The Ballista: A Tale of Struggles

[onos_devour]

Okay, so for a long time I've wanted to have a simple ballista to add some nice defense weapons to a wall that people can mess around with. Why a ballista? They have a small footprint and are easy enough to build or have set up to mount to a castle, and much easier to aim than mangonels & springalds. I've studied the workshop ones and there are some okay ones but they are often gigantic and are set up more for sieging than defense - but in my opinion that has more to do with how much room they take up than anything, and if used defensely, a springald would be better in ME simply do to being able to have like 3 of them lined up instead of 1 ballista... but I digress.

So I was trying to build a compact defense ballista, and I've run into the same problems time and time again, and I'm actually surprised a lot of these problems haven't been adressed.. so I'm sharing some of what happens while building (that have actually been posted before, like even near this game's release) so that maybe some of these are changed for the better without wrecking too much of what has been created by people.

Issue 1: Lining things up.
There are 3 common ones and I'm pretty sure the last is just never going to be "fixed" but I thought I'd mention it anyways. 1) Catch Blocks. These are frustrating. They are a 2x2 that has a "middle" offset. This makes a lot of designs have to be shifted 1 block, or sometimes a half-block which is awkward enough to never want things to come to that. Of course planning ahead helps, but sometimes these blocks are a nightmare. It's also not entirely clear when something is causing them to not rotate, which can be frustrating. Also (not so much a symmetry problem) they are ridiculously good for building vertical springalds - but I feel like it's more of an exploit than intended. Because they're so inexpensive materials wise, they are probably the best option for a high-damage mangonel-like device... which brings me to 2) Torsion bars. These also have an offset kinda thing that happens with them I think? I don't know, I rarely use them anymore. They're actually not that bad. HOWEVER, this ties into the main topic of ballista in the fact that using torsion bar & glitched catch blocks in a dual-arm design like a ballista can cause the charging bolt to just go insane. This makes designs like a ballista almost impossible to make stable enough to want to share - and even if you get a design working.. sometimes you'll load the blueprint and try to re-place a charging bolt and it will take a half-hour to get it to work again. That heavily favors line symmetry designs like mangonels, springalds, and trebuchets; but it's sad that ballista designs are pretty much trash in comparison due to not being able to charge them or requiring extremely complex designs that either take up a lot of space or don't feel "medieval". 3) Small blocks sometimes. Wanting to only connect the 1x1 on the end of a block to the 1x1 on the end of a placed block requires you to place 2 temporary blocks, and it's just annoying. This probably wont be fixed.. ever.. but it's annoying. One other thing worth mentionning is the Rope Eye Plate. Their rotation is based on camera angle which makes sense but is reallllly anoying when facing certain angles causes it to never want to rotate into a place that you want for symmetry's sake. I've fussed more with these blocks than any other block.. but I'm used to it now and I just move a bit to the right/left.

I'm going to provide an image soon of a simple ballista so you can what I was going for, and hopefully the pictures are enough, but I'll explain them as best I can to show how the point above relate to some of it. Note that I'm not expecting anything, this is more to document the struggles of trying to create something. I'm sure a lot of people are going to ♥♥♥♥♥ at me for not wanting to cooperate with these blocks or that I'm doing this or that wrong, but I'm just simply trying to make a thing that has more issues than it should imo. To be honest, I'm at a point where I am almost 100% sure that a mannable model of a ballista would be better suited than a built item, but there isn't one on the workshop yet (speaking of which, I'd be willing to make and animate it if anyone wants to program it).

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1345077835
This is it on the stand that I used as a test - which basically held the catch blocks from rotating on me too early. They still managed to rotate because of that half-block offset. Not a big deal though, because it was still locked to a point where it couldn't rotate too far passed that unless it actually glitched completely 90 degrees. You can see at this point, I'm trying to use the locked double-catch block glitch on each arm of the ballista. This was already kinda setting myself up for failure, but one of the more successful ballistas on the workshop uses this style, and from testing it's actually quite powerful and the double-locked catch blocks are one of the most powerful designs aside from trebuchets and torsion-series ones.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1345077867
This is it off the stand. You can see in this picture that the catch block I used for the right/left movement gives it a weird offset. Not a big problem, but it's assymetry isn't really desired either.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1345077908
In this shot I just turned it to the right to show how easy it is to move. This is actually good, right/left is often not a problem in medieval engineers. A lifting jack small block would be pretty cool for vertical aiming though.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1345077975
And this is an above shot. Nothing complicated.. I tried to make it as simple as possible actually, and it just wouldn't cooperate. I actually didn't want it to even be this wide or long, but the original design I had in mind wasn't working and I kept widening it to see if it was just the amount of leverage required that was the stopping factor. It wasn't. I'm fairly sure it was just the catch blocks that didn't want to cooperate by being broken - and that's fair, but using torsion bars simply isn't powerful enough and has just as many problems (for example, pulling back the charging bolt just causes it to vibrate and stop being pulled back, I'm sure a lot of people run into this problem on multi-arm weapons like ballista). I had also tried multiple times to set up essentially a rail system, but the vibration bug while pulling back just causes so much friction that the charging bolt doesn't even move. Not sure what the best way to deal with that is, and I could probably look to designs on the workshop, but from what I remember those were all pretty weak anyways, and I was just in the mood to do something new.

So yeah, the ballista. Fun times.

Edit1 / 2:
An update: I did end up making the above ballista into a working weapon, but it has issues still:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1346101519

This version could send a 7-long timber with a small ball projectile on it to the castle keep in the distance, but it probably wouldn't have been able to make it that far without being on top of a wall (however, it was intended to be used from a wall). For reference, the shots would hit in and around the main entrance.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=134610♥♥♥♥

...and a shot for the scale showing how ridiculously large it is. A nice size would probably only be 1 or 1.5 blocks long, but that kind of machine is impossible to build (at least in my opinion, with small blocks) with enough power to be useful.

1) Taking it off of the stand (which puts it into that dynamic mode) cause it to flip and then disintegrate when you cranked it. Tying it down solved this, but still... flipping and disintegrating is pretty ridiculous. I know this is a known bug but still.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1346101547

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1346101614

2) Sometimes the "death wobble" would occur where the charging bolt just wouldn't settle. It was especially bad on ground terrain, where the entire machine wouldn't settle which made firing it all but imposible.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1346101651

3) When it did work, the range was garbage. It shoots about 1/3 of the range of the 'official' trebuchet blueprint that comes with the game, with a small projectile (and it's not hard to make that standard trebuchet into a real beast). However, a trebuchet is consistent and I can't say the same for this machine.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1346101923
I didn't actually mark the location of the stone ball, but I have photos that show it landed 75% of the way to the keep. There is a marker half-way there and that was a marker for a piece of metal connected to a 7-long long timber that was shot. The stone column on the far left shows the trebuchet range.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1346101691
This was the ball launcher version. I basically just retrofit it. I used a large ball so the trebuchet test and this were using the same projectile. Don't get me wrong, I understand that trebuchets are an elite siege weapon... but torsion bars are even worse than breaking the game with double-locked catch blocks design, and are take up more space. Speaking of which I created a torsion bar version to test that as well.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1346101833
It was really finicky though and I didn't get a great shot off. Looking at the design after the fact, I realized I probably could've put timbers ramping downwards to align with the projectile slide better.

4) It takes up the same footprint as the trebuchet. This is the part that really bugs me, I feel like it should be 1/3 of the size and have probably 200% range than what is possible with blocks alone. It's a bit hard to get a scale from the images above, so I might provide new images to show that, but this thing is stupid large for how weak it is.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1346101882

5) I refitted it with torsion bars to see how those compared, and they are MUCH weaker.. perhaps 1/10th of the range of a trebuchet, if that. (Shown above)

I have screenshot documentation of the above, I may provide that soon.

[onos_devour]

^ Just saying, the game is called medieval engineers, and the ballista is a nice historical defense piece for a castle around that time (I guess technically I would be wanting a siege crossbow). Any attempts to create one with a small enough footprint to be placed on a castle end up being pretty weak. I'm trying to see what other people think. In my opinion, I think there should just be a siege crossbow object, because it's pretty much impossible to get any sort of performance and consistency out of the small blocks (at least, with a small enough footprint to mount it on a small section of wall).

[Baldr]

Walls are too strong really, even my trebuchets fail to get through walls past crossbow range

[onos_devour]

Then you have a bad trebuchet.. trebs can get really powerful because they're powered by gravity acting on mass (weight). I don't actually expect a ballista to do much damage to a wall, but their reliability right now compared to even mangonels and catapults is ridiculous. I had ended up actually creating a model for a small one that could be mounted on walls or potentially on large siege carts here:
https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/discussions/18446744073709551615/1697169163415732884/?appid=333950

but I need a modder

Edit: To be fair though I havent booted this game in a while, not sure what the state of "clang" is right now