What happened to sieges?

[Combat Blues]

Back in TW:WII, most tier 3 settlement garrisons were able to hold back an enemy army or even two by themselves if you played your cards right. Now the minor settelements seem to have no walls and rely on towers with long build time, low damage and low attack range?

I mean... I know I'm not exactly a tactical genius, I'm a rather casual player, but since the settelements are now circular maps with no walls and very poorly prepared garrisons (no artillery and not even a lord) how am I supossed to stop any enemy army? I can only built two towers (or one barricade and one tower) with the starting defense budget and then when the supplies keep raising, it takes 90 seconds to build another tower. In 90 seconds I will have the enemy elite troops performing a rectal examination on my settlement lol.

How are you guys dealing with this?

I also noticed that when I'm the attacker, my troops keep losing their targets every time the enemy moves around a bit and gets out of sight for 0,1 seconds or walk past a barricade. My troops will just lose their order and stay there like sitting ducks without chasing the enemy I told them to attack.

Is there like... any mods or something I can use to make this situation more bearable? Right now I'm just auto resolving every settlement battle because it just feels way worse than it was on TW:WII.

[Testikles]

Sieges are...not the strong point of the game, that is a fact. However, it's not hopeless. There are mods to bring back walls to low tier settlements and mods to increase garrision sizes.

However, I would advice against this. The garrision mods are often overtuned and will mess up balance, letting you face off / wield high tier units in garrisions although you or the AI is only in tier 1-2 territory. Bringing back walls sounds like a nice idea - unless you realize that the majority of battles in this game are now settlement battles, and that they get old VERY quick with the walls coming back.

Still, don't despair, as there is a much simpler solution here. If you look closely you will notice that supply lines have been nerfed into oblivion compared to WH II, so it is really not a big deal to create another army. So, if you are in need of defending, create an army and use it as a custom mobile defense force backed up by garrision units. Bonus: It can gain XP and is fully customizable to your needs. Very simple actually :)

[Combat Blues]

Not really a big fan of "expendable" armies than I will recruit, use and then dissmiss but I would lie if I say I didn't resorted to them sometimes.

I'm not a hardcore player, I mostly play normal difficulty and I sometimes even set it to easy if I want a chill campaing I can just play on the background when talking with friends on Discord. I don't expect to get good, I just like trying different factions and painting the map of my color.

Back on TW:WII it was rather easy to ensure the conquered area by building walls. I knew a province was truly mine when I had walls on each settlement. Now it's kind of frustrating to see how easy it is for the AI to just casually walk into my territory and take two or more settlements before my armies can react. Since there are no walls, they don't even need to take one or two turns to build siege towers.

I'm seriously considering going back to TW:WII but I don't really want to play the older game because I will miss the new factions and units they adden on TW:WIII. I might try one of the walls and better garrisons mods. I honestly don't mind the sieges being a bit hard when I'm attacking and I desperately need the defensive battles to be more bearable.

Also, I noticed that, at least with Dark Elves (my main faction) the local recruitment capacity is lower than the former game. So it's now even harder for me to recruit a provisional army to desperately deffend a settlement.

The AI, as usual, keeps paying itself with monopoly notes and can afford to own three full stack armies even if they only own one more city, so I don't really feel bad for cheating a bit, since the AI is going to do the same on me.


EDIT: Also, about the units losing their targets during sieges... is there anything I could do about it? Any settings I should have changed on the main menut to make units move to the last known position of their foes or any mods able to do that?

[Darklight]

I don't miss the old settlement battles that much. Enemies would take their time climbing the walls, often attacking you not all at once. The strongest thing about them wasn't the fact they had walls, it was their layout.

Where as in 3 they don't have that issue and you often have to defend from multiple angles. The defence supplies can be pretty influential but you have to spend them very wisely. Investing in some unit buffs is usually my go-to. Followed by saving for a AoE tower.

If you want more ease you can install a mod that increases your supply budget, I'm sure there are plenty that have been made by now. With that you can setup your own defences, your own makeshift walls of sorts. Going to make it a lot easier though.

There maybe mods that change the settlement layouts to be more like the old ones, not sure. As suggested above there are also mods that add back settlement walls.

[Testikles]

There are means to increase your recruitment cap and there are defensive buildings you can construct to give you walls. Defensive armies also don't need to be dismissed - they can still go to defend somewhere else or be refitted to take a more offensive role. As Delves you even have access to black arcs which play a vital role in recruitment and defense.

Of course, if you only start recruiting when it is too late then you won't stand much of a chance. But usually you can tell where the threats will be comming from and prepare accordingly.

[Enelith]

You missed the original settlements. It was better imo. While there were a lot of settlements battles (bcs the map got cramped, the distance between cities got smaller, and armies just could reach one city in one turn, removing the possibility to meet another army in field battle), it actually was a siege battle (not perfect, but better imo...).

Now, it became too easy also because towers were "too deadly" according to most complains.

[MadArtillery]

I'd honestly recommend forgetting the towers and just using the barricades and more importantly traps. I've seen the ai break with regiments of infantry just standing getting shot by a t2 tower, then I upgraded it to t3, then 4 and none of the tower levels dealt any damage to the afk squad because it missed horribly every single bloody time, on packed infantry!!!!!

Traps atleast have a pretty big area of penalty and since you can climb over your own barricades it can be pretty easy to sandwhich the ai on a trap from both sides. Of course this depends a lot on settlement design. Ogre's seem to have the most bearable settlement designs which is odd. Long walks for the invader, actually well placed barricade points.

Defense budgets are 100% way to pathetically low to start, I do not understand their decision. Really forces you to sacrifice points as you'll never ever have the points for defense stuff to actually defend even if you split up.

[j.yellow28]

its becouse people complaind about the amount of seages couse you could have walls on every settlment and it made fighting so many siege which players didnt like. So they just nuked em. I for one Loved the new sieges couse now it added atleast some flaor from 2 when all sieges in citys were the same layout just diffrent art, i just didnt like the towers and defences u can build wile ur fightiong, If they just removed the defences u can build wile fighting and just left em to only during the prep phase it would of prob been better, Then just tweak AI a bunch to make em better in sieges tho no AI in any total war siege was good

[bearfieldlee]

Originally posted by Enelith:

You missed the original settlements. It was better imo. While there were a lot of settlements battles (bcs the map got cramped, the distance between cities got smaller, and armies just could reach one city in one turn, removing the possibility to meet another army in field battle), it actually was a siege battle (not perfect, but better imo...).

Now, it became too easy also because towers were "too deadly" according to most complains.

Yeah, what's this thing with towers? I use a mod that returns the walls and everything and towers are hopeless.

[Combat Blues]

Originally posted by Enelith:

You missed the original settlements. It was better imo. While there were a lot of settlements battles (bcs the map got cramped, the distance between cities got smaller, and armies just could reach one city in one turn, removing the possibility to meet another army in field battle), it actually was a siege battle (not perfect, but better imo...).

Now, it became too easy also because towers were "too deadly" according to most complains.

That's something I noticed too. More settlements in the same map. So it means there are less oportunitied to fight in open field.

Unlike most people I talked to, I have no strong preference over fighting on open field instead of a fortress. Still, it's true that most battles are settlement battles now.

It doesn't help the fact that I think siege machinery is slower to build now. Or so it seems at least. It takes me 4-5 turns to build 4 sets of siege towers plus ram, and I think that was like... two turns with a full stack army on the former game. Now, by the time my siege towers are ready to go, the enemies is half-starved.

[sirkudjon]

Sieges suck since day one. What will happen when some ladders are placed onto the walls and the gates are breach? Which route will your units take? Through the wall or through the gate. Of course they will take climb the wall even if they are standing righ next to gate.
I wish there was a mod that will remove ladders entirely or made them buildable in campaign map like battering ram or towers. Hell even return of the underway from Med2. Something other than this moronic ladders out of the ass!

[j.yellow28]

Originally posted by bearfieldlee:

Originally posted by Enelith:

You missed the original settlements. It was better imo. While there were a lot of settlements battles (bcs the map got cramped, the distance between cities got smaller, and armies just could reach one city in one turn, removing the possibility to meet another army in field battle), it actually was a siege battle (not perfect, but better imo...).

Now, it became too easy also because towers were "too deadly" according to most complains.

Yeah, what's this thing with towers? I use a mod that returns the walls and everything and towers are hopeless.

some faction towers were op such as Chaos towers and skaven towers and there were a few more that the lvl 1 towers projetiles wernt just arrows and they were equally as good as the explosive tower

[FlameWar]

Originally posted by Combat Blues:

It doesn't help the fact that I think siege machinery is slower to build now. Or so it seems at least. It takes me 4-5 turns to build 4 sets of siege towers plus ram, and I think that was like... two turns with a full stack army on the former game. Now, by the time my siege towers are ready to go, the enemies is half-starved.

No, it is the other way around. in TWW2 it took most armies 2 turns to build one set of towers, and 3 turns for 2 sets. Now the majority of amries you can build with the majority of factions can build towers in 1 round.
Though it is also of note that you really don't need mroe than 2 sets of towers at most IMO. Rams are still basically useless, as a squad of infantry will only take 15-20% longer to bash in a gate with their weapons when you factor in that the ram takes much logner to get to the gate.

[Mr.Hmm]

People happened.

They didnt like Sieges so CA overdid it and now Sieges are destroyed. CA was dumb for listening to these whiners.

[dulany67]

Originally posted by Mr.Hmm:

People happened.

They didnt like Sieges so CA overdid it and now Sieges are destroyed. CA was dumb for listening to these whiners.

Yeah, all those people asking for tower defense...

[Lamp]

Originally posted by Mr.Hmm:

People happened.

They didnt like Sieges so CA overdid it and now Sieges are destroyed. CA was dumb for listening to these whiners.

WH1 sieges were terrible. And you're saying that pointing that out made them worse. Go be wrong somewhere irl please, you need it.

Yeah Combat Blues they went overboard trying to make sieges... something in WH3. All we needed were sieges like in 3k and instead they made them into a clownish minigame. Then when people were like "hey sieges are still awful," CA removed walls from minor settlements- it's not the fans with criticism that make braindead, disconnected decisions like that, it's CA.

Then there's the AI. Been waiting for a long time for them to do/say anything about the state of the AI, (currently useless,) and they just keep dropping DLC's with as many repainted units as they can cram in.