Sieges rant (+bug report)

[Lt. Vadim]

*Beta 1.3.0.*

I hope its not a secret that the lategame is all about sieges. And so far it's one of the most bugged part of the game. Here are some things that really grinds my gears:
- Plz finally fix AI pathfinding for Towers! Is it that hard? I am so tired loosing my elite troops to a bunch of peasants just because my mega-troops slowly climb 1-by-1 and get killed instantly with 5-7 shots from defenders.
- Rams always either got destroyed in very first moments of battle, or survive till the gates. Seems completely random.
- Btw, if Rams are destroyable, why can't I have more then 1? Rams are far better than bugged Towers! If Ram got destroyed, siege goes to the twighlight zone of pure luck.
- Can we stop AI making decision to switch breaching path? For one, they LOVE to leave their commander figting with the enemy 1-on-100, just because reasons... And for two, they get shot while runing from one tower to another.
- It's also annoying the archers on the wall can make Dark Soul moves, right as the arrow fly towards their head. But when the similar things happents with the guy behinf ballista... Do you know it has weight, and cannot make a 120-degree turn in 1 second?
- Why some castles have the wooden shooting spots near the wall, and other have them only miles away from the wall?
- My vassals barely even siege anything on their own. And after the last patch it takes millions of goldcoins to vassilize a new clan.
- Why Elite troops are the first ones for permadeath? I had a autoresolve with 4 Fians/Cross-Sergants/Marksmen/PalGuards lost to a stack of 5 Forest bandits!
- *Bug* During one of my sieges, the Ram got destroyed in seconds, so I ragequit to load. But I didn't save for a good 1 hour, so I loaded Autosave and started a battle again (first battle was considered as a retreat). Surprisingly, instead of a wall, I ended up in a Lords Hall, on the horse (!), and with HUNDEREDS people inside, who immedeately started slicing each other. After good 15 minutes of slideshow, I ended up almost winning (with many of my Ranged units slaughtered as they were not created for such scenario), but 2 enemy units got stuck in textures, so I Retreated to finish up in autoresolve. I remember similar thing was in Warbands, but here it was totally a bug.

So with sieges my best bet is to build Ram and 2 Towers, hope for the Ram to survive, play Legolas shooting down Archers, then go to the gates. If Ram gets destroyed, losses becomes doubled/trippled. Also some tips: (a) before the siege you can overview the battlefield to find nice spot for shooting with a stash of unlimited arrows around, (b) on the left from the tower there is a nice spot to shoot defenders, stepping on the tower, (c) you can shoot your own archer to loot his stack of arrows.

Btw, what is your strategy/tactics for making sieges easier/quicker?

P.S. Plz also fix the problem of unavoidably having "-100" relations with absolutely everybody, even your vassals.

[Kord]

Hi. One thing to help with sieges is to pause and place each siege engine in reserve as soon as they complete, before launching the siege. Placing them in reserve prevents the castle's weaponry from damaging them while you are waiting for the others to finish.

I usually do not launch my attack until I have a Ram and Tower in reserve.

Also - currently I would avoid auto-calculating battles because the current system for it seems to be broken. Currently, it seems to compare your army strength vs enemy strength and calculate how many of your things would die based on that strength inflicted on you. 5 looters strength is still enough to cause casualties against your army, but when you manually fight those looters, the damage is spread out to at least that number of your troops (assuming they even reach melee).

[Lt. Vadim]

Yeah, the "move to reserve" trick is nice, but it takes tooooo looonng to siege 1 castle with that...

Ram and Towers cannot be damaged on the worldmap, only during the battle.

With auto-resolve, they specifically said they fixed losses during overwhelming number advantages. Still losing elite teoops to 5-10 packs of bandits! Also, recently had a hideout with 100+ men inside! 4 stacks of 10-15, and one of 69!! Gool luck storming that with 10 people!

[Hidden Gunman]

Recruit peasants; launch charge; skulk behind cover; hopefully win.

Red army taktik is good, comrades...

[Cryten]

At least with regards to the ram and towers you still need to destroy their war engines first to stop them damaging them in the siege. But the most reliable way to siege is to destroy a wall or both.

[Rigsie]

I have won precisely two seiges, but I hope they get more challenging, as my routine for pretty much everyhing combat related is as follows.

1. Recruit Khuzait nomads.
2. Hunt outlaws of various types until nomads advance to mounted heavy archers.
3. Goad people into fights, order my archers to follow me, and circle the enemy till they DIE DIE DIE.

How does this work for sieges you might ask? If you wait there long enough,eventually someone attacks you, and if the garrison is sizable, they sally forth to help the attackers.

And DIE DIE DIE.

You don't need much in the way of siege engines if there are only 4 defenders left after them sallying forth to get their rear ends handed to them.

I mean that is all I have done. Admittedly, this is the early game.

[Juff]

Try the mod BetterArmor. If you have high level troops I can almost safely bet that a heck of a lot more of them will make it to the good part. If the relationship thing gets too bad you can always fix it with a developer console.. I'll admit that I have done it, especially when trying to get my bride to be to like me.

Unfortunately the patch notes where they said the troops on towers would wait until a certain number were present to lower the gate seems to not have been implemented in 1.3. They also said the tower ladders were fixed and that skill perks were simply "fixed" but I still can't use my Noble longbow on horseback despite having BOTH perks.
I just hope they really iron out the sieges because they are all important. But in the meantime I've been having a blast.