I'm genuinely curious.... why is it so difficult to get troops going up ladders and siege towers correctly?

[Mad Vader]

Wasn't it that the AI performance in Bannerlord sieges depends solely on the map scenes and that the pathing and behavior is assigned when making the map itself?
If that is the case, then the poor performance of the AI in sieges could be chalked up to the fact that they took the scene and map makers and pushed tthem to do village and region-dependent battle map scenes, instead of improving sieges.

That's an interesting theory, but more specifically I think they need sceners and battle AI coders (different teams) to work together on each siege scene, and that requires co-operation and timing impossible if one of them doesn't want to do it. For example, if they blame each other for the state of sieges and each side demands the other does something, you need management to step in.
Another theory is that everyone is waiting for some other big feature that's a prerequisite for sieges. Or they are all waiting for the keep battles for some reason. Interestingly enough they are working on the keep battles for months now (not all the time presumably) and it's unclear what's the delay there. If they managed to make the prison break scenes, keep battle scenes should be very similar and equally easy to make.

What we do know is that if they let loose a coder and a scener from the modding community to fix the sieges, they would have done all of the above in a month - fixed sieges, keep battles, everything. It's very hard to understand why they can't do it with people paid to do this.

 

[Fistochat]

This ladders and Siege towers issue is a shame because I'm sure that I'm not the only one not playing the game anymore because of this. I am waiting for this fix. I think they should at least implement a provisory fix for this. At the moment, siege immersion is broken because of this issue.

 

[ShakenSpeare]

I bet the same "team" working on Sieges is the same team that's working on Multiplayer: some unpaid intern who hates this **** and is about to change his major... again.

 

[paladinx333]

The ladders themselves seem to work just fine. You can literally shove a soldier onto the ladder and if their feet touch it, they will climb up. The interaction between the ladder and ai agent seems good.

The problem that I have observed is one of queuing. The men standing about the ladders are waiting for something. You can often run through them, bumping them around. This sometimes stimulates a few of them to climb the ladders. Giving them orders to charge doesn't seem to do anything.

Whatever type of "controller" is running the siege is not giving proper instruction to the soldiers that should be climbing the ladders. This leaves most of them in a perpetual wait state. They are given instructions to run to the ladders, but only some of them seem to get the instruction to begin climbing.

The ladder climbing is better in some scenes. There are two battanian castles and the town of Revyl where non-tower ladder climbing seems to work better. Some of the ladder climbing issues are scene specific.

Those siege towers are pretty crazy. In one siege, my men would not climb up the siege ladders, but the defenders began climbing DOWN the ladders. I stood at the bottom of the tower, shooting the defenders in the ass as they attempted to climb down. And they were using all three ladders!

This seems like it should be easily fixable. I would make the ladder and siege towers themselves give climb-up instructions to the men nearest their base. The soldiers have no trouble getting to the ladders, they just need some help on deciding when to start climbing.

 

[a_ver_est]

Of course not, that´s why I said "Seems like".

On the official webpage there are 8 vacancies, 2 for unannounced project and the others for M&B2... but I have seen there for months so I don't know if they are real positions.

 

[Mad Vader]

On the official webpage there are 8 vacancies, 2 for unannounced project and the others for M&B2... but I have seen there for months so I don't know if they are real positions.

Of course they are real. The question is whether those 6 Bannerlord vacancies are because TW are serious about adding people to the existing BL team or because they moved 6 people to Mech & Blaster.

 

[froggyluv]

I remember seeing an Ex-Taleworlds employee on LinkedIn or something like that saying "The Pros about Taleworlds were the games themselves but the Cons were the length of time and extremely slow movement on development". Actually i dont remember exactly what he said was the Pro but that sounds good enough

 

[Doofus]

http://prntscr.com/11bau6d I usually don't use ladders, but on occasion (I thought) they make sense. In this siege, I badly outnumber the enemy. They only had one siege weapon up, so I figured why not siege. Nope. As seen in the screenshot, my troops only used one ladder...then the enemy tosses the other down. Then my army puts the other up and everyone stops using the first ladder and goes and waits to use the second. My losses were 5 times thiers. After losing my 1st hundred troops I gave up & decided to do it the usual way. Nice that I'm forced to waste time.

 

[ChiefGameMinister]

The ladders themselves seem to work just fine. You can literally shove a soldier onto the ladder and if their feet touch it, they will climb up. The interaction between the ladder and ai agent seems good.

The problem that I have observed is one of queuing. The men standing about the ladders are waiting for something. You can often run through them, bumping them around. This sometimes stimulates a few of them to climb the ladders. Giving them orders to charge doesn't seem to do anything.

Whatever type of "controller" is running the siege is not giving proper instruction to the soldiers that should be climbing the ladders. This leaves most of them in a perpetual wait state. They are given instructions to run to the ladders, but only some of them seem to get the instruction to begin climbing.

The ladder climbing is better in some scenes. There are two battanian castles and the town of Revyl where non-tower ladder climbing seems to work better. Some of the ladder climbing issues are scene specific.

Those siege towers are pretty crazy. In one siege, my men would not climb up the siege ladders, but the defenders began climbing DOWN the ladders. I stood at the bottom of the tower, shooting the defenders in the ass as they attempted to climb down. And they were using all three ladders!

This seems like it should be easily fixable. I would make the ladder and siege towers themselves give climb-up instructions to the men nearest their base. The soldiers have no trouble getting to the ladders, they just need some help on deciding when to start climbing.

Sometimes they are waiting for a command, Sometimes they are attempting to go somewhere, and it is because of the collisions around the ladder, and how the troops work together with the same command.

For example, say you also have 50 troops with the same command to attack the final two units on the battlefield. They all swarm towards the units all attempting to attack.

Saying to 50 units, attack two units, can sometimes make those two units harder to hit, because of the collisions, and sometimes those two units, at first get more attacks in, before finally they do go down, because of the collisions. Battle is not exactly the swan lake of real battle.

Thus, there is an issue

1/ The program loop of command - Some units are not trying to climb the ladders at all in the grounded base ladder
--- The only time that they do try to climb again, is when the defender knocks the ladder down, and they get a climb order when the ladder is put to the wall again
2/ Siege tower - Collisions of units, that you as the player can bump the units up the siege ladder

And obviously, the programmer is having problems solving this, or else it would be solved. So we are then waiting on the programmer to solve his problem. Perhaps another programmer would solve it more quickly. Yet I am not in charge of human resources at that company, or how they do things.

I can only imagine, eventually, they will solve their problem, or the programmer having the issue, will solve it.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

I like that you can put up the ladder by yourself and climb up and this will magically activate that one last enemy that got stuck in a wall somewhere to come get you so you can finish the siege.

 

[Philozoraptor]

Ladders are actually fixable by code and as few people here assumed it is related to their waiting queues, we already fixed them in the AI module. However the towers need changes both on code and map level, we could probably fix them on code level if we could fully control the queue locations, number etc on the maps.

 

[rottenapple11]

Honestly a very simple way to solve it would be: give modder the access to change the pathfinding of maps.
It could be the pathfinding is too hard for siege map. It could also be the TW had a bad coder designing staff. AI is something that have to make a balance between the computational pressure and "look smart". But I guess it could at least be improved if TW make it open sourced.

 

[Bluko88]

I mean I know it depends on the structure of the castle and the walls.... but come on.... surely it can't be that hard?

or ...... do you think they are just waiting until the game is fully 'scened' and all of the castles are 'in-game' before they finally go and fix it?

Maybe the soldiers are just that afraid of heights?

Honestly I'm amazed this game has a playerbase left at all at this point. Though I suspect 90% of the current base is playing the game heavily modded - so are they really playing TW's game even?

 

[JerryValentine]

Maybe the soldiers are just that afraid of heights?

Honestly I'm amazed this game has a playerbase left at all at this point. Though I suspect 90% of the current base is playing the game heavily modded - so are they really playing TW's game even?

Diplomacy, RBM ai overhaul, and improved garrisons are pretty much necessary for me to play. Calradia at war too because its makes the world feel more lively.

 

[Mjdecker123]

Maybe the next big update we will see them fix or tweak them. If it is truly down to the map like some are saying, they are working on the Terrain update, its possible they branched into the other maps. Doubtful but the AI are a downfall atm. Sad I have to rely on a mod to get half decent AI but most of that is on Taleworlds. I'm sure these modders would solve most issues if they were allowed all the modding tools they need. But I dont want just the Siege AI worked on but the AI in general. One day though

 

[9yearsago]

You do not need an answer from TW, just mix these words randomly and you'll have your official TW answer:
immersive, experience, dynamic, rich, diverse, to create, feedback, unique, playthrough, content, deep, sandbox

 

[MostBlunted]

Experience immersive dynamic rich diverse unique deep sandbox content.

 

[Kulgrinda Košmarjus]

I think I'm at the point to slowly accept that my dream is just a hyped up piece of lies, and I'll never get my layered castles.

 

[CrazyElf]

We in RBM team assume they have some sort of inner roadmap and that they have actual plan to do siege overhaul so they are not "wasting" time on siege before that. Obviously if they would care about their game and reputation they would do at least bare minimum like assigning the formations to correct or at least some positions (on some maps there are formation that are literally not assigned to defensive position and instead just stant next to the wall). Just today we released AI update and we concluded that siege AI and general enjoyment could be literally improved by 1 person that would add or move broken infantry positions in the editor (modders have no access ATM), you literally dont have to be coder to do this just be enthusiast that knows roughly how AI works.

I think at some point, TW does need to clarify what the plan is.

It's clear that this is one of the biggest issues in the game and that it is increasingly a source of frustration.

 

[Julio-Claudian]

I think I'm at the point to slowly accept that my dream is just a hyped up piece of lies, and I'll never get my layered castles.

Try and maintain hope that modders will eventually be able to change that aspect of the game.