure that seige towers would not have been used in real seiges.

That's a specific M2TW problem I think. The thing is, they open the ramp way too soon. Back in RTW, the tower only opened when the whole unit was packed tight on the last level, ready to all pounce at the same time.

That said, even with such "broken" state of affairs, towers are still a better option than ladders. Tower-borne assaulters land in a big clump in the middle of the defenders, cutting their unit in two and protecting each other. By comparison, ladders deliver men 4 at a time, isolated, surrounded and soon dead. I think I've never seen a ladder assault actually succeed, even when DFKs climbed to face peasant archers :/

Love the idea of building siege engines on site though, maybe not cannons or treb's, but ballistas and catapults are simple enough. Then again, it would kind of make towers and rams useless...

[Didz]

Love the idea of building siege engines on site though, maybe not cannons or treb's, but ballistas and catapults are simple enough. Then again, it would kind of make towers and rams useless...

I think the issue with cannons and trebuchets is that in reality most of the eariler versions would have been transported in prefabricated form and only assembled on site. So, things like trebuchets and bombards would not normally be available for a battle. If we wanted to reflect this in the game then the seige engineer idea would be the way to go, and one would just upgrade their skills to allow them to assemble bombards.

That would mean that in battles we would only have access to artillery weapons which were classified as field artillery by the game and thus represented as permanent units.

[Kobal2fr]

How is that different from just lugging around the completed item ? Since the army would be carting the bits anyway, the movement speed reduction would be the same in-game, the only difference would be that you couldn't use them in field battles. Or am I missing a key point here ?

EDIT : OK, I was : your point WAS that they weren't use in field battles

[Didz]

EDIT : OK, I was : your point WAS that they weren't use in field battles

Also...by implication the seige engineer unit would only use up one army slot, if that, (he could for instance be an agent, and just attached to the army) but be able to manufacture/assemble multiple seige engines and weapons.

Its actually quite ahistoric for armies to cart around their seige train when on campaign. Usually it was only called forward when a seige was being conducted. Wellington for example kept his seige guns stored on ships in the Tagus until he needed them, rather than drag them up and down spanish goats tracks, I suspect medieval generals did the same leaving the trebuchets at home until they had need of them rather than carting them around everywhere just in case.

[Lupiscanis]

Also...by implication the seige engineer unit would only use up one army slot, if that, (he could for instance be an agent, and just attached to the army) but be able to manufacture/assemble multiple seige engines and weapons.

Its actually quite ahistoric for armies to cart around their seige train when on campaign. Usually it was only called forward when a seige was being conducted. Wellington for example kept his seige guns stored on ships in the Tagus until he needed them, rather than drag them up and down spanish goats tracks, I suspect medieval generals did the same leaving the trebuchets at home until they had need of them rather than carting them around everywhere just in case.

Certainly pre-medieval times (I'm not wholly sure about during medieval times) larger siege weaponary was constructed on site using local timber, simply because it was more efficient that way.

[Didz]

Certainly pre-medieval times (I'm not wholly sure about during medieval times) larger siege weaponary was constructed on site using local timber, simply because it was more efficient that way.

Its not my area of expertise, but I've read several accounts of named seige engines being ordered to assist in seiges, suggesting to me that these weapons existed as an entity and were transported to site.

In truth, both scenario's are probably correct and may even have co-existed.

Actually, the more I think about it the more I like the idea of the seige engineer being represented as an agent. The potential implications of this are quite interesting in that this specialist can then be moved independantly from seige to seige or be attached permanently to an army and more importantly as he is not an army unit he is only really vulnerable to assassination and bribery both of which could be fun to employ against him. There also the possibility of seige engineers gaining skills and knowledge and becoming people of world wide renown, like James of St.George.

[Hermann the Lombard]

Its not my area of expertise, but I've read several accounts of named seige engines being ordered to assist in seiges, suggesting to me that these weapons existed as an entity and were transported to site.

It's unclear to me whether The Warwolf (probably the most famous named siege engine) was built on site or transported to Stirling Castle. Wikipedia says that disassembled it filled 30 wagons and took at least 3 months to complete. So you could be right about transporting them.

[Didz]

Warwolf was one example I was thinking of, but there was also a seige in France where I think three named seige engines were ordered from England.

Of course that doesn't mean that others were not construtucted on site form local materials. In fact, its possible that some may have originally been built on site and then disassembled and stored for future use elsewhere.

However, from the point of view of gameplay it doesn't really matter whether they are being constructed on site from scratch or from components delivered by ship or wagon as it would just be another option on the seige preparation screen.

[HighLord z0b]

Would love to see it all (a la Stronghold)...

I would love to see:

Ditches and moats as [optional] constructable improvements to Wall or Castle level. You would need a counter of some variety (it is still a game)...

Well the obvious counter is counter-mining and moats, both of which were employed in the middle ages. However it's very hard to represent with the current engine so I doubt we'll see it.

It's a pity they took it out but it was a bit easy in RTW without any counter mechanism.