Defenders bonus on walls a bit much?

[unseen11]

Let me set the scene, Assaulting a castle with Sergeant Spearmen with silver armor upgrade, I had one of my ladders go up to a section of wall where there was a half strength peasant unit guarding it. I think "ok easy push over there then they can manouver around and outflank a armored spearmen unit nearby", however as I'm preoccupied with charging through the gates of the city i notice one of my Spearmen units down alot of men, I go back and check its the dam peasant unit thats cauing so many casualties.

Now considering my Spearmen had upgraded armor, near full strength and the peasant unit was half strength how in god's name did they manage to slaughter so many spearmen (no other units helped the peasants except for some archers on another bit of wall section firing at them but it still doesnt explain why they didnt kill the peasants easily)

[Askthepizzaguy]

It's the ladder that's killing you, not the wall defense bonus. Try assaulting that same wall, same scenario, with a seige tower. Sure, they take longer to build, but ohhhhh the difference. You would have crushed that same unit of peasants easily after exiting the seige tower. True, those peasants will fight better than they would on the ground, but that's because they can't rout easily and they aren't surrounded. With seige towers you can tackle the enemy with roughly half your unit all at once, rather than three or four men at a time.

It doesn't really matter if your unit is full plate armor. That knight steps off his ladder and into a pile of pointy pitchforks, and one of them is going to knock him to the ground where he can be stabbed until he dies. Being totally surrounded really negates the ability to fight effectively.

I call that "surround n' pound". Take about a thousand peasants and totally surround one hundred knights, and what do you get? Dead knights (and some dead peasants, but hey, no big loss).

With a seige tower, there is no "surround n' pound". There is death from above followed by brutal melee. Under those conditions, the wall defenders only have a slight morale edge, and that's all.

[El Diablo]

Umm also you may want to check what version of M2TW you are running.

As I recall in 1.0 (unpatched) peasents were uber.

The same again in 2.0 may have a differenet out come.

ED

[Hoplite7]

My siege towers always burn, every single time. The same with rams.

Most would disagree but I would stick to ladders. You lose a ton of people to arrow fire but those are easily healed.

One key thing though: Once the ladder is attached to the wall, you have to wait till the first few men are near the top. Then select the unit and attack the defenders. This might have had a huge impact on why your spearmen were killed.

The difference is: by just right clicking the wall, the soldiers will climb the wall and assemble in formation at the top. They will try to do this even though they are attacked. While some will fight back, the majority will just stand there or walk through the enemy and die.

By right clicking the defenders, you're telling them to kill any on the wall, not form-up at the top.

[Askthepizzaguy]

How many rams? How many seige towers?

You should have at least 2 rams. One to ram and one to barbeque things on.
You should have at least 3 seige towers. One might burn... two, mayyyybe... three? Sorry, that's never ever ever happened to me. 4, 5, or 6 seige towers never hurt either. They could be used to provide cover for your ladders, archers, artillery... the list goeth on.

Ladders have a function... they can be used to rush and sneak up the side walls instead of the front ones while your seige towers pin the enemy in.

See my incredible work of art:
(L for ladder, S for seige tower, D for defender...)

L->[ ]```````````````````````[ ]<-L
```[ ]```````````````````````[ ]
```[______DDD__DDD___DDD_____]

^L``````S`````S``````````S```````L^

The ladders start out behind the seige towers, but when the seige tower hits the wall and pins the unit on the extreme left or right, they can't move too well. That's when you can safely run around to the side and scamper up the wall with a bunch of your troops, nice and quick like. Now the rest of your infantry or archers can quickly and safely run up and scale the walls. Use meat shield/cannon fodder troops for the seige tower assault, kamikaze division.

Once you get your heavy infantry and archers on the side walls, you could move your heavies down to the ground level inside the city and use archers for cover fire. Try to open the gates and get your cavalry or other units inside. A lot less painful than full ladder assaults. Less painful than full seige tower assaults. Slightly more painful than artillery assaults.

[Hoplite7]

How many rams? How many seige towers?
snip

Admittedly only one ram and two siege towers. I can't spend too much time building the seige equipment because Otto-von Fullstack [in my Poland campaign] would always show up with militia spam and attack my besieging army.

Though I like your idea to put the ladders behind the towers, surprisingly I never thought to do that. Seems like a great way to protect my men.

Lately the AI has "taught" me to surround my ram with peasants so that the flaming arrows hit the peasants. (Of course the AI uses heavy calvary so any bonus they would have had becomes null )

Also: how do you get the siege towers to fire arrows? They never seem to do it for me, not even in Rome:TW.

[Askthepizzaguy]

So you get where I was going with the seige tower "shield" tactic followed by pinning the edge defenders and scurrying around to safe haven with ladders?

Ladders are the quickest way to get up the walls. They just leave you vulerable on the way towards and up the walls.

I've never gotten seige towers to fire flaming arrows. Or arrows at all.
You can do that?

[unseen11]

Thanks for the replies guys!

Perhaps I should elaborate more on what siege equipment i had to use as with my siege assaults i tend to besiege and build up equipment one turn and then attack the next turn, rarely waiting more then 2 turns to assault as I do not like facing reliveing armies lol.

For this assault i had 2 rams, 2 ladders and one siege tower (and im using 1.2 ), though I did lose 2 units of spearmen to the ladders (the other unit dieing to a unit of armored spearmen which I found normal) my first ram managed to get through so i abandoned my siege tower and had all available units rush through the gates as they were undefended. Overall it was a victory thanks to the gates being smashed down hence a big gap undefended being created where my knights and spearmen rushed through.

I'm guessing you're right about the spearmen trying to reform once they ascend the ladder instead of just attacking straight out (I did leave them to ascend and focused on other areas of the map) So i guess i'll have to watch out for that in the future

[Hoplite7]

I've never gotten seige towers to fire flaming arrows. Or arrows at all.
You can do that?

For some reason I remember in Rome the description for siege towers described being able to shoot the enemy on the walls while moving towards them. I assumed they carried this over from RTW, but like I said I haven't been able to get them to do so.

Who knows, maybe I'm mistaking memory for a dream or something lol.

[Askthepizzaguy]

Yeah... I'm a big RTW fan but I never saw any arrows coming from seige towers.

Would be nice, though. Even better would be seige towers with ballistae on the top, or catapults inside, like Alexander the Great's seige towers he used at Tyre. Come to think of it, cannons might be better... Or perhaps B-2 bombers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tyre

[PapaNasty]

In RTW your seige towers were able to fire arrows (they are Ballistae bolts pizzaguy ;) ) at the wall defenders only when you were assaulting the largest walls it was possible to build. It was done automatically (you built larger rams for these walls, the graphics for them are slightly different) and you have no control over it, but defending it was damn hard because they were pretty devastating (I often lost 50% or more of principe or cohorts on V/H settings).

I've never seen it done in M2TW, but i don't think i've assaulted the largest walls so i dunno.

One of my experiences with ladders, I had a full unit of experienced dismounted feudal knights massacred when they assaulted some merc crossbows on an inner Citadel wall. The crossbows did diddly squat to them until they engaged in melee off the ladders, then my dfk's were slaughtered as they came off the ladder. only two survived from that unit, but the merc crossbows were beaten by a unit of armoured swordsmen i sent up on ladders beside them and flanked them.

So now i usually add a few units of trebuchets to my armies. after breaking through the outer walls, i roll them up and smash holes in the walls so my men can wade through swinging hehe. I prefer brute force to finesse and army speed is never an issue for me. usually trebs and ladders do it for me, i don;t go in by the front gate either. if there are units on the walls, hurl a rock at them and they move pretty quick, then send the ladders in and switch fire with the trebuchets. I am usually able to take any wall uncontested by doing that.

[SadCat]

In RTW you did get fire from siege towers. You roll close to wall and stop. Turn on fire at will on the unit card. Yes any unit with a siege tower will have that button. It will then start to clear the wall in front of it. Ballistae fire I think. Does not appear to work in M2TW. SadCat

[PapaNasty]

any seige tower sadcat? I could swear it only worked against the largest walls. I've never seen any other seige tower equipped unit come up with it :(

[SadCat]

You will force me to switch cd's and try when I get home? I think every time wall would let you build them it worked. Will have to look that up. SadCat

[Zenicetus]

Remember your wall-climbers aren't just taking damage from the peasants on top of the walls; they're also being hit by fire from nearby towers. That's why you take fewer losses auto-resolving a siege as the attacker, compared to a full 3D battle. Defending fire from towers isn't included in the auto-calc (AFAIK; I don't think this was changed in the last patch).

The towers get an attack bonus from shooting your guys in the back, whenever they face away from a nearby tower to attack defending infantry on the wall. Siege towers help defer the damage a little, also moving in other stacks on the ground like archers to draw tower fire, can help if you get them close enough.

The worst situation is an attack with isolated single stacks at intervals along a defender's wall, where each single stack can draw fire from two nearby towers. And those towers won't stop firing until you control the ground surrounding them. We can't shut them down (and take them over) by running attackers through the towers like we could in RTW. They're nasty.

Fire from the towers is enough hassle that I usually just zerg-rush the gates with rams if I can't open them with spies, or I can't make openings in the walls with artillery. I almost never climb the walls unless it's a small settlement without big walls and lots of defensive fire from the towers.

[Didz]

Yeah... I'm a big RTW fan but I never saw any arrows coming from seige towers.

I've used that feature, and I'm pretty sure it was when playing RTW.

You have to turn it on though, their is a 'fire at will' button added to the unit display when a unit is pushing a seige tower. Can't recall is the unit has to be missile armed, I don't think it does.

[Husar]

My siege towers always burn, every single time. The same with rams.

What battle difficulty are you playing on?
I play on medium since I found that on very hard they were a lot more likely to burn. Maybe I didn't test it for long enough but seemed like chances to burn are affected by battle difficulty.

[Per Ole]

I think I've seen arrows fire (yes, arrows not balistae bolts) from siege towers in my campaigns, but they don't really kill very much (a little, though). However I rarely play sieges, at least not without catapults or the like. It always seems like my things start burning whenever they come into range of towers; I've tried with 3 rams, 4 siege towers, all start burning before they reach the wall (On Hard difficulty)

[SadCat]

In RTW Stone walls and on up will let you have siege towers shoot if you turn it on. Your spear men will have a fire at will button if they are pushing it. Arrows or bolts? Now did not check that close but if it goes through 3 or 4 defenders I think bolts, but that was on epic walls. On stone I never saw it drop more than 1 at a time. Now I am going to pull that disk back out PapaNasty as I jest lost both sieges. SadCat

[Ramses II CP]

If you have to use ladders to attack the enemy walls, you need two ladder teams for each defender unit. Have them land on the wall to either side of the defender and squeeze him between them. Asking your men to fight their way up a ladder and into the middle of an enemy formation is madness, and only appropriate when you have to stop enemy archers from burning your ram and you're willing to sacrifice a ladder team to do it.

The best use for ladders IMHO is in fortress and citadel sieges where ladders can be reused, but siege towers cannot. You need artillery to get a siege tower to a second level wall, and if you have artillery what are the towers for? ;)

[Ulstan]

"My siege towers always burn, every single time. The same with rams."

Build more of them :D If you build one ram and one seige tower, yeah, the defenses will torch them.

If you build 6 seige towers and 3 rams, half of them will make it to the walls and that's all you need.

Yes it will take you more than one turn to build all that stuff, but that's hardly a problem. Maybe it will give the AI a chance to actually provide you with a fight O.o

[d3nn16]

Isn't the siege tower supposed to be protected against fire ?
Wikipedia says:
"Because the towers were wooden and thus flammable, they had to have some non-flammable covering of iron or fresh animal skins"