Ballistas in seige warfare

[PapaNasty]

Whats with Ballistas being such effective wall-breakers? In a battle i fought the HRE attacked with 5 units of Ballistas (supposedly doing 10 damage to walls), which in a short space of time demolishd my Large Stone walls and 5 towers close to the action, as well as smashing my archers that were placed on the walls (which wouldn't listen to my commands to get the hell off ).

Their spy apparently was supposed to have opened the gates for them, but they remained firmly shut in my favour (like the bug I posted in the buglist, but reversed). They lost the battle, but only after my Levy Spearmen in schiltrom at the broken walls smashed their cavalry charges, and my general lost all but 3 of his unit charging into the back of their infantry (You should see the attributes he got out of it though )

It might not be a bug, but it would be nice if Ballistas werent so damn effective against stone walls and towers! maybe they should only work on gates, like in MTW and (I think...) in RTW. I noticed that the HRE is pumping out armies stacked with Ballistas and/or Catapaults in my campaign (English on H/H)

[phonicsmonkey]

hi - there was a pretty good discussion of this question in.....wait a minute......*pulls out of hat* THIS thread:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=86158

seems like it has more historical basis than you might think, at least according to wiki

[Alsn]

Well, i believe the point of sieges are to simulate real sieges where they spent months/years breaking down walls with siege weapons. While a ballista may not exactly do much damage to a stone wall if its tipped with a blunt iron head itd at least dent it. Given enough time they *would* destroy something.

[Kobal2fr]

Keep in mind that city walls are intentionally weaker in-game than castle walls : cities are meant to be easy to take, they're your soft underbelly. Which is also why they have fewer towers, and why said towers fire much less efficiently than castle ones.

[TeutonicKnight]

Keep in mind that city walls are intentionally weaker in-game than castle walls : cities are meant to be easy to take, they're your soft underbelly. Which is also why they have fewer towers, and why said towers fire much less efficiently than castle ones.

Agreed. I fought several castle battles last night as the Danes, with little supporting artillery (meaning mostly zero). Then I fought a city battle against a much larger defending force than the castles had.

My casualties against the city force were far less than the castles, and the castles had only a few hundred men defending while the city had almost a thousand.

The majority of losses inflicted in the castle fights came from castle towers. Well, and a good bit from my dismounted Huscarls going over the walls.

Guess I should have used swordsmen.