Currently, I find engineering pretty niche and overall useless as a skill (except for governors, I'm also assuming that metallurgy will be getting nerfed). In my opinion, master engineers should be the gods of siege warfare, and I have a few suggestions to make the skill more useful in sieges:
- Massively increase the siege engine build speed by level; currently the rate is +0,1% faster engine construction per level, I'm proposing to increase this by 5x (or even 10x). This way, a master engineer (say, level 300 for simplicity's sake) will be constructing siege engines +150% or 2,5 times faster.
- The skill level should also increase the siege camp construction speed +0.3% per engineering level. Continuing on with the same example, a level 300 engineer will be setting up a siege camp twice as fast (2,5x at level 330 and with the perk Improved Tools).
- Level 150 perk, Siege Engineer's buff to defensive siege engines' HP should be replaced with an effect which makes the besieged settlement lose food reserves when the walls are hit by (maybe only fire?) mangonels during the siege preparation step. The HP buff can then (optionally) be switched with the other level 150 perk's secondary effect which enables building fire engines (so that there's more of a choice between a siege engineer and a governor).
- To balance the building speeds so that they're not too ludicrous, troop numbers' bonus to siege camp preparation and siege engine building speed should be capped at 500-600 troops and the bonus starts to decrease at higher unit counts (but never to a negative value maybe?).
These are some of my suggestions, these simple changes won't make Engineering less niche, but the skill should at least be more useful now. If you have any further suggestions or any objections to my changes, please do tell. I should clarify that I pulled these numbers out of my ass, so they can be (and will likely be needed to be) changed if the bonuses are too large (or as unlikely it may be, too little). Engineering should also be leveled up easier if the party engineer is automatically assigned to fire the siege engine during siege battles or if they actually fix OOB so that when we assign a companion to a siege weapon, they actually use it, but this is a different issue altogether so I'm not discussing it here.
- Massively increase the siege engine build speed by level; currently the rate is +0,1% faster engine construction per level, I'm proposing to increase this by 5x (or even 10x). This way, a master engineer (say, level 300 for simplicity's sake) will be constructing siege engines +150% or 2,5 times faster.
- The skill level should also increase the siege camp construction speed +0.3% per engineering level. Continuing on with the same example, a level 300 engineer will be setting up a siege camp twice as fast (2,5x at level 330 and with the perk Improved Tools).
- Level 150 perk, Siege Engineer's buff to defensive siege engines' HP should be replaced with an effect which makes the besieged settlement lose food reserves when the walls are hit by (maybe only fire?) mangonels during the siege preparation step. The HP buff can then (optionally) be switched with the other level 150 perk's secondary effect which enables building fire engines (so that there's more of a choice between a siege engineer and a governor).
- To balance the building speeds so that they're not too ludicrous, troop numbers' bonus to siege camp preparation and siege engine building speed should be capped at 500-600 troops and the bonus starts to decrease at higher unit counts (but never to a negative value maybe?).
These are some of my suggestions, these simple changes won't make Engineering less niche, but the skill should at least be more useful now. If you have any further suggestions or any objections to my changes, please do tell. I should clarify that I pulled these numbers out of my ass, so they can be (and will likely be needed to be) changed if the bonuses are too large (or as unlikely it may be, too little). Engineering should also be leveled up easier if the party engineer is automatically assigned to fire the siege engine during siege battles or if they actually fix OOB so that when we assign a companion to a siege weapon, they actually use it, but this is a different issue altogether so I'm not discussing it here.
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