Cities Indefensible?

[Rhyfelwyr]

I just attacked a Spanish city which had a couple of units of Dismounted Feudal Knights, Crossbow Militia, and a General. Meanwhile, I had a full stack army mostly consisting of Italian Spear Militia and Pavise Crossbow Militia. I had 2 Rams, 2 Siege Towers, and 2 sets of ladders.

When the battle started, my towers were flaming after about ten seconds. The units with the ladders were slaughtered and hardly made a casualty, and both rams were wrecked before they reached the gate. I played until 40% of my army was dead, then quit.

I've heard people here claim that cities are impossible to defend. While they are maybe not quite as strong as castles, they are still a nightmare to attack if they have a few infantry units to defend the walls.

[FactionHeir]

I think you could/should have won this battle even with your siege equipment wrecked, if you had spread out your units more at the start.

Any unit can defend a wall efficiently against ladders, provided their stats/animations are not horrendously lower than that of the attacker. Castle or City walls are the same in that respect. Cities are easier to assault because they tend to only have one ring of walls and are larger and square, allowing more points of attack.

[Ramses II CP]

You just (probably) had the wrong idea about attacking. It's not about overwhelming the defenses the AI puts in front of you, it's about out manuevering them. Put a ram at two different gates, with towers to soak fire to either side of primary ram's line. Your ladder teams can run faster than he can move men on the walls, so run them to an undefended sector and scale up. Once they're in the city don't fight on the walls with them, the defender has an advantage there, go to the street and get an undefended gate open, through which your cavalry can enter the city.

Once you've got enough holes in the walls or troops in the city the AI will attempt to retreat to the square. Pursue his units as hard as you can, but don't fight in the square. Use cavalry to eliminate his ranged support, then use your own ranged units to force his men to sally out of the square. Once they're out cut them off and cut them down. Siege over.

[Rhyfelwyr]

It just seemed a little cheap to run to all the undefended points, but considering the HUGE bonuses their units get on the walls I may just do that in future.

[LadyAnn]

It is "cheaper" to starve them to submission :D

Annie

[FactionHeir]

It just seemed a little cheap to run to all the undefended points, but considering the HUGE bonuses their units get on the walls I may just do that in future.

I see, so you were trying to play like the AI does?

[Grog]

As other posters have mentioned, flanking is the way, but heres a few tricks if you fight with small armies:

Onel trick for early era sieges is to run your general in first and charge him up and down the enemy wall outside to draw enemy fire away from your rams. I use this early game when siegeing with understrength armies. As the defenders are city militia bows/xbows they will have a hard time hitting a general charging across their line of fire..

Alternatively, as you had a lot of troops in your example, marching some cannon fodder in front of the rams usually draws enough fire to get the ram to the gate.

[ReiseReise]

I ALWAYS use two rams on the front gate. One walks straight to the gate but doesn't actually attack it until they are real close. The other unit walks foward and to the side of the main unit to soak up arrow fire. In case the main ram gets set afire, the secondary unit can take over.

[DVX BELLORVM]

I just attacked a Spanish city which had a couple of units of Dismounted Feudal Knights, Crossbow Militia, and a General. Meanwhile, I had a full stack army mostly consisting of Italian Spear Militia and Pavise Crossbow Militia. I had 2 Rams, 2 Siege Towers, and 2 sets of ladders.

you could take the city with minimal casualties. Instead of building rams, you should have built 4-5 siege towers and 4-5 ladders and spread them all around the walls. That way you would certainly found undefended parts of the wall, and concentrate your attack there.

Once your forces are on the walls, AI usually falls back to the square. I always have an archers with ladders ready to rush to the walls and shoot them while running to the square. If you captured the gates, you can also rush your cavalry against them.

In the next phase, send your archers (xbows in your case) to attack units on the square to lure them from the square. Since you outnumber the enemy, you can do this from multiple directions.

As already mentioned, avoid fighting on the walls and on the square, especially with militia against knights as they will get slaughtered.

If you must use rams, take at least 3-4, and send them to the gates all at once, not one by one. Some of them will be destroyed, but one will surely reach the gates. Although I consider use of rams against heavily defended gates to be rather foolish

[PseRamesses]

One thing I found very useful during assaults with few troops is waves and outflanking on the walls. Lets say you have 6 infantry of any kind. Build 6 ladders and line them up as follows.
1____2__3_4__5____ 6

1 and 6 is placed as far out on your flanks as you can place them. Move 1 or 6 towards the wall, not both, wait some 10 secs then move the other. When the first hits the wall the defender will counter. Now move the rest to counter the AI´s move. This way you´ll always outflank and encircle the enemy on the walls.

With this "method" you can surround any enemy unit on the wall with 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5, 5-6 and thoose that isn´t needed for this task will secure towers/ gates or move towards the centre. Good luck.

[phonicsmonkey]

yo, I was having some problems taking large numbers of casualties when assaulting settlements so I started this thread. I found some of the replies extremely helpful and now I'm capturing settlements no problem with 1/3 of the enemy casualties or even less...

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=88794

[Cheetah]

Actually all you need is one ballista (ofc better arty will do too ) to knock in the main gate. Once the gate is open the AI usually retreats to the city square as the others said.
If you do not have arty build two rams. Set them against two different gates, put your main army with one of them and a smallish force with the other. Very likely that the AI wont guard both gates. Also, I never had rams burnt in city siege. The trick is to use some cheap units (I use peasant archers mostly, as they can fire back ) as cannon fodder to cover the ram. AI is silly enought to fire on the peasant archers with its archers/xbows. Though towers usually still target the ram, but city towers are not strong enough. Fortress or citadel towers expected to burn one ram before I reach the gate but the second one usually succeeds.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Thanks for that link phonicsmonkey, very useful.

[phonicsmonkey]

The only problem is, I've gotten so darned efficient at it that it's become extremely boring - there's only so many times you can get pleasure out of lurking near the gates behind a wall of spearmen on guard mode and peppering anything that comes near with bolts of pointy death.

So now I mostly just wait it out rather than fighting siege battles or auto-calc'ing (which seems unfair)

[Brutal DLX]

So now I mostly just wait it out rather than fighting siege battles or auto-calc'ing (which seems unfair)

Indeed, it's a bit unfair but you know what? I auto-calc a lot of sieges to save time, because usually they just have a couple of units in there and it's just not worth it to me to load the battle for a boring and certain victory. Siege attacks are only fun if you're facing fully garrisoned cities or castles.

[Daveybaby]

I ALWAYS use two rams on the front gate. One walks straight to the gate but doesn't actually attack it until they are real close. The other unit walks foward and to the side of the main unit to soak up arrow fire. In case the main ram gets set afire, the secondary unit can take over.

Same here. Works every time, without fail. If youre assaulting a citadel you'll probably need to bring along a few extra rams for the inner walls.

Ladders (In addtion to the rams) manned by sacrificial units are great for diverting enemy forces from the main entrance, as are siege towers. Once youve established a beachead at the gates and gotten archers onto the walls victory should be assured.

As for the OP... i can only wish that the game was as difficult as you make out. I'd give anything for a version of the game that wasnt a total walkover from start to finish. Also I really dont understand people that quit battles if theyre losing - what's the point of the game if you win every battle? You might as well just hack the game to show the victory screen at the start and save yourself all the bother.

[Rhyfelwyr]

I never quit battles unless I get annoyed with the AI (eg Mongols attack me on campaign map then camp up a hill). The reason I quit that siege was that there was no way for my units to get into the city, as once pratically all my infantry were killed all I had left were Cavalry Militia, which couldn't use the ladders - nothing to do but run down the timer.

I actually enjoy losing battles, either because its nice to get beaten fairly by the AI (rare though that is), or because it tends to be a last man stand against some giant Mongol/Timurid/Aztec army.

[phonicsmonkey]

Yes, funny that.

I think we can all agree that the game isn't hard enough, but there is something perverse in our constant dance of trying to make it harder so we can lose at it, then get better at it and beat it all the time.....

I guess it's because, although we'd like to win, we want it to be worth something....

[Daveybaby]

I never quit battles unless I get annoyed with the AI (eg Mongols attack me on campaign map then camp up a hill). The reason I quit that siege was that there was no way for my units to get into the city, as once pratically all my infantry were killed all I had left were Cavalry Militia, which couldn't use the ladders - nothing to do but run down the timer.

Ah, apologies for my assumptions.

[DVX BELLORVM]

I actually enjoy losing battles, either because its nice to get beaten fairly by the AI (rare though that is), or because it tends to be a last man stand against some giant Mongol/Timurid/Aztec army.

Same here . Some of the most interesting and most memorable battles I fought, are the ones I lost...

[Rhyfelwyr]

The AI never fails to amaze. I just defeating a Portuguese army consisting of a 5 star / 3 dread General leading a full stack of about 10 Dis Feudal Knights, 5 Pavise Crossbowmen and a few ballistas and catapults. Quite an army for th AI.

I had pavise crossbow militia, armoured sergeants, and a newbie general, with the other half of my army various mounted knights.

Anyway, the paved road was built at a 90 degree angle along a cliff. The only way up the cliff was on my side of the battlemap, at the end. Basically:

    C enemy army
    C
    C 
xbowC
xbowC
xbowC

army

    C
    C
    C
    C

So they followed the road right along the base of the cliff and lost over 50% of their troops before they charged uphill into my spearmen.

Maybe I was being a bit cheap using that tactic, but it was fun.

Having said that, battes like these do not happen often.