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There is NO successful siege defense
- Thread starter staylee
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Mik1306
Recruit
I mean the attacker will always have an advantage because they can choose whether or not to lay seige, they won't seige unless they think they'll iwn. So the odds are against you in general.
Seige defense isn't really about winning though because your 200 troops in a castle are never going to kill off 800 troops outside. IRL it was more about holding out until a friendly army showed but in game no time passes during the battle. Instead i've foudn the best you can do is kill as many of the attackers as possible so that some friendly army can retake the castle later.
Got to be honest though some of the most annoying experiences in this game so far, including all the bugs, is being given a castle with no garrison and 6 militia by Derthert. Gee thanks i'm sure this will last.
Seige defense isn't really about winning though because your 200 troops in a castle are never going to kill off 800 troops outside. IRL it was more about holding out until a friendly army showed but in game no time passes during the battle. Instead i've foudn the best you can do is kill as many of the attackers as possible so that some friendly army can retake the castle later.
Got to be honest though some of the most annoying experiences in this game so far, including all the bugs, is being given a castle with no garrison and 6 militia by Derthert. Gee thanks i'm sure this will last.
cnconrad
Recruit
No, the current system is stupid and pointless. I cant think of a single time in history that an enemy was in the middle of assaulting the walls of a settlement and a different army attacked them in the rear and all were magically teleported to an empty field to fight...
Nothing about sieges are fine. They are completely broken from the battle themselves to the campaign map. Which really sucks because they could be fun.
Another issue is that unless the attack AI army "KNOWS" it can win, it doesn't attack so often, even when you beat them to the castle or town, they will immediately move away to find a weaker target so unless you want to join a siege, you can't possibly win, your never going to be part of a siege.
I also agree that it is stupid that you have to "break your way in" and that you end up having to sacrifice half your army to do it. Honestly it shouldn't be any different than if you come across a field battle, you should just be able to join in and defend. Then if, the attacking AI sees it can't win after a while, it does what a player does, retreats and runs away.
I also agree that it is stupid that you have to "break your way in" and that you end up having to sacrifice half your army to do it. Honestly it shouldn't be any different than if you come across a field battle, you should just be able to join in and defend. Then if, the attacking AI sees it can't win after a while, it does what a player does, retreats and runs away.
Maximum997
Squire
Oh my god this mechanic is awful.
And i think it wasnt some game design mistake. It was done on purpose so player just cant defend castles.
1) AI atack only when he is 100% sure that he can win no matter what.
1) AI build siege camp instantly. so you have less time to reinforce, almost no time. I Warband i can go through half of the map to defend my besiged castle.
2) No defensive tools, no catapults, no ballistas. You can try them in custom battles, and they are completely useless there. They placed in such place, that you can kill with them may be a few guys. For that you can use a frkn bow and kill 5 times more.
But that in 250 v 250, in huge battles AI loves to make a blobs and stupid decisions, thats why they cut them from defense. Becouse what if player can use it smart? No, we cant allow him to do that.
3) To cut your already small chances to zero, they did two things
a) That stupid mechanic that cuts your army in half when you want to help. Lol, i can cut that atacking army to small pieces with zero casualties, but for some reason i need to sacrifice half of my troops to get in castle. You can say that it is just bad game design. Okay.
b) If you already in the castle you CANT defend it. You can only kill half of your army and run or fight in open field. And you cant argue with that.
It has no exuse or explanation. Exept one - devs just dont want you to hold your castles without army of vassals.
Now to atack:
Most of siege equipment has two purposes:
1) To exist
2) To look cool in trailers
Fof example onager(non fire) and trebuchet. All you can do with them is destroy parapet(it can be useful for archers, but for some reason archers jsut dont want to be archers in campaign sieges) and kill like 5 guys with boulders. It cant destroy walls, becouse destroyed wall is a another map with new fortifications and camp points fof AI.
Balista.It was ment to be useless or was nerfed to the useless state. It placed very very far away in the worst possible spot. It is very innacurate for such rdistance. And becouse it wasnt bad enough, you cant zoom. You can zoom with every weapon and even without it, but not with Ballista. Becouse player will be able to snipe enemies! We dont want it! We add ballista not for this.
Yes, you can actually kill with that, but only for one reason - AI is very dumb. Becouse bots can actualy block that shot with shield. And not only one, but many. But again - just use a frkn bow, it is 100 times better.
Battery ram - very useful thing. Build it, set up on battlefield and forget. Becouse it forces AI to make a shield blob and it leaves walls less defended. Dont send your troops to the gates, becouse they will only smash this shield wall with no to little effect.
Siege towers. With ramp - good thing. With ladders - useless. And never, never ever climb there!
Fire onagers. DAMN they are good. Only weapon that i see as an advantage when i build it.
So what we need to see:
a) They nerf fire onagers. It means that siege uquipments should be useless. And they made all of it for purpose(to not allow player solocarry).
b) they buff anything else. It means that it was just a bad balancing\realisation. And its okay, it is new game, it is impossible to balance it so fast.
And i think it wasnt some game design mistake. It was done on purpose so player just cant defend castles.
1) AI atack only when he is 100% sure that he can win no matter what.
1) AI build siege camp instantly. so you have less time to reinforce, almost no time. I Warband i can go through half of the map to defend my besiged castle.
2) No defensive tools, no catapults, no ballistas. You can try them in custom battles, and they are completely useless there. They placed in such place, that you can kill with them may be a few guys. For that you can use a frkn bow and kill 5 times more.
But that in 250 v 250, in huge battles AI loves to make a blobs and stupid decisions, thats why they cut them from defense. Becouse what if player can use it smart? No, we cant allow him to do that.
3) To cut your already small chances to zero, they did two things
a) That stupid mechanic that cuts your army in half when you want to help. Lol, i can cut that atacking army to small pieces with zero casualties, but for some reason i need to sacrifice half of my troops to get in castle. You can say that it is just bad game design. Okay.
b) If you already in the castle you CANT defend it. You can only kill half of your army and run or fight in open field. And you cant argue with that.
It has no exuse or explanation. Exept one - devs just dont want you to hold your castles without army of vassals.
Now to atack:
Most of siege equipment has two purposes:
1) To exist
2) To look cool in trailers
Fof example onager(non fire) and trebuchet. All you can do with them is destroy parapet(it can be useful for archers, but for some reason archers jsut dont want to be archers in campaign sieges) and kill like 5 guys with boulders. It cant destroy walls, becouse destroyed wall is a another map with new fortifications and camp points fof AI.
Balista.It was ment to be useless or was nerfed to the useless state. It placed very very far away in the worst possible spot. It is very innacurate for such rdistance. And becouse it wasnt bad enough, you cant zoom. You can zoom with every weapon and even without it, but not with Ballista. Becouse player will be able to snipe enemies! We dont want it! We add ballista not for this.
Yes, you can actually kill with that, but only for one reason - AI is very dumb. Becouse bots can actualy block that shot with shield. And not only one, but many. But again - just use a frkn bow, it is 100 times better.
Battery ram - very useful thing. Build it, set up on battlefield and forget. Becouse it forces AI to make a shield blob and it leaves walls less defended. Dont send your troops to the gates, becouse they will only smash this shield wall with no to little effect.
Siege towers. With ramp - good thing. With ladders - useless. And never, never ever climb there!
Fire onagers. DAMN they are good. Only weapon that i see as an advantage when i build it.
So what we need to see:
a) They nerf fire onagers. It means that siege uquipments should be useless. And they made all of it for purpose(to not allow player solocarry).
b) they buff anything else. It means that it was just a bad balancing\realisation. And its okay, it is new game, it is impossible to balance it so fast.
TheCalradian
Recruit
Secret tunnel would be easily defensible. Attacking through the bottle neck of a secret tunnel would be very silly. The only advantage an attacking player with preknowledge would have, would be to block it.
I don't know if I like the idea, though. As much as I would like take part in more siege defenses, I don't know if I would have liked the enemy garrison getting reinforcement while I was sieging. It would make little sense to me that I can spot enemy units far away on the map, but not preventing them from entering the castle.
I don't know if I like the idea, though. As much as I would like take part in more siege defenses, I don't know if I would have liked the enemy garrison getting reinforcement while I was sieging. It would make little sense to me that I can spot enemy units far away on the map, but not preventing them from entering the castle.
Sieges in the game definitely need a lot of work, but I have to disagree that ALL siege defense is bound to fail.
I've had a number of successful siege defense in early-mid game as a small mercenary company. Whereas letting a 600+ attacker vs 200+ defender playout in simulated battle is a sure victory for attacker, it is definitely winnable in tactical battle as long as defense catapults are able to destroy battering ram and offense becomes limited to ladders. Once it's ladders only, it's pretty fun to defend against so many enemies, especially if playing an archer, and absolutely winnable.
I've had a number of successful siege defense in early-mid game as a small mercenary company. Whereas letting a 600+ attacker vs 200+ defender playout in simulated battle is a sure victory for attacker, it is definitely winnable in tactical battle as long as defense catapults are able to destroy battering ram and offense becomes limited to ladders. Once it's ladders only, it's pretty fun to defend against so many enemies, especially if playing an archer, and absolutely winnable.
TheCalradian
Recruit
I think there is a whole dimension lost in the current game.
Today, you don't know of the existence of an army until it is outside the gates of a town.
I think the there should be INTEL on army movements. If you receive good information that an Aserai army of size 300-600 was heading for Poros to arrive in three days, THEN you would have time to prepare.
This could be a reason why you would keep good relation with criminals in enemy border towns. So that they, or even bandit lairs, could provide you with intel. Or maybe you could pay a bandit lair to provide you with sight. Or hire some hunters or something to keep lookout in a map bottleneck.
Your own towns and cities should NOTIFY you if an army is spotted.
You should have a fiefdom overview where every fief would be reporting what it is currently seeing and you should be able to scroll to that fief and see for yourself. This would also include ongoing sieges in case you missed a notification. Low prosperity fiefs would have less sight than high prosperity ones since you assume they have less activity.
Today, you don't know of the existence of an army until it is outside the gates of a town.
I think the there should be INTEL on army movements. If you receive good information that an Aserai army of size 300-600 was heading for Poros to arrive in three days, THEN you would have time to prepare.
This could be a reason why you would keep good relation with criminals in enemy border towns. So that they, or even bandit lairs, could provide you with intel. Or maybe you could pay a bandit lair to provide you with sight. Or hire some hunters or something to keep lookout in a map bottleneck.
Your own towns and cities should NOTIFY you if an army is spotted.
You should have a fiefdom overview where every fief would be reporting what it is currently seeing and you should be able to scroll to that fief and see for yourself. This would also include ongoing sieges in case you missed a notification. Low prosperity fiefs would have less sight than high prosperity ones since you assume they have less activity.
In a recent siege, routed defenders tried to get up to higher level.
If storming a castle you'd have to do 2-3 (depending on castle level) succesful storms, it'd make for great opportunity to inflict heavy casualties, as well as have some sort of plan to enact other than headshotting top tier enemies while your lemming-like troops keep jumping/being pushed off the walls.
I've managed to offload my treasure and prisoners to different castle, and with select 120 troops inflicted 300+ dead on enemy army, which was quickly defeated. My castle fell, but I'd say that was still very effective defence. And if I could retreat my troops in orderly fashion to upper castle for stage 2, I'm pretty sure I'd hold if AI wasn't acting like Wallstreet gamblers after a market dip.
If storming a castle you'd have to do 2-3 (depending on castle level) succesful storms, it'd make for great opportunity to inflict heavy casualties, as well as have some sort of plan to enact other than headshotting top tier enemies while your lemming-like troops keep jumping/being pushed off the walls.
I've managed to offload my treasure and prisoners to different castle, and with select 120 troops inflicted 300+ dead on enemy army, which was quickly defeated. My castle fell, but I'd say that was still very effective defence. And if I could retreat my troops in orderly fashion to upper castle for stage 2, I'm pretty sure I'd hold if AI wasn't acting like Wallstreet gamblers after a market dip.
pmn1990
Recruit
Its not historically inaccurate for an army to break though a siege to help on the defensive side. It should be a specific battle map where you need to get to the castle gate. On your side of the battle the defending archers join on the walls. The sieging party will engage but once you get within safety of the castles defenses it will go back to normal siege with you in the city. It will eliminate so many troops loses where more likely than not better troops will survive. It could even cap how many troops your able to do it with. You can only bring 50 troops and the rest go to your nearest fiefs garrison( which would need to be fixed)
pmn1990
Recruit
This. Not sure why they removed multiple tier siege defence from warband. They added siege equipment which is basically useless. The AI is aweful at holding walls and when i give commands they break even worse. My only outnumbered defense that worked i had to pull them all up to the castle and fight whole group on troops that trickled in and even that i had to do 10x and they still wanted to run up to the walls and get slaughtered.
I presume the feature is not fully implemented - it'd be a waste of time to add such complexity when AI appears to be at relatively early stage of testing. I'm hopeful that this is a target further down in development.
One of many things I'd love to see addressed in Dev Blog, but from fan reactions I can also see why they'd rather keep quiet. If a feature doesn't work out for one of many reasons, players will be in uproar. What eyes can't see...
Crossbowmen have pavisses they don't use, archers are all snipers with no friendly fire damage, some troops have javelins they never throw. I expect there's a slew of features that will only be tested once they have a better handle on stuff like basic pathing has been beefed up. But that itself is an assumption that, again, could be confirmed in Dev Blog
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Storm7Lightning
Recruit
The coward "intelligence" ai is the reason why I stopped playing many other great strategy games like total war.If the ai wants to be such a smart ass that it knows that I will win, even when I waited for multiple months in a city to see if they will attack with the regular 300 man garrison and my 50 man, they still turned tail with a 500 MAN ARMY, why don't they just stop entirely? Did I buy the game to play wack a mole or play the siege like in the trailer? If the ai wants to be so smart why doesn't it just stop playing then? So this is "intelligent"? Can I have the option for fun ai or ai with balls?
Some of the castels actually do have secret or side passages, like a hidden harbor or a gated small passageway to a nearby water stream, so I guess this will get added in future content.
As for siege weapons, in one map assulting an Asari castel my fire onager kept getting loads of kills each hit because the enemy were bundled up somewhere along the ramparts and my men were stargely accurate, ended up almost single handedly blowing away any resistance to one of my siege towers.
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Why cant defending allied armies that are outside the walls simply attack the siegers as they siege forward -attacking them from the rear in the same Battle scene. The siegers would then have to leave some troops to cover the rear/flanks as opposed to just charging everyone to certain victory
I presume the feature is not fully implemented - it'd be a waste of time to add such complexity when AI appears to be at relatively early stage of testing. I'm hopeful that this is a target further down in development.
One of many things I'd love to see addressed in Dev Blog, but from fan reactions I can also see why they'd rather keep quiet. If a feature doesn't work out for one of many reasons, players will be in uproar. What eyes can't see...
Crossbowmen have pavisses they don't use, archers are all snipers with no friendly fire damage, some troops have javelins they never throw. I expect there's a slew of features that will only be tested once they have a better handle on stuff like basic pathing has been beefed up. But that itself is an assumption that, again, could be confirmed in Dev Blog
I think the major issue is that we don't REALLY know what is working as intended or not working as intended. It would be nice for the devs to actually say, "AI still needs work but we are working on it" or "Sieges are working as intended and are considered feature complete".
That would save everyone a lot of time, hassle and worry. I mean I would love to ASSUME that because I feel something isn't working like it should, that the Devs feel the same way and it will be fixed but if I was to bet money on that happening, I bet I would go broke fairly quickly.
The problem is that you can only let the algorithm do the break through.
When chose to break throug ,if we can enter a battlefield with your army, allied besiged army, the settlement, and your enemy, then fight our own way to breakthrough enemy's siege camp and enter the settlement, this part of gameplay would be more interesting
When chose to break throug ,if we can enter a battlefield with your army, allied besiged army, the settlement, and your enemy, then fight our own way to breakthrough enemy's siege camp and enter the settlement, this part of gameplay would be more interesting
Storm7Lightning
Recruit
Wouldn't a city have multiple entrances making reinforcing a city a non problem?
nah, that's just fine, what isn't good at all is the fact that the AI doesn't seem to be able to hit enemy siege equipment, most of the time the Onagers are useless on the defending side, unless the player takes control fast enough... Some castle designs also make it impossible to hit enemy equipment due to positioning.
You can patrol your castle during war time, if you chase butterflies during a war, well, you're asking for it.
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