Castles: storming vs besieging

[Stazi]

btw do you ever defend your castles? I mean battles on maps with a castle. My standard tactic (if I can't win in the field) is to "retreat to stronghold" and counterattack next year with forces gathered form other provinces. If I'm unable to retake province in this fashion it means I've done something wrong. If I have strong garrison the AI doesn't want to attack but when I have small garrison I'm unable to effectively defend the castle. In both situations it's just a waste of units.

[gollum]

You can use castles Stazi in order to delay enemy troops when you have many fonts open that you can't possibly cover all at the same time. In this case, its best to have your armies in one or two proinces per front and in teh rest you can have a small "custom made" garrison for castle defence. This includes usually a missile unit, a spear unit, a militia unit and a small perhaps cavarly unit or some combination of those. Usualy i pick units that have suffered losses so the castle will last a long time under siege.

Provinces are more likely to rebel (including loyalitsts) when besieged, so keeping a front with small custom made garrisons and good fortifications is a good strategy of you need the troops elsewhere for defence or for expansion.

This strategy of course is for border regions, not for your core lands! You want to keep training troops and making prfits and etching up from those.

Another area in the same theme is that of castles defences. For example if you make your castle on a hill (all castles for which you've built a motte are on a hill, for all castles you didn't built the motte they are on the plain), its better not to make ballista/catapult/artillery towers - the enemy is low and the artillery are hitting your own walls (especially true from catapults onwards). But for castles you make in plains, building the catapults is good as the ground is flat and the catapults can hit the enemy troops with devastating results. This by the way is pretty historical. There were castles in flats in Spain and elsewehere that were build with a low outter wall and a high inner wall or keep inside and the two are pretty close to one another. This was in order to fire at assaulters from both the outter wall and the Keep/inner wall.

[Ironside]

btw do you ever defend your castles? I mean battles on maps with a castle. My standard tactic (if I can't win in the field) is to "retreat to stronghold" and counterattack next year with forces gathered form other provinces. If I'm unable to retake province in this fashion it means I've done something wrong. If I have strong garrison the AI doesn't want to attack but when I have small garrison I'm unable to effectively defend the castle. In both situations it's just a waste of units.

You can often force a siege by sallying from the castle without moving in reinforcements. The AI usually counteracts by storming the castle. Of course, the AI doesn't always do this and then you have a field battle on your hand (or full retreat from the castle). Usually I do what you do, but this method can give good castle defense battles for fun.

Finding out was painful though. Had my best general besieged by Mongols (I was Russian), tried to save him by retreating from the province, got a siege instead, won epic victory. The general starved to death the next year...

[Gilrandir]

btw do you ever defend your castles? I mean battles on maps with a castle. My standard tactic (if I can't win in the field) is to "retreat to stronghold" and counterattack next year with forces gathered form other provinces. If I'm unable to retake province in this fashion it means I've done something wrong. If I have strong garrison the AI doesn't want to attack but when I have small garrison I'm unable to effectively defend the castle. In both situations it's just a waste of units.

Defending castles is worthwile, when you can't help it (you cannot draw relieving force in the first year of the siege and the AI storms your castle). In this case your main objective is to destroy as much of the enemy as possible (particularly, the general), so that the province the enemy has captured can go rebel soon because of the small number of the enemy's garrison. Moreover, sometimes you can even win (especially if you manage to kill the general). I had in my experience two cases like this. One was the Byz against the Egyptians when they brought plenty of desert archers and other crap. They captured the outer yard of the keep and stood put indefinitely absorbing missiles and then fled.
The second was the Turks against the Byz. Their forces were far below under the hill, so they had to foot it a long way and up before they reached the gate (no siege equipment for them). The first units to be engaged at the gates were Varangians which were destroyed in the process of breaking the gates. The general unit kept gallopping along the walls until all shot from within. The other units (although numerous and with reinforcements) were successfully repelled by mine.

[gaijinalways]

I'll have to try some of these in my next campaign. I'm often lazy and autoresolve a lot of the castle battles. I almost never have siege weapons as I don't build them, so it's only if I bribe rebels or capture them and don't execute them.

[gollum]

The best way to get siege weapons in vanilla is as mercenaries - cheap and fast. Always i keep a province underdeveloped (higher level castles/forts reduce mercenary mgnetism) and close to the enemy for an Inn to get them and any other mercs. I never autoresolve - even chore battles and sieges. The battlefield is the place to be in MTW :)

[gaijinalways]

I hear you Gollum , but sometimes real life has a way of intruding, so I save time sometimes and even (gasp) autoresolve battles I know that I should easily win (where I have far superior numbers) if it saves time to finish some campaigns in days and weeks rather than months.

[gollum]

I hear you Gollum , but sometimes real life has a way of intruding, so I save time sometimes and even (gasp) autoresolve battles I know that I should easily win (where I have far superior numbers) if it saves time to finish some campaigns in days and weeks rather than months.

Absolutely. I was just expressing how much i like playing TW battles rather than telling how it should be. I feel for you as i have precisely the very same problems :)

[Gilrandir]

I autocalc at the stage of the game, when you have sheer dominance in numbers and 70% of the map is conquered. The game becomes not that interesting in matters of fighting, but only in terms of general policy and strategy.
Strange are the ways of human mind!!! When you are threatened from all sides by powerful factions, when you have to scrape last coins in your treasury, when you see in a nightmare your generals starting a civil war, when your heart starts missing a beat expecting an heir to be born (cheatcodes don't work in my game), you hate it all and wish for some stable and smooth situation in your kingdom. But if such times come and you are sitting at your throne, benevolent and wise, deleting empires with a wave of your hand, the game becomes tedious and boring (or are they synonyms?). Is there any explanation to that?

[Geezer57]

In this case your main objective is to destroy as much of the enemy as possible
<STUFF DELETED> They captured the outer yard of the keep and stood put indefinitely absorbing missiles

One small observation in such situations where you're defending a castle large enough to have inner and outer walls, but don't have a garrison large enough to securely hold the outer portion. I tend to defend the outer gate with a unit I can afford to sacrifice, but try to use the toughest unit possible in that role, while hoping to salvage any survivors if possible. If the enemy enters the outer ring of defenses, and there are no defenders in that outer ring, the outer wall's missile defenses will quit firing. The ideal unit to prevent that is one that can hide in plain sight (Sherwood Foresters, Hashishin, etc.), even if there's only a single man surviving in the unit. Place them inside the outer wall as far from any opened gates or breaches, and let them hide for as long as possible. Any enemy searching for them (and the AI will eventually get around to it, trust me) will have to travel the full distance from one end of the defenses between the walls to the other, suffering missile defense fire the full way.

When defending gates: you ideally want to set up something similar to a bridge defense, forcing the enemy units into an overcrowded position while not overcrowding your own. If you have three strong melee units to use, set two of them facing each other perpendicular to the gate opening, just far apart enough that they're clear of the gate opening, with their outboard flanks anchored to the inside face of the wall. Position the third unit perpendicular to the first two, with its face just touching the inboard flanks of the earlier units, forming a narrow box in which to trap any enemy that filter through the gate. Those enemy will be overcrowded, flanked on both sides, and attacked three ways. It's best to turn on Hold Formation and Hold Position, or you'll lose your bonuses after your troops become intermingled with the enemy's during combat.

If you only have two good melee units to spare for gate defense, you can achieve almost the same effect by angling the inboard ends of the units towards each other, so that their faces just meet at that end. Then any enemy that makes it through the gate will have to run a ever-narrowing gauntlet that closes before they can enter the courtyard.

Cheers!

[caravel]

Personally I dislike sieges, as I've said many times before. It's why I particularly hated RTW - though the sieges in that were definitely an improvement the issue of stupid AI was still there (arguably worse in fact).

Sieges show the MTW AI at it's worst IMHO.

1) The units that march back and forth in front of the gates getting cut down, routing, coming back for more, etc... before eventually manually attacking the wall on one side and then dying.

2) The cannon/ballista towers (which I never build), which shoot your own men, shoot your walls, gates, towers...

3) The AI approach: I've won many siege defence battles when outnumbered about 10 to 1, simply because the AI was too stupid to attack in a coordinated fashion... but instead sends it's units against you piecemeal (the kind of battles that could be won by simply positioning the troops, starting off and then going down to the pub...)

4) The AI often doesn't bring siege engines, positions them too close to the walls (the crews get shot to pieces) or in a position where they can't all hit the gates/all hit the same piece of wall.

When it comes to attacking it's certainly more in the AI's favour as it's sitting in the same place and the stucture itself adds to the challenge. But I've always found moving your best units out and using autoresolve gives a lower casualty rates than risking your general and decent units attacking a castle that sends a constant spray of "auto arrows" at you. Also if you don't bring siege equipment along with every single army stack, you stand a fair chance of being involved in a few sieges without equipment. In such cases I will almost always starve them out as manually battering down the wall or gates is far too costly.

[Gilrandir]

4) The AI often doesn't bring siege engines, positions them too close to the walls (the crews get shot to pieces) or in a position where they can't all hit the gates/all hit the same piece of wall.

It has always been a surprise for me why the AI doesn't bring siege artillery while besieging, but brings it for field battles (especially while attacking!!!). But in the last case it can be a useful thing when fighting against an enemy with a multitude of reinforcements. I noticed that when the AI doesn't want to bring in more of those (in fact, acknowledging defeat) then the siege engines' crews leave their equipment and beat it. So, seeing them doing this is a sign that the AI gives it up.

[caravel]

It has always been a surprise for me why the AI doesn't bring siege artillery while besieging, but brings it for field battles (especially while attacking!!!).

Another problem with siege equipment, which you highlight here, is that the AI indeed takes it to field battles, where especially if attacking, it's essentially useless. This is further compounded by the AI's inability to organise his reinforcements. The worst result can be a ballista army...

My personal opinion is that the way STW handled it's "sieges" was better. Simple and unrealistic yes, but they actually worked.

[gollum]

The solution to this problem is to raise the maintencance costs of the artillery to that of a normal unit. The AI stops spamming it, although he brings one or two pieces/stack. This is implmented in the Caravel mod.

Of course he's still worthless in how to use art in pitched battles. But stack composition can be much improved and hence his performance.