How do I Siege?

[mb3]

I've had an army sitting on a castle for 500 days and all it says is 5 more days to siege progress and nothing happens. Do I not have enough troops to progress? Where does it say or show that? Because I've looked all over the siege window and I see nothing that shows why, how or what I need to progress the siege.

[mb3]

NM, I had to go off line to find the answer.

This stupid game notifies me every time my neighbor trips on a pebble or if I fart too loud... You think it would give you a flag or something to let you know your siege isn't doing anything at all.

[bri]

There is a flag on the unit, looks like an exclamation point. Also if you look at the siege in the outliner the same applies.

[grognardgary]

General rule of thumb if you don't have more troops out side than they do inside your siege will be ineffective.

[Malvastor]

Originally posted by mb3:

NM, I had to go off line to find the answer.

This stupid game notifies me every time my neighbor trips on a pebble or if I fart too loud... You think it would give you a flag or something to let you know your siege isn't doing anything at all.

It does, in two separate places.

Originally posted by grognardgary:

General rule of thumb if you don't have more troops out side than they do inside your siege will be ineffective.

Specifically, 3000 besiegers per 1000 garrison. And at minimum one extra regiment for the inevitable losses from attrition.

[Alice]

Sieges are the worst design choice in this game. Waiting for Eu5 so it can have the more convenient CK3 sieging

Nothing ruined video games more than Luck

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

Originally posted by Alice:

Sieges are the worst design choice in this game. Waiting for Eu5 so it can have the more convenient CK3 sieging

Nothing ruined video games more than Luck

You're going to be sorely disappointed, then. EU5 is already confirmed to have siege mechanics virtually identical to EU4, except that:

1. There will be no more "click this button to instantly create a wall breach" mechanic to speed things up
2. Assaulting a fort will be much less effective, as it eats through your army's Morale much more rapidly than it does currently
3. You will now furthermore have to manage trucking food to your sieging army, else when they run out of food you will be forced to either abandon the siege or watch your entire army evaporate to starvation and desertion.

Johan has directly stated, in no uncertain terms, that he wants the sieges to be entirely RNG-based, both to "simulate the mindgames" involved in an actual siege and to make it possible for the besieger to actually fail the siege altogether. In regards to the siege systems of other Paradox games, the head of development had this to say:

"tbh. the one in ck sucked. it was the same in v2. it just makes it guaranteed to win, and is just a progress bar ticking, which is purely unrealistic.

yes, i designed the ones in ck1/2 and vicky1/2."

[grognardgary]

Sieges during the early days of the period in question failed as often as not. Constantinople was besieged a total of 22 times only four of those were successful

[Marquoz]

Originally posted by Totally Innocent Chatbot:

Originally posted by Alice:

Sieges are the worst design choice in this game. Waiting for Eu5 so it can have the more convenient CK3 sieging

Nothing ruined video games more than Luck

You're going to be sorely disappointed, then. EU5 is already confirmed to have siege mechanics virtually identical to EU4, except that...

Lol, yeah. You'd better stick with EU4, Alice. EU5 will be much worse in the ways you hate.

[Mason]

It's possible forts will be more meaningful/less common.

[grognardgary]

Originally posted by Mason:

It's possible forts will be more meaningful/less common.

But not likely at least in Europe where every jackinapes with a noble title and some gold promptly built himself a keep and expanded on that as money became available. And a free city that wished to stay that way did likewise.

[Malvastor]

Originally posted by grognardgary:

Originally posted by Mason:

It's possible forts will be more meaningful/less common.

But not likely at least in Europe where every jackinapes with a noble title and some gold promptly built himself a keep and expanded on that as money became available. And a free city that wished to stay that way did likewise.

Yeah, EU4 diverges from reality in a lot of ways, but it's definitely not for having too many forts.

Wikipedia has a list of cities with defensive walls[en.wikipedia.org] (which probably doesn't include all the non-city castles and fortresses out there). By my count the number just for France is over 320. If even 10% of those were reflected in the game by default, it would be a tremendous slog.

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-23-31st-of-july.1697510/?prdxDevPosts=1

^Source for the above btw, in case anybody thought I'm just making stuff up here. Already filtered to show only developer responses in the comments as well - there's as much information contained there as there is in the actual Dev Diary itself more often than not.