What's the Point of Siege Defense?

[federally]

The problem is how both bannerlord and warband expect you to assault every settlement like in total war. In reality a decisive field battle would make some of the losing side's castles surrender immediately. The game needs some system like this to make siege assaults less common and shift the focus onto field battles, so that if siege assaults do happen, the defenders can get way more of an advantage and it won't feel as ridiculous as it does now where every other battle is a siege.

I'm not sure if I like this idea. Field battles definitely need to be made much more significant, but I dislike the idea of not having to siege a local castle just because you won a battle in the field.

Conquest needs to be slowed down, your idea would just help it happen faster.

Lords who are defeated in battles should take much longer to come back with a party. So defeating an army should more or less guarantee you aren't going to see another large army for a while.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

I know that conquest is too fast, but there has to be an alternative to "siege out every 400 man garrison on the map 3 times over". Sieges weren't fun in warband and they aren't fun here. Theyre just boring meatgrinders where the player gets killed if they participate too much. Maybe a limit to how big garrisons can be or something, I don't fully know.

I think that if a kingdom decisively loses a big field battle or two, they should either sue for peace with some temporary concession like vassalage or tribute or even territory. In warband and especially in bannerlord, defeating big armies just feels like triggering a cooldown for when the enemy army is going to respawn. I mean if the player was in charge of all those lords and they lost a massive battle, with the time it takes to replenish you would probably want peace ASAP even if it meant losing a castle or two, because the alternative would be losing everything in a grindy war of attrition. Big field battles between groups of lords should be diplomacy-defining events where you feel like you have to win at all costs, not "ahh another enemy army for me to fight the exact same way I did the last 10 times i fought them".

 

[federally]

I think the problem you've identified is due to the way territory often changes hands back and forth, over and over. Or it trades between multiple settlements.

So a successful siege doesn't get you much. Because your new castle/city starts off with 50 defenders and every ai party on the map knows this immediately and begins to move to come take it.

So I just think the problem here is so much more significant, and shows how really empty this game is inside.

There really needs to be a cycle of war and peace, conquest and consolidation. However there is literally nothing for the player to do during peace time, so peace is boring. As well the game economy is really divorced from reality, because it's more profitable to be at war than it is to be at peace

So the game needs moments of peace, to add weight and significance to the results of wars, however there are zero systems that exist that make peace interesting at all.