No Way To Learn Engineering Early Game

[ConnorDAwesome]

Currently there is not really a good way to gain any experience for Engineering early game until you actually go start or join a siege for the first time. This makes it extremely difficult to take a castle and only possible if you are leading large army. It also makes a lot of sieges lack siege machinery because it takes too long to build them. Even if the castle is vulnerable and weak it's still very difficult to take a castle, and you have to play the opportunist and depend on luck. That isn't bad but I don't think it should be the only way to take a castle, but right now the player doesn't have much of an incentive to put skill points into Engineering because it's mostly in the late stages of the game.

Here's my suggestion: make clearing bandit hideouts a way of getting Engineering exp. Hideouts are pretty much like a makeshift castle/fort, so it could just get tweaked a little to be more like a fort with walls. Then the player has a mini siege on the fort and that teaches them the basics of sieges. Then they have a foundation for when they siege a real castle. There's already the waiting phase for attacking the hideouts so it could just be turned into a mini siege preparation and use basic siege equipment to help attack the hideout. It would also help with the issue that you can only bring a few troops to attack the hideout. This would give the player a rudimentary level skill of Engineering so that it could give the player a decent start on sieging castles.

 

[Hammerhi99]

Currently there is not really a good way to gain any experience for Engineering early game until you actually go start or join a siege for the first time. This makes it extremely difficult to take a castle and only possible if you are leading large army. It also makes a lot of sieges lack siege machinery because it takes too long to build them. Even if the castle is vulnerable and weak it's still very difficult to take a castle, and you have to play the opportunist and depend on luck. That isn't bad but I don't think it should be the only way to take a castle, but right now the player doesn't have much of an incentive to put skill points into Engineering because it's mostly in the late stages of the game.

Here's my suggestion: make clearing bandit hideouts a way of getting Engineering exp. Hideouts are pretty much like a makeshift castle/fort, so it could just get tweaked a little to be more like a fort with walls. Then the player has a mini siege on the fort and that teaches them the basics of sieges. Then they have a foundation for when they siege a real castle. There's already the waiting phase for attacking the hideouts so it could just be turned into a mini siege preparation and use basic siege equipment to help attack the hideout. It would also help with the issue that you can only bring a few troops to attack the hideout. This would give the player a rudimentary level skill of Engineering so that it could give the player a decent start on sieging castles.

Engineering is imo one of the few skills the player don´t need to skill for himself.
Just search for companions with the last name "the Wainwright" or "the Knowing". They come with a sufficiant engineering skill.

 

[Waybook]

Sieges are actually easier early game, because most castles and cities still have tier 1 walls.

 

[zykox]

+1 on first post.

@Hammerhi99 -
Engineering via companions: Sure, doable. But the point is having the PLAYER be the engineer and raising HIS/HER skills.

@Waybook - I guess everyone's experience is different. By the time I get around 100 troops to lead, many castles and towns have tier 2, some 3.
Also, even if you're right overall, that doesn't solve the issue of "engineering" being impossible to raise, except by actually sieging, risking overall success.
Raising skills is overall yet unbalanced, it's so much easier to raise other skills.

 

[ishkiniza]

@zykox @ConnorDAwesome agree that this is an issue. Regardless of if there are "workarounds" to this deficiency, the skill simply serves no purpose whatsoever in the game. Throughout the early and mid game castles are simply brute forced with ladders and a battering ram, and having enough engineering to reliably out-build a defending castle takes years. The skill is redundant in its current form and therefore barely adds any flavour to the game.

Any argument to the contrary ignores the fact that there is 0 need to have the skill on your main char, and that even if you don't have an engineering companion you can still reliably siege down forts just throwing meat at them. Either make engineering a required skill and have ways to level it, or get rid of it.