Fountain Hall siege strategy

[aiceball]

Hi,

As of Perisno 0.8, Fountain Hall seems to be a full-blown siege tower castle siege. With the new and improved crackshot falcon boys, what is the viable strategy to sucessfully wipe out 1k+ falconites out of that town? I'm having some serious difficulty in that particular siege.


Regards,
Aice

 

[arduus]

Bring lots of archers and crossbowmen and let them clear the walls, retreat, repeat the process. Your army might not be enough to clear the whole garrison, since the Falcon troops are overpowered. Bringing a few friends or vassals will help.

 

[TheBanditKing]

Archers in my experience is not a truly viable option for fountain hall. It is an impenetrable fortress almost. The only real option I think is to overwhelm them with numbers and widdle it down over a multiple sieges.

If you can break through the main tower where the siege tower ramps to, and then have a chance to reposition forces inside the tower (archers mainly) you might have a chance to do it without high casualties but that tower is hard to penetrate to say the least.

Having a blast trying to take to fountain hall myself at the moment.

 

[TheBanditKing]

Finally took Fountain Hall last night.

The definite trick is to get inside the tower, then hold them in the tower or even better the stairwell on the left that the enemy comes up. Melee fights in the stairwell and you and your archers can sit on the wall and shoot down. You will still need about at least double the troops force of the garrison to be safe. I play on very difficult though. Archers strategies will not work on fountain hall until you breech the walls.

 

[Reus]

I actually really love how you take your time to figure out solid strategies for this fight over time, rather than whining about how difficult it is, and how it should be nerfed until you can just tell your troops to charge the entire fight. I like you. Kudos.

 

[TheBanditKing]

Love the difficulty and the uniqueness of fountain hall and the falcons overall for that matter. I'm kinda thinking it would have been better to let them be because now theres no rebel aepeale falcons running around. I usually run around and knock those guys out in order to recruit them for renweards.

Devs have done a fantastic job on every aspect of Perisno. Absolutely favorite mod out there.

 

[Yozzer]

TheBanditKing wrote "Devs have done a fantastic job on every aspect of Perisno. Absolutely favorite mod out there."

I would just like to say I completely agree. So much thought has gone into it, and the new troop moving functions are really a great touch.

On topic, I have had a go at Fountain Hall, and did get to the tower, but the next wave of my troops arrived too late and I lost my foot hold, but I WILL BE BACK

 

[arduus]

TheBanditKing wrote "Devs have done a fantastic job on every aspect of Perisno. Absolutely favorite mod out there."

I would just like to say I completely agree. So much thought has gone into it, and the new troop moving functions are really a great touch.

On topic, I have had a go at Fountain Hall, and did get to the tower, but the next wave of my troops arrived too late and I lost my foot hold, but I WILL BE BACK

It depends on which troops you use, not all of them can hold the tower, maybe TheBanditKing can tell us which troops he brought. Archer strategy works for me, but his army composition can help others who prefer different strategies.

 

[TheBanditKing]

My troops -
Elintor
Hired Mercs
Falcons


Having said that I sieged it with my army of lords which is half elintor, 2 parts tolarian, and 2 parts Zann totalling 3500 troops. The enemy garrison was over 1500 strong + gunnars 490 man army at the time.

The archers when trying to position on the bridge seem to hug walls and not shoot. Maybe you have a different experience (I tried multiple times to correct this but was unable to find a way to do it). Heavy casualties until I was able to hold the tower at which point it starts to even out.

The archers on the sidewall next to the tower need to be taken out immediately because they just sit there and peg anyone coming up the ladder or on top of the tower.

 

[arduus]

Thanks for the tips TheBanditKing, I definitely will try this strategy in my next playthrough.

I generally play lance/1hd in the field (sometimes lance/archer) and become a pure sharpshooter during the sieges (3 bags of arrows + I collect arrows everywhere whenever I get the chance). It helps me clear the most annoying archers and crossbowmen on the walls and towers my troops ignore or miss. I also train all my companions as horse archers (+ 1hd), it requires a lot of skill points, but it is worth it, especially during the sieges.

 

[samoja]

I took it by swarm, i had a bunch of vassals with me and just sent wave after wave into the breach, i lost 10 men for each of theirs but at least in that version most of Falcon troops were armed with maces, and i had maxed out surgery, so only a few troops were in fact lost, when i ran out of troops i just waited a few days for them to recover and attacked again, took forever but eventually they were worn down by sheer numbers.

 

[davidm27]

Haven't taken it yet, but in my current game the major 6 factions wiped everyone else out, so taking it from Hakkon shouldn't be that hard

 

[Jeffy29]

Falcon faction is no go, probably best left it to autocalc. I had like 400 soldiers, elintor cavalry mixed with hired knights and tried to siege their castles and got my ass beat handily (defeated Hakkon easily previously). Then I tried  different castle and by the time my siege tower was built, lots of Zann soldiers joined the assault - 400 of my soldiers, 1500 Zann (!!), we coudn't kill more than 200 troops.  The battle was so long I watched entire episode of Always Sunny before it finished.

 

[porkinson]

Falcons are definitely op, very reminiscent of the noldor in pop(while a bit weaker), it also doesnt help that they have Fountain Hall, i love the design for this city but it has serveral problems. For one, its very hard to position your units in the damn bridge without them gluing to the walls, this makes it so most of your archers will be doing almost nothing if you move them forwards. The best strat i found to take it was basically soloing 200-300 enemies yourself, use the siege tower as cover and kill all the archers in the walls, once that is done cheese the hell out of the enemies in the entrance, take ammo from your archers and slowly kill all the stupidly strong guys at the entrance with headshots, it feels dirty as hell but falcons are just too strong and if you simply send your troops to charge once the tower arrives you will need more than a couple thousand. Once you cleared the strongest guys at the entrance you can try your chances and charge, if your units manage to enter you can win but if they cant then you are gonna have a bad time and lose a ton of good troops so i would advise repeating the cheese 2-3 times. Kinda unrelated but if you wanna earn the renown and not have to repeat the fight vs 5-15 enemies again you need to survive till the end because some enemies bug out inside the castle and you have to enter it through the right side and kill them yourself.

My other problem with Fountain Hall is that its too easy for the player to defend, you can simply keep on killing the enemies moving the siege tower and it will never reach you, the mix of this with infinite arrows(from city improvement) is pretty damn retarded and can make irrelevant any enemy army. I guess the castle was designed to not be taken by the player and leave the falcons alone? but it shouldnt happen that you are able to beat anything once you take it.

 

[Drakken]

Let your marshall do the job. I can gather a 3000 men big army.
You ave to wait a litle to capture this town, the hit and run work well mostly because of you cleaning the wall since your own archers can't be deployed on this cursed bridge.

 

[Talinoth]

Haha, I took my hodgepodge warband of 600 dudes - very strong companions, 50 Household Guards with Darkforest bows, 250 Geldarin Dukes, and a mix of high level cavalry and archers from other factions, made another save, and declared war on the Falcons just to see what all the hype was about.

Geldarin Dukes are NOT squishy characters, and the Noble Geldarin Shield they carry (HP 500, Resistance 20) is pretty good, along with their 9 shield proficiency.
They've also got 83 hp, 63 head armour, and 61 body armour. They make an impressively tanky shieldwall.

Saying all that, I lost 200 Dukes just escorting the siege tower to the walls. That is one majestically long bridge. Fountain Hall's architecture is incredibly imposing even by modern standards, let alone for a 14th/15th century tech-level feudal republic. Even your best archers can't possibly return fire until 70% of the way across that vast length, and meanwhile the Scytere Fealcans rain a hailstorm of arrowfire down on your army from an astounding distance.

Even when your archers make it close enough they can't form up properly to return meaningful fire except for a handful of men, and your shieldwall escorting the siege tower are soaking up quite literally a thousand arrows a minute.

To top it all off, your troops can get stuck inside your siege tower, fail to stand alongside it (because of pathfinding issues), and then the siege tower never reaches the walls at all. I had to end my try there.

-

Results;
My Side -
- 330 wounded
- 82 killed
(out of 61

Defenders -
- 56 killed
- 0 wounded
(out of 1086)

-

The only siege I've ever played that outdoes this is goddamn Elacrai, and that's more because the Noldor are Noldor, and Noldor will do what Noldor always do - which is to say, be completely overpowered. In terms of the sheer majestic difficulty of the scene though, I think Fountain Hall is even nastier than Elacrai.

I'll come back with my marshal army of 30 lords later... much much later... and see whether I can break it open with sheer numbers next time.