Some suggestions to make the Engineering skill more useful

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Totalgarbage

Sergeant Knight
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.
 
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+1 to the first two.

3 sounds a little complex.

Strongly agree Engineering needs a buff, constructing siege camps is painfully slow and you have to do it like 100 times.
 
Engineering seems plenty strong to me. Late game is 95% seiges, so taking 8-16 hours of build time off a siege ( camp, towers, ram, 3 catas) is powerful.
 
I think building gear should give much more skill. It's silly that shooting a guy with a ballista gives much more skill then building the ballista. And of course hitting the walls with siege weapons on the map should give skill too.
 
Someone also had a fantastic idea that the player could help rebuild destroyed villages in exchange for Engineering and Medicine experience.
 
It might work if xp from the non-active sources were increased sufficiently.

Personally, I just find you have too poor a visual experience personally commanding siege gear in active sieges, for that part to be encouraged or needed.
 
Good ideas. However as compensation for the defensive side I would like to have the ability to build the artillery I want and the ability to especially decrease the range of artillery. It is hard to believe that the defenders constructed their walls and towers and positioned their defensive artillery in such a way that they cannot hit attackers in the decisive assault phases any longer.
 
I will try with a question about levelling this.
During sieges, both defend and assault. When one places out the troops and place the mouse over a ballista or other gear the engineering picture comes up. How do one use it? Or is it bugged?
It feels like i could make a 4 man formation with the companion i want to level to use that gear. But they always run away.
 
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