Dev Blog 26/09/19

If the wall happens to be destroyed, what will happen to it when the battle ends? Will it automatically be fixed, or will you be defending a castle which you have partly destroyed-thus making it more vulnerable to future attack. This would be interesting, as it would be amazing if there were consequences to trying to bombard and destroy a castle. Maybe the player would be required to rebuild/fix it?

Ahmed Reda said:

cool blog actually .. and i really love this part

" For instance, let's imagine a siege assault where 500 men are trying to take a city defended by 100 men. As the assault continues, men die from both sides, but due to the valiant defense by the city's garrison, the attackers now have 250 soldiers against 80 of the defenders without setting foot inside the castle. At this point, the attacker AI commander may decide to call off the assault instead of losing more "

i mean if u are in this situation .. u will feel great seeing ur enemy fleeing like that

Click to expand...

I can imagine hearing the call for retreat rolling through the enemy lines closer and closer to your position while watching the enemy peel away from battle...

I believe that siege weapons such as catapults, ballista and trebuchet should have their own operators instead of our troops. Only in case one of the operators dies one of our soldiers would replace them.


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Ahmed Reda said:

cool blog actually .. and i really love this part

" For instance, let's imagine a siege assault where 500 men are trying to take a city defended by 100 men. As the assault continues, men die from both sides, but due to the valiant defense by the city's garrison, the attackers now have 250 soldiers against 80 of the defenders without setting foot inside the castle. At this point, the attacker AI commander may decide to call off the assault instead of losing more "

i mean if u are in this situation .. u will feel great seeing ur enemy fleeing like that

Click to expand...

That is going to be such a cool feeling. Imagine leading a division of your troops fighting off the attacking men who have breached the gate. Both men lost on both sides, you may see this as a final stand, thinking of retreating your troops to the second layer, but then you hear the horn. The sound of retreat, as you see look over to the walls to see that your elites have held against the siege tower assault while the militia are extremely battered but victorious against the ladders. You rally the men at the gate, maybe a few dozen and chase the enemy as they flee towards their camp.

Certainly better than most of the weekly blogs. I've seen enough of sieges already though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A blog this detailed about inheritance, clans, diplomacy, or similar aspects would surely be a sight to behold.

It was no point in dedicating 1 more blog to sieges. In gamescom we had hours of sieges gameplay. No new info in the blog at all.
I will be satisfied better with one more Q&A blog with questions from forum users

pete99 said:

If the wall happens to be destroyed, what will happen to it when the battle ends? Will it automatically be fixed, or will you be defending a castle which you have partly destroyed-thus making it more vulnerable to future attack. This would be interesting, as it would be amazing if there were consequences to trying to bombard and destroy a castle. Maybe the player would be required to rebuild/fix it?

Click to expand...

I hope the wall would still be destroyed at the end of the battle and will need reconstruciton.
But that would make me consider not wise to destroy walls in the first place. Especially if it takes time to bomb them.
The choice will be depending on how long to destroy and how long to rebuild.

I would like to hear the horns during the battle, calling for charge or for retreat. I suppose it won't be done, but would be cool anyway

At least, this blog was interesting.

Great dev blog. Thank you Callum.

I do hope you can improve the AI's ability to use spears, especially against cav.
Right now in the beta they're not good at all with using their spears or throwable weapons.

Very interesting indeed

JuanNieve said:

I believe that siege weapons such as catapults, ballista and trebuchet should have their own operators instead of our troops. Only in case one of the operators dies one of our soldiers would replace them.

Spoiler

Click to expand...

Agreed, there have been videos where high ranking troops have been operating siege equipment, and it looks silly.

Edit:

I’m very glad to hear the AI will withdraw if the casualties are too high. It always irked me when in warband, the attacking enemy would throw every last man on the walls and get wiped out. It didn’t make sense.

I want to point a few things:

1. "let's imagine a siege assault where 500 men are trying to take a city defended by 100 men. As the assault continues, men die from both sides, but due to the valiant defense by the city's garrison, the attackers now have 250 soldiers against 80 of the defenders without setting foot inside the castle"

Well, in the related video, we see this Castle Siege where the Vlandians didnt have a chance against this Imperial Invaders, so as far as i know, the Vlandians should (?) be "efficent" as defenders, and their army was not only composed by untrained militia... so this kind of example could happen in the game with the current ia?  Or was it an extreme example?

Anyways, it really surprises me how the invaders made such a succesful siege, with almost no loses at all; The invaders really outnumber the defenders, but those should have the advantage of being in the walls so i think it has to be noticeable. Even the defenders are easily taken out being harassed by the Invader Ranged Units. (Looks like they're in Open Field, not defending a Keep)

2. We saw in other DevBlogs that if the defenders really start to loose as the siege goes, they would retreat to the "inner parts" of the Keep
so they can put on some resistance against the invaders, and it would come a "Second Phase Keep Fight" (Something like in Warband) but this "Second Keep Fight" doesnt show up, at least on the Gamescom videos ( Maybe it was deactivated)

We can see in this video how lots of Vlandian Crossbowmen (it's the same siege like the one from the DevBlog) flee to the Main Tower of the Keep;But there's no second fight at all, so how is it works? if they're really few troops, do they surrender to the invaders?

https://youtu.be/GgAMugbWuNE?t=1156

Cheers!

Great blog. Honestly love we can actually depend on the AI to make small intuitive decisions which could play important to the siege, great work as always!

the setting sounds good, looking forward to see it in action next year. Its not a Total War game, so curious how comfortable it will be to control all those areas and troops spread in big towns ... and without a minimap. We will need NPCs to play the role of a messenger and an AI  that can give us reports of what is going on and can take orders like "send men from the gate to the west wall on the double!" hehe

MB2 siege battles will look like a action movie

@Dreamer19

Yeah I don’t quite know where the second phase went. I hope it was removed simply for gamescom, and not permanently.

Nothing new, a topic that has been given relevance with 5 blogs and has not really shown anything substantial in live as breaches or battles in the keep. Then, to strain an "old" video in this "new" devblog I don't see it elegant...honestly (and after a couple of weeks).
Yes...I'm irritated, after having read that from March the game will remain on EA for another damn year and that it will be deprived of important features...
And here we are for 5 times discussing the sieges again. Very disturbing your behaviour...

Oh boy, I feel a riot a-brewing.

  Please just make the game hard, combat looks too easy on the current build. Those defenders don't put up much or any fight it seems to me, I know it's early still though, just my two cents. Games are too easy these days. I want to feel like those AI soldiers are fighting for their life and will do everything in their power to NOT be sliced by a sword instead of just accepting death. Please don't make it a hack and slash and have some realistic combat, enemies need to parry and dodge as much as they can, often using shields to block which should be hard to break their guard, they are supposed to be fighting for their life! You can bet if someone comes at me with a sharp blade I will be trying to block or dodge before they get that thing anywhere close to me.

A battle should be filled with terror and triumph and rage. I just don't feel that from this siege video, but I know it's early and there's still lots of time. Easy games are mindless time wasters, challenge is good, something to come back to. Not a whole lot of memorable easy games in my book, but the hard ones are worth coming back to again and again until you are victorious, and it will feel great.
Happy week-end people.

Hello everyone! I got a few questions: do the AI archers know to pick up arrows from their fallen comrades (they might run out of ammo in a long siege)? Or in other words, can AI pick up weapons? Should we have a command telling archers and soldiers to pick up arrows/bolts/javelins?