Siege Battles, Confronting the Elephant in the Room

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Phantom38

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Siege battles in Bannerlord are epic in scale and can be some of the most fun in the entire game. But there are some big, big issues that serve to undermine them. The first and most important in my opinion is the lack of incentive to build siege weapons(Ballistae, Onagers, Trebuchets) due to how long they take even with high engineering and the impossible to overcome headstart the defenders get in building their own. Beyond this is the faction that when the player uses the weapons there is no cross hair nor the ability to zoom in. Another issue not directly related to sieges is the constant and aggravating food shortages. By mid game I have spent tens of thousands on buying food from villages and other towns to feed my own and make sure my elite, trained garrison doesn't die of starvation.
 
I feel you on your first point, but I don't think we should have crosshairs or the ability to zoom with siege weapons, hell I think there should be no crosshair or zooming in the game at all! But that's just me.
 
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Yes, the food delivery service is definitely taking up a lot of time and getting old fast.

I am tired of being the "Skip the Dishes" service for my garrisons and towns! ? Let them get their own food, I have empires to conquer!
 
I feel you on your first point, by I don't think we should have crosshairs or the ability to zoom with siege weapons, hell I think there should be no crosshair or zooming in the game at all! But that's just me.

This exactly.

But I wish they fired faster so I could zero the aim in a bit easier.

Their fire rate doesn't really match the pace of battles in Bannerlord.
 
The first and most important in my opinion is the lack of incentive to build siege weapons(Ballistae, Onagers, Trebuchets) due to how long they take even with high engineering and the impossible to overcome headstart the defenders get in building their own.

You can put your siege engines into reserve by clicking on them, wait until you have (f.e.) four trebuchets built then unleash all of them at once. There is absolutely nothing the defenders can do about it.
 
You can put your siege engines into reserve by clicking on them, wait until you have (f.e.) four trebuchets built then unleash all of them at once. There is absolutely nothing the defenders can do about it.

Hey, just a friendly tip. In English they don't write f.e, they write i.e. or e.g. Maybe you're just Danish but :smile: Write i.e. or e.g.
 
I have an engineer with 200 skill and the wallbreaker perk. He builds the siege camp quite fast, but it sill takes forever to build siege equipment. Even with trebuchets, breaking the level three walls of a town takes too damn long. I have to assume that the wallbreaker perk probably doesn't work.

If you could build and use siege equipment in a reasonable amount of time it might seem like it were more useful.
 
I have an engineer with 200 skill and the wallbreaker perk. He builds the siege camp quite fast, but it sill takes forever to build siege equipment. Even with trebuchets, breaking the level three walls of a town takes too damn long. I have to assume that the wallbreaker perk probably doesn't work.

If you could build and use siege equipment in a reasonable amount of time it might seem like it were more useful.

Don't forget all the casualties you take as your siege equipment gets attacked by defending equipment.

The trade off of time + wounded and dead soldiers makes building your own siege weapons completely worthless.

I just build a ram, towers and assault
 
Don't forget all the casualties you take as your siege equipment gets attacked by defending equipment.

The trade off of time + wounded and dead soldiers makes building your own siege weapons completely worthless.

I just build a ram, towers and assault
Well, loosing maybe 50 troops to break the walls against losing 150 in an assault it's a good trade off actually, and by destroying their weapons you also kill their men, so for me it's better to wait and destroy the walls instead of losing half of my army to take a city, and like Apocal said, with 4 trebuchet in reserve, it's quite easy. Yeah, there is the risk of being attacked by an enemy army, or even better, the defenders sally out when an enemy army it's near, and if you win, remains only 1 garrison in the settlement.
 
I think the biggest problem lies on being a defender,
I have not found a way to place my troops on the walls, and even when i do they reset to their pre-pathfinded areas. Moreover many of them do not actually shoot and they always hold position untill the enemy comes very close or enter they "zone" i guess.

As an attacker as @paladinx333 said the time we need to break the walls is too much and makes siege equipment not really useful.
 
The biggest problem is the battle AI. The observations of their idiocy are legion but suffice to say they are not very good at defending a castle. Just remember to look at how the gate defenders gather in a compact suicide cube and wait for the release of death.
 
The fix is the faster time mod lol. I found sieges to be quite useful actually. Putting trebuchets into reserve and then loading all 4 of them usually overwhelms defenses, then you can keep firing and defenders keep losing troops due to destroyed siege machines. This way a big garrison can be reduced to reasonable numbers and the walls can be destroyed pretty easy. The faster game speed mod helps with the waiting lol.
 
I'd just be happy if we could build firing siege weapons out of range. I know you can move them to reserve but, no matter how quickly you do that they still have to take a hit. It's super dumb.

Also, I'd like to have perk that allows us to place arrow refill buckets.
 
The battles should last longer than 5 minutes. There can be no epic battle that lasts this long. The sieges have all kind of issues but this is the big one.
 
Yeah tricking then into sallying out is much better because of the automatic death if they hit with the defensive siege weapons while you build stuff.
When I have more throwaway troops I want to experiment a lot with the siege weapons because I would like to level engineering and I like this stuff in concept.... however ATM it's less hassle to just fight 500 crappy troops with 70 good ones.

when the player uses the weapons there is no cross hair nor the ability to zoom in
Yeah this should get changed if they expect us to actually use this or be happy about it existing.

constant and aggravating food shortages
Is it still a problem? I haven't felt it is an issue since they increased the food storage in towns. I don't think I've ever bought food for my party and always had a massive amount from battle drops, but I do buy it for new towns. However since they updated it in the game I've been playing I mostly just use 1 town for my garrison and it has double grain villages and I bought and changed the brewery into a smithy, so it has a lot of natural food.
 
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