Sieges in MTW2 - Better than RTW?

**swordsman** · February 11, 2006, 11:25 PM

in rome total war when your city was under assault, all u had to do was set up a really good defence in the center of the city, and let the towers on your walls do all the killing. i hope in M2TW u have to defence your walls or else the enemy would start sacking your biuldings and killing your ppl, so theres accual consiquences to not defending your walls. it would be a whole lot more realistic, also if your troops could, go in biuldings in a city, killing the ppl inside. Then even if they didnt take the city at least some buildings, and hav killed some civilions.

**Sarge_Scot** · February 12, 2006, 01:53 AM

Totally agreed. I think they'll revise sieges a lot in MTW2, mostly because sieges will be a major focus of the gameplay, since the Medieval Era saw the most sieges or any previous time period.

**Drunken** · February 12, 2006, 03:46 AM

Yea IMO seiges, mainly defending, were quite boring compared to field battles. All you need to do when defending is sit in the streets and fight the enemy one at a time.

Unfortunately the AI didnt do this, meaning when attacking in a seige it was quite easy, just time consuming.

**Ewan** · February 12, 2006, 07:02 AM

I found seiges in R:TW to be repetative and after a while very dull. i think battles should perhaps have a unit limit ( for example it is ill likly that say 2 units could fully go round a complete epic city and keep supplys out)

**John I Tzimisces** · February 12, 2006, 09:32 AM

Anyone else remember not seeing any units on walls in the MTW2 screenshots that have been released? I'd LOVE to see that kind of change, it makes battle so much more straightforward if "all" you have to do is force open the gates or knock a wall down, of course bearing in mind towers will have cannons by the late game...

**Ewan** · February 12, 2006, 02:33 PM

i think keeping guys on wall were fine. it just needs to be tweeked and fixed a little

**Peter** · February 12, 2006, 03:08 PM

More important locations to defend would be cool. Like if you loose more and more terrain the enemys morale would be much greater. And if you loose a sector your mens morale would be lower and some people would turn against you, thinking you would loose the battle

**Ewan** · February 12, 2006, 03:44 PM

the idear of forts in R:tw was a gd idear but i found them useless , they were just a place to get cornerd into. i think if forts were redone to be a beter place to defend form then they could be another place to defend apart from your citys

**General4Hire** · February 13, 2006, 12:29 AM

Originally Posted by Sarge_Scot

Totally agreed. I think they'll revise sieges a lot in MTW2, mostly because sieges will be a major focus of the gameplay, since the Medieval Era saw the most sieges or any previous time period.

This I knew...however, I'd be curious to hear you describe WHY you think this was the case...better castles and seige walls...more a of a logical reason to fight the enemy from behind them than out in the fields/woods?

**Universe Man** · February 13, 2006, 01:55 AM

Sieges were repetitive and boring over time. you just had to take the walls and kill the what's left of the enemy(who rarely stayed together).
plus when you told units to go somewhre(especially in the center of the city and breached walls) they'd make it harder on themselves and go forward and then run back in formation.
They wouldn't go right where they're supposed to go, they'd take the "longer way"

**Ringeck** · February 13, 2006, 04:58 AM

I suggest a hefty morale loss to all defending units if the enemy makes it over/through the walls with more than a certain number of units (which should be random, to discourage exploitation), or defense points such as suggested by Peter. Add the automatic pillaging of the city, with the economic effects this entails, if the enemy takes a certain number of defensive points or makes it past the walls. That should ensure a defending commander tries to defend the city if he's got the men to do it.

If he has too few, well, it's time to retreat to the keep and let the city burn.

**Giurza** · February 13, 2006, 07:59 AM

I would say that building forts was a very good idea, but they messed up with it in RTW, 'cos as it was said, you were just cornered there.
what I would like to propose is to build a wooden fort at first and then there should be given a possibility to upgrade it to a full time castle (only castle without any other structures within, except of course barracks for the garrison). for those that would like to oppose this idea, I'd like to remind that in medieval times it was a 'must do' to saturate country with small strongholds (varying all from wooden forts to quite large castles). besides it should affect the spawn of rebels in the province much more than it was done in RTW
for example:
[IMG]

[/IMG]
this is not a city... even not the town... this is just a stronghold... and the ending result could be a generic castle as shown here:
[IMG]

[/IMG]

**Zarekk** · February 13, 2006, 07:26 PM

I also found the seige repetative. Of course it all comes down to a better, meaner and smarter AI.

**Shigawire** · February 14, 2006, 01:43 PM

Having studied the nature of ancient siege warfare, as one of my duties in EB, I have to say that our capabilities are unfortunately lightyears away from a realistic representation of sieges. There is so much more to do in respect to this.

I was glad to see that we will be able to have multiple walls in M2TW, as Qart-Hadast, Thapsus and many other cities, had 3 walls.
I am also glad to see that the collapse of the wall will be more open-ended now. While in previous games, up to RTW, the walls would fall in predetermined sections.

But I think CA shoots themselves in the leg with their fixation on artillery. There was a lot more to assaulting cities than artillery. What mattered back then was the very concept and procedure of an assault. You could have all the artillery in the world, but if you only attacked a city with artillery, you would almost certainly lose. In the classical assault on a city wall, the secret of success developed first by the Assyrians, lay in the combining all siege methods, as well as having an adequate amount of covering fire. Dionysios' had the invention of the first catapult (katapeltai - shieldpiercer) precisely for this purpose! It had more range, and a battery of them could provide covering fire to a PRECISE area of the wall, with power, allowing corps of engineers to perform their operations in relative safety. Slingers were also instrumentally useful for this purpose. Covering fire is NOT handled by the RTW engine, since soldiers on the wall do not have a "supressed" state.

More importantly, the investment of a city is very limited and requires little effort or consequences, while in reality an investment was a very expensive, ardous, and potentially disastrous operation. Athens' siege of Syracuse in the Peloponnesian war took one year. In order to maintain the investment of this powerful city, it has been estimated by historians, archaeologists by studying numismatic evidence, that the siege cost approximately 75% of Athens' annual budget. Maintaining an investment of a city was not cheap. Also, Athens had attempted to build a stone-wall - "periteichismos" (envelopment) around the city, more properly called "aperiteichismos" since it was a sealocked city. The Syracusan defenders built counter-walls to intercept the Athenian walls as seen by the red line where it says "syracusan palisade" in the following image. The purple line is the Athenian wall:

At phase two of the siege, the Athenians attempted to construct walls northwards from the circular fortress. This also failed, since the Syracusans intercepted this wall also. The Syracusans had recently captured the fortress of Labdalum, and now they were building the counterwall all the way to the highly strategic Labdalum - closing the Athenians off from the northern area of Epipolai, and giving Syracusans access to the main road. This was the defining moment in the defense of Syracuse.

There are so many intricacies which could be included to reflect realistic siege warfare better.
At present, way too much emphasis is placed on artillery. Artillery had a quite negligible effect actually, depending on the wall's thickness.
They generally took a lot of time to work. The strongest benefit of using artillery the way you could keep your men safely out of trouble whilst dismantling the walls from a distance. In RTW, the artillery is far too powerful. Undermining should preferrably be handled on a turnbased basis instead of realtime moleman-digging. The defenders should have ways to counter-mine. I don't know how, but it ought to be looked at nonetheless.
Siege-towers should only be able to move forwards and backwards, since the attackers used 2 weeks to prepare the terrain into a runway for the siege-tower.

Logistics and supply would also add a huge dimension. This would allow the siege warfare to become more interesting, as you would have to take a more active role in holding strategic positions, like harbours..

Also the construction of the wall should be customizable on castles and indeed for the besieger's "periteichismos". One should be able to select a path for the stonewall, add traps and whatnot, and end the turn. You could use the "lily" traps that Caesar had at the siege of Alesia for example.

Suffice to say, the more you read about siege warfare, the more you get frustrated over the things that are missing.

**Obi Wan Asterix** · February 15, 2006, 09:41 AM

Nice post Shigawire!

I really hope that the fantastic aspects of medieval sieges will be elaborated in the game.

**Mathias** · February 15, 2006, 11:13 AM

I hope they manage to make more realistic sieges which are more challanging and much, much more realistik(well not totally, I don`t want to spend hours finishing one siege) and where you have to use real tactics instead of just finding easy ways to exploit the stupid AI(like the you had to do in RTW sieges).

I agree with Shigawire that artillery is very overpowered in RTW, but it must be a bit stronger than in reality because I dont want to spend days waiting for my trebuchet to destroy one tower, that would be quite boring

**The White Knight** · February 15, 2006, 11:17 AM

@Shigawire: What an impressive post! I had no idea about that all!

I wish you worked for CA.

But EB is going to add an advanced logistic system, is it not? Is it not? I'd better.....

:laughing:

**drak10687** · February 15, 2006, 12:00 PM

all factors of siege warfare cannot be included, but I think sieges would be more interesting and realistic (yet not too time consuming) if the defenders (with walls of course) would get a much bigger advantage (so that people climbing up a ladder dont just have to 'push through' to get onto the wall. This way reinforcements would play a much bigger role, and armies would have to significantly increase in size to be able to take a city and therefore sieging would be more costly. Also, dividing up the siege in several phases would be cool. so that you can abort your attack and regroup and continiue the next day, while your troops rest. Or decide to attack in nightime the next phase.