Is this right?

[Forward Observer]

I still have not started a campaign in Kingdoms simply because I want to finish my current grand campaign, but for grins, I have played a couple of instant battles in at least three of the 4 eras.

So last night I fired up an instant battle in the Crusades and it was a castle assault with me as the Kingdom of Jerusalem against the Venetians. I didn't realize they were in this particular era, but they are listed in the custom battle roster.

Anyway, all I have in the way of siege equipment is a ram, a mangonel, and one bombard. The Venetians have crossbowmen on the walls on both sides of the gate, so as per my usual tactic in such situations, I direct the bombard to fire at the center of one of the two walls they are on.

Since I am used to this phase of the assault being somewhat automatic, I turn my attention away for a few moments. When I look back, I see my bombard unit setting within spitting distance of the walls and being shot full of holes by the crossbowmen.

They were totally decimated before I could get them to safety. I exited out and re-fought the battle thinking that instead of targeting the walls, I had instead advanced the unit by mistake.

It was no mistake. To get within in range of the wall to fire, the bombard unit had to advance so far into missile fire range that it was never able to get off a shot before its crew got wasted.

Is this part of the re-balancing? If so, the bombard in this era is now pretty useless unless you have a totally undefended (no missile troops) wall and totally inactive towers. (no troops near by)

Any opinions or comments?

[FactionHeir]

Hmmmmm this could be the infamous bug that you normally only tend to see with crossbows and archers, in that telling them to attack an enemy unit currently outside range by using single click will cause them to walk all the way up to them, rather than stop at range and shoot.
Never seen it with artillery in M2TW though.

As for your Kingdoms scenario, what was the height difference between the wall section's bottom and your bombards? If the bottom is below your bombard's height, it might be due to being out of bounds (projectiles have a certain angle bound they may fire at). But I would guess it might be someone making an error when writing up either the EDU or the projectile file for that particular scenario of Kingdoms.

[edit]
That reminds me. I think I never reported it on the buglist. Be right back

[icek]

the same stupid bug seems to be in m2tw 1.2 where cursor's color tells you that you can fire already but siege unit must go another 20 steps to do it practically.

[Forward Observer]

I remember checking the second time I tried the battle just to see what the bombard's range was by checking to see when the cursor would change from green to red, and it was less than half of what it should have been.

Today, I went back to the crusades era and set up a custom siege assault with the same armies giving my side bombards and everything seemed back to normal. The range was just as it has always been. It must have just been a fluke or some minor data corruption that occurred when the instant battle got set up by the software. At least I hope that is it.

Cheers

[FactionHeir]

Its usually 'fun' when it happens after you fought countless battles during a given turn and haven't bothered to save (due to not wanting to cause the retraining bug) since the autosave.