What's the point of having walls?

[Cruelsader]

I am a newbie RTW player. In STW there were no true castles. In MTW the siege battle were very simplistic affairs. RTW is a huge improvement but the conception of siege battles seems nonetheless flawed. I am not talking of AI, which, in my limited experience, seems quite dumb when it comes to sieges. I am talking of the whole idea of having defensive walls. Considering RTW level of abstraction the reason for having defenses could be "buying time" and "being able to battle back much larger force". Neither seems true.

First, the fortifications do not buy you enough time: only one turn (and not even that if enemy has artillery). Second, you cannot battle back enemy with small force. The enemy can easily breach the defenses at several points. In order to contain them you need large force. Wooden walls are very easily breached. Stone walls are better but you need a large garrison to man them properly. The automatic fire from towers helps a little but then the siege towers also fire. What is worse, once the enemy takes the towers they start to shoot at the defender. In most cases, it seems far better to defend the entrances to the central plaza.

To sum up: walls and siege engines look cool but there is not much point building walls. Do you agree?

BTW, it would be much better if building walls would give you automatically several guard units which you could post on walls or at gates. (These units would not appear as a garrison on the strategy map and would not increase public order)

[Patroclus]

I don't think walls are utterly redundant, but clearly the difference between the various types of stone walls and woodens types is reasonably limited, and you shouldn't need to dish out a lot of cash on walls in most settlements.

Walls do, however, force an enemy to concentrate his strength at certain points if he has a small force, or few siege engines (which is usually the case) thus making the enemy easier to deal with. The towers, oil, etc, can also be a huge help if your outnumbered.

[Charge]

+
In vanilla having stone walls AND playing battle means lots of dead enemys from arrows, balistas, oil, etc... Also it is almost imposible to ram gates.
If you have phalanx of coz you should defend streets near c. plaza, if good swordsmen, then walls (unless enemy had machine-gun towers:)).
On campaign you have 2-4 turns additional time to get reinforcements, aslo I always add law bonus to the walls in EDB.
You can choose wooden walls if you playing macedonia or seleucids with their very-long-spears (you can cheat if place them near gate and possible breach).

advantageous for ai - only when you storm cities with stone walls..

[Cruelsader]

I should have been clearer. I can recognize the advantage of walls in single player games. AI has difficulties in assaulting defended settlements. It makes basic mistakes like not placing siege engines optimally and then trying to drag them to a better position oblivious to tower fire. But this benefit is not due to the walls but dumbness of the AI. In the reversed situation – human attacking AI – the walls often provide benefit to the attacker (at least in my experience). It is true that walls create chokepoints, however, you already have “natural” chokepoints in every settlement: entrances to the plaza.

It would be interesting to know how much the walls are valued in multiplayer battles.

[Patroclus]

Even if the AI was a competent sieger*, then walls would still be beneficial. As I say, the towers and oil can be a boost when you're outnumbered, and high walls allow you to plan your defence more effectively and make it a much tougher fight for the enemy.

*As an aside, It's strange just how idiotic the AI can be in city battles, even to the point where you are genuinely surprised. I was fighting an Egyptian army besieging one of my settlements, and sallied forth to meet them. They promptly lined up about half of their army just below my walls, and proceeded to stand perfectly still - only occassionally shifting their army to allow more units to be within range of the towers - until roughly over half of them were dead. I then let my cavalry free, and the Egyptians basically disintegrated at the first touch. I don't know how many men they lost, but it looked like the Somme out there.

[Cruelsader]

I do not understand how the oil could be beneficial against competent besieger. Competent besieger would not try to enter the city through gates without taking the gatehouse first. I agree that towers are somewhat useful: some attackers will be shot and there is a chance that siege engines will catch fire. However, the benefit is marginal when attackers have much larger force. A large army can build several engines/mines (and ladders cost very little anyway) but more importantly they can storm the city from several directions at once thus negating the chokepoint effect.. Walls are too long to man properly and if even one attacking unit gets through you have to defend plaza.

IMHO, the walls do not provide enough benefits. I really think it would be much better if having walls would automatically mean having several guard units on the walls or at gates. It would make siege assults against the dumb AI more interesting as well.

[Charge]

I really think it would be much better if having walls would automatically mean having several guard units on the walls or at gates.

They are represented by towers. All benefit comes with that..

[Cruelsader]

I understand that. I'd simply be happier if the "mysterious guards who cannot be killed but switch sides real easy" would be replaced by real units. And there should be enough of them to make storming the castle much more costly than it is now.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

An interesting question.

In most of the really "up scale" mods -- XGM, EB, et. al -- the walls come with progressively higher levels of Law and Happiness scores reflecting public and commercial sense of security. This would have been good for Vanilla as well, IMO.

In Vanilla:

Palisades are useful only for buying you one turn -- no immediate break-throughs unless expensive elephants or slow artillery are brought to play. That's about it. Towers are few and usually ill-placed. Still, a competent defender in SP (In MP I assume rams have support teams) can sally during an assault and steal the rams from the attacker, winning a quick victory. Thus, a smaller force can defend for much longer against a bigger one -- unless they build 5-6 rams, in which case you're dying in the square.

Wooden Walls are an abhorrent waste. There is, in practice, so little time difference between breaking a wooden wall and a palisade that it adds nothing and the restriction of cross wall missile fire goes both ways, since (of course) the wall is erected without a fighting platform or firing loops. Bottom line, keep an eye on your population, only build the stupid wooden wall in the last two turns before you become eligible for the next tier government building -- so that you can get a stone wall as soon as desired. If you're in a backwater, don't bother -- a palisade is all you'll ever need against 98% of all rebels and brigands.

Stone Walls bring the first new defensive strategies. Fighting on the walls is often the best choice for sword troops and javelins from above hammer home without shield unless the target is "turtling." Shooters on walls take far fewer casualties and can missile duel at great advantage. Towers are better placed, though silly blind spots are still too frequent. Once you know you cannot hold the walls, it is often possible to stall the attack and still set up your street/square defense after attritting the attackers to good effect. Above comments about garrisons are apt, however. A small garrison must sally during the assault and take siege towers/ladders out for a quick win (rams burn 97% of the time "on their own" it seems), otherwise, they get killed by multiple break-ins etc. The instant tower conversion is patently silly and a gross advantage for the attacker.

Large Stone Walls have towers that hit much harder and ladders cannot be used against them, requiring siege towers -- and taller ones -- or mining for the attacker. The siege towers built by the attackers mount the same firepower as the walls, so the advantage there is to the attacker, who doesn't have to go nose-to-nose with a tower as there are still blind spots. The only real advantage here is time. It takes significantly longer to undermine, knock down or climb a tower tall enough to deal with these walls, and ladders are the only "fast" way up.

Epic Stone Walls have towers that hit just as hard and fire even faster -- but so do their siege tower opponents. But the city KEEPS ITS SAME BLIND SPOTS DESPITE 3 or 4 iterations of walls built acrosse 7+ game years! Epic Gatehouses have slightly better fields of fire, but that's about it for differences. Usually not worth the cost or time -- since your probably only a couple of provinces away from winning by the time you can build one of these anyway.


Thoughts:

Walls, for SP players who've disabled or grossly extended the battle time limit, are not much of an obstacle. One turn of construction and you're probably killing more defenders with "turned" towers than the AI kills with the long-range shots it gets before you're safely snuggled in a blind spot. With a 45 minute or less timer on, however, Large and Epic walls are much more of a defense as any kind of "finesse" in siege tower placement etc. can cost lots of those minutes and leave you without time to get to, climb up, climb down, get to square, kill general and last pike unit. This forces a more "frontal" strategy where the AI actually gets to attrit you a bit -- more challenging.


Things I'd like to see:

Towers all ballista equipped with mini arrow-firing "turrets" between. If they're supposed to represent garrison firepower, then let's have a goodly volume of fire.

Fewer blind spots -- maybe one or rarely two in a whole wall, not the 3-5 typical now. Even one or two town plans without a blind spot at all.

Cities NOT all built on flat level spaces, but nestled on hills etc. Masada would not have held out as it did had it been built on a Gaza beach. How about a semi-circle where the long "wall" is actually the water.

Firing platforms to put artillery up on walls. As it is, I have to hammer the crap out of my own walls to lob bombs at enemy towers.

Ladders getting pushed away -- at least once in a while -- by defending troops.

A breach that looks like a breach instead of a neat cut-through doorway.

Captured towers that stop firing -- for anybody -- once captured by the assault team.

Cities going to the ally who takes and holds the square for 3 minutes and NOT just whoever initiated the assault (not that I havent' used an ally's full-stack to bleed for my 3-card stack's right to own the city ).


Rant concluded.

[Cruelsader]

Very interesting read! Do you know has any of this been implemented in MTW2?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Very interesting read! Do you know has any of this been implemented in MTW2?

Haven't purchased it -- no computer I own would be able to run it save at the most "strippped down/downsized level" so I haven't bothered yet. I too would be interested to know if any of the points above were touched on in the new engine.

[mrdun]

Theres always R2TW lol. The nestled settlements in the hills seem like a good idea, reminds me of Helms Deep.

[Celt Centurion]

In all of the time I've played RTW and XGM, I've only lost one stone walled city. That was very early on in Barbarian Invasion in which I had a stone wall, but the barracks and archery facilities were inadequate or non-existent, nor was there money to build them. There was a blacksmith, but no armorer. Four full stacks of Goths laid siege and attacked simultaneously from all four sides. With four groups of limitaneai and one archers and a weak cavalry, there was not much I could do. While my archers burned the towers of one group and my infantry died on the walls above the gates, it was just a matter of time before they were overwhelmed, and they were.

Large stone walls or epic stone walls might have helped, but this was too early in the game for them to be built.

Now if I play BI, I move any nearby armies into these cities, discharge peasants and discharge "weaker" mercenaries to raise the population. Build better barracks and an armorer if possible and retrain all units every chance you get.

The walls are great if you are being assaulted, but there needs to be an adequate defence garrisoned inside.

Once you have an adequate garrison of strong infantry and archers, and a few units of cavalry to chase the last of the enemy from the field, a wall is not even needed, unless of course you find yourself assaulted by four full stacks of barbarians with upgraded armor.

Strength and Honor

Celt Centurion

[paul_kiss]

W/o walls it would be damn hard to defend what is mine. There're a great number of tricks that help to make an attacker's life hard.

Walls rule, no doubt here.

[wumpus]

W/o walls it would be damn hard to defend what it mine. There're a great number of tricks that help to make an attacker's life hard.

Walls rule, no doubt here.

I usually play Greek with RTW and XGM, and I ALWAYS build walls for my cities and bigger towns--gives me more assurance--EXCEPT SPARTA. Just as historically accurate. Especially my income-generating settlements. No question--walls give more advantages than no walls (excepting Sparta, because they have Spartan hoplites or Spartan Royal Guards). Hawooh!

[mrdun]

There're a great number of tricks that help to make an attacker's life hard.

Like what?

[paul_kiss]

Like what?

Well, one of them: sometimes it's wise not to set my soldiers directly on the walls to defend them, but to concentrate all my troops on the main square. Thus, I'm letting the enemy to overcome the city walls.

If one thinks it's giving up the city without any fight... well, the enemy WILL take walls and the gate, but it'll cost him damn big number of soldiers indeed. They will of course penetrate the inner area, they'll try to gather up and move to the center. And while doing all that they'll be suffering intense fire from the towers.

And till the moment when they'll finally reach the center 1) they'll have lost many men 2) they'll be exhausted 3) my troops will be 100% fresh. Guess what will happen with the worn out attackers then.

(This trick is actually for a city, not a town. The bigger the walls are, the funnier it is to look at the attacking enemy)

[mrdun]

Haha ok thanks

[Cruelsader]

Yes, AI is dumb: it simply does not know how to assault a stone-walled city properly. It also does not know how to defend one - when I am attacking stone walls the fortifications provide clear bonus against the defending AI. My question is not "Are walls good against AI?" but rather "Is the conception of walls flawed in your opinion?" IMHO, the conception is flawed. Fortifications provide some benefit for competent defender but not much when the attacking army is much larger (which should usually be the case).

[Caius]

the walls do not provide enough benefits

I don't think so. The enemy dispersates if you dont have one.