Castles and Siege; Revisited

[Risasi]

This is probably the most informative thread I've found on the subject (but it's old): http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=39031


I noticed in my single player campaign that the siege battles were somewhat Roman feeling, but I only hit a couple small towns with wooden walls. A battering ram opened the door pretty easily. Since these were small towns I fired up a custom battle and threw in the largest city I could with a stone wall.

I pitted my 1800 men, I think I had six missile teams; four yumi of varying kinds, one archer monk and one arquebusier unit, then one pike unit, one no-dachi unit and a couple horse units, general included.

Defending against a force of 2400 men. I thought I put together what was a reasonable mix of what should have been a decent assault team. A lot of upgraded Samurai, no less than four yumi teams, a slew of just random melee units that I thought would be good at assaulting the walls. I gave them one ram and two ladders. The results were surprising;


* Neither ladder unit got anywhere close to the walls. Maybe within 50 meters. My yumi and especially the arquebusiers just decimated their forces. Clearly the ram was more effective. And really I'd expected to burn down their ram and stop their ladder units cold.

* The ram made it to the gate with flying colors. I was hitting it with all sorts of flaming arrows but there was NO damage whatsoever to the ram. Frankly I was shocked. Am I missing something here? After my abject failure at burning the ram before it got to the gate I tried to rush my no-dachi unit out to kill off the stragglers to stop their busting down my door. They wouldn't go out. I guess that's not a big deal. The ram broke through my gate and my pike unit and nodachi unit and general easily repelled the small assault force they were able to bring. [EDIT: Nevermind, I see that I actually have to enable flame arrow. After I did that the ram didn't stand a chance...]

* I was half expecting a mountain fortress when I started this little test. Obviously it's flat, and I assume that is simply a limitation of the RTW engine? Or would it be possible to build custom maps with "tiers" and multiple walls? Likewise, I was expecting an inner castle courtyard to be the capture point to hold for a victory. Is that also just a limitation of the engine?

The end result of the battle. Yes, the ram breached my gate, ladder teams were worthless. I believe they lost nearly 2300 men, 700+ to the arquebusiers (that's scary!). They never came anywhere close to penetrating past the walls. Obviously it makes far more sense to starve out the defenders, but I was just curious what the limits are to this engine.

[leonn]

i think the simple fact is we cant do historically accurate sieges as they would have happened at the time.
the engine simply wont allow it, so whatever we do it'll be a fudge. cheers

[Risasi]

I understand.

I toyed with the battle editor this afternoon, thinking perhaps I could tweak a map with a walled city on it, using a combination of terrain height changes, some artifacts like cliffs. And perhaps change the ground height within the city walls. The first two can be done however it's a lot of work, I don't know if they could be saved as a custom battle map with a city already inserted, and trying to change ground height within the city is nigh impossible. And also no moats.

A bit disappointing, but what you have to work with I think you guys have done a fantastic job.

[BiggBudd]

Have rebalanced the towers and rams in next fix. You shouldn't lose as many men on the ladders now.

[Risasi]

I downloaded RNJ 2.0 a couple weeks ago. Work is finally letting off, so I hope to get in some play time. But the few custom battles I played just makes me think this mod is awesome. Especially with the RS2 Environments.

Anyway, the castle deal still bugs me. I took Shogun 2's castle battles as being de facto accurate, but now it doesn't seems it's a very fair protrayal. I ran across this; http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showth...-Castle-Sieges - while studying siege warfare in the Japanese culture. A couple things I've learned.

* I can find no information on the use of battering rams, because they weren't really used. Later as the Euros introduced them to gunpowder weapons they made use of cannon, but this was much later.

* I can't really find much in the way of actual siege battles against castles taking place on a regular basis. It would appear most siege campaigns merely turned into a waiting game of starving them out. In which case the defenders might eventually sally forth and attack the sieging army, or give up.


So this has got me pondering a few questions.

A: It makes me wonder how it would change the battle dynamic if battering rams were removed entirely from RNJ and only ladders are available? Likewise would it kill the fun factor? Any thoughts?

B: I still wonder if it wouldn't be possible to emulate these mountain castles by using the terrain and control of the walls, say drawing a few detached boxes of walls sitting on top of hills, as in the first example castle in my link above? I don't know enough about modeling in the TW engines. Anybody know? My thought was perhaps such a model could replace only the forts, and the mod being reduced to towns only having at most low walls.



Anyway, I think this mod lends itself to de-emphasizing siegecraft battles and forcing them to occur on open ground, or more commonly, raids on lightly defended towns. As that seems to be what happened in Japanese culture anyway. My two suggestions above likely make castles impenetrable fortresses, but it seems that they actually were. I don't know, any further thoughts?

[leonn]

ive been researching sieges with a mate of mine who lives in japan.i have some stuff to put up but im away for the weekend and have to leave in the next 15 minutes.
will sort it next week.cheers

[Risasi]

Impressive:

RSII Hill Fort

This was done by a fellow named Tone on the Roma Surrectum team, for version 2.5. What do you guys think?
This gives me hope that it might be possible to build a tiered Japanese castle some time.

[BiggBudd]

That would make RNJ awesome if we could make tiered castles, good find Risasi.
We are releasing 2.3 vsoon, and that should make attacking walls with the new cannons better.

[GRANTO]

i have messed around with this for my arthurian sub mod , the pathfinding was terribe in the rs 2.5 release and i was unable to improve it myself , but i believe it is better in the upcomming rs 2.6 release we will have to see , when i say the pathfinding was terrible i mean it , basicaly ai units were attacking the wall as if it was still the original fort and they were getting stuck in the wall and running around, it was basicaly unplayable ,but if it i fixed in the new rs 2.6 it will be quite an impressive piece of work {even more than it is} it does look amazing would love to see it in here with the japanese style on it

[Risasi]

I just recently changed laptops again and was reinstalling Shogun 2 last Saturday. Seven hours to install! And then it wasn't even that fun...graphics were pretty though. So you guys are the last Asian mod that interests me, so I'm just looking to contribute what little I can. :-)

I still think emphasis should be on open battles as from my research that seems to be what happened; the attacker either starved them out of castles and won by surrender, or eventually the defenders would get desperate and sally forth. But stronghold forts were part of this time period too. Even if it is just for an army to camp inside.

I haven't found much information on how well towns were fortified (were they even commonly walled?), but it does seem that castles were generally NOT where towns were located. Mostly along trade routes, roads and rivers or other strategically useful locations. So it seems like they functioned more like the forts as found in RTW.
I found references to "castle towns", but that mostly seems to be mountain castles with a town lying below or on the outskirts. I gathered they were the exception and started appearing more toward the end of the Sengoku period.

[lord ahrens]

What about using the Barbarian Towns and putting the japanese walls/buildings in them, maybe some of that script can be changed to make all settlements in the mod that are Roman reverted to have that one hill fortification in vanilla. Just a thought.

[leonn]

from what i can make out seiges were very rarely if at all resolved by all out attacks on castles and fortresses because they were so strong.
starvation,sabotaging the water supply etc were all used to make the enemy sally out and attack.

there are some instances of artillery breeching gates and commanders ordering an assault,but the casualtys resulting were massive and the attacker had no certainty of winning.
from what i can see most ordinary size settlements had no walls because an enemy wouldnt waste time and resourses destroying a money producing asset.
whatever lord held the town mattered not overmuch to the population as their lives wouldnt change. cheers

[Risasi]

I'm of the opinion that the end goal should be cities should be left without walls and hill forts should be the only type of castle available.

Of course it's not my mod, it's you guys' mod...so what do I know.

[BiggBudd]

I'm of the opinion that the end goal should be cities should be left without walls and hill forts should be the only type of castle available.

Of course it's not my mod, it's you guys' mod...so what do I know.

RNJ would not have been finished without input from peeps on these boards, so please continue to contribute.

A version without any walls is easily do-able, only 2 files need to be edited. If we have a volunteer I'd be happy to release a version without the walls to be tested and assessed?

[leonn]

opinions always welcome mate!
especially informed ones. cheers

[lord ahrens]

I second this motion and feel that it would make gameplay more interesting if hill forts where made to be the actual castles and towns had no actual walls. It can be done where they can be placed in strategic positions on the map by editing the desc_strat file, these hill forts will be kept on the map instead of disapearing when an army leaves them. The only issue is finding good spots where the AI will take them over and hold them easily and also the siege turns should be increased to a higher number causing them to actually assault the castle instead of waiting until the 3 turns are up.

[Crociato78]

You say you create a "strong" as "castles"?

You can also keep them even if there is no unity in it?

The idea is great.

[SBogdanov]

May be* hill forts like in RS-2.5 ??

[BiggBudd]

May be* hill forts like in RS-2.5 ??

Haven't played with the RS mod in yrs, perhaps I should have a quick look.

[SBogdanov]

the last post 4 images of babrabian town*

http://imtw.ru/topic/17475-патч-25-o...2#entry1062202 *