Has this happened to anyone else

[Ares82]

I'm playing as the Romans and currently in a pretty big war with the Macedonians. Anyways, they have this one stack that has a couple of Scorpions in it, and everytime when they siege a city that I took from them they just stand around until the battle timer runs out. I even take my Cretan Archers out of the city and shoot at them, and they still don't bother to move. I'm pretty sure they do it because they consider scorpion a siege weapon and they're waiting till it breaks the towers or the walls, but since the scorpion can't attack those they just keep waiting forever.

I'm playing RTR PE 1.6 with BI exe so I don't know if it's just the problem with BI or does this happen all the time.

[florin80]

AFAIK scorpions do not have the power to damage walls so they aren`t really a siege weapon. You did not say if they ever fired at your units.

[Ares82]

No they never returned fire, in fact just now I went back to game and took my Principes to the nearest enemy and had em throw their pillas, and they STILL didn't retaliate. Then I used the same principes to attack the Scorpion crews, the vary moment that those guys routed the entire Macedonian army started moving, so the cause of this were the Scorpions.

I know that they can't damage the walls, but as far as the game is concerned they ARE considered siege units because if you fire Scorpions at some other unit and then you mouse over that unit, you will notice it will say something like Concerned about being fired on by siege weapons.

And if you ever played vanilla RTW you might have noticed that anytime there were onagers in the army, the army would wait until the onagers destroyed the towers before moving forward, and I suspect the same is happening in this case, but the game doesn't know that Scorpions can't damage the towers it just knows that they are siege weapons and thus the AI wait for them to do their designed role.

[florin80]

And if you ever played vanilla RTW you might have noticed that anytime there were onagers in the army, the army would wait until the onagers destroyed the towers before moving forward, and I suspect the same is happening in this case, but the game doesn't know that Scorpions can't damage the towers it just knows that they are siege weapons and thus the AI wait for them to do their designed role.

Interesting theory. It`s worth looking into.
And yes I know about the thing with the onagers.

[Antiochus the Great]

Perhaps since the onagers were removed and there are no longer two wall damaging types of siege weapons the game assigned it to the only other piece of artillery available to fill the gap? Probably not but hey its worth a thought....why else would they wait on scorpions to knock down a wall? BTW i have had this problem too although it is rare.

[JoeyJubb]

I'm no modder - but wouldn't the simplest solution be to add a stupidly weak buildings attack to the scorpions? I know they'd still try to knock the walls down but eventually they'd run out of ammo and have to come at you a different way! It's a short term fix at least right?

[alanschu]

Speaker of Onagers, I though they were accurate for the old Roman period? No big siege weapons existed back in the day?

[Antiochus the Great]

I seen a history channel special featuring ancient siege weapons, if you ask me the onagers should be brought back to the game but only made available for sieges only by making them a buildable siege weapon like the ram, ladder, sap point,and siege tower.

[florin80]

I seen a history channel special featuring ancient siege weapons, if you ask me the onagers should be brought back to the game but only made available for sieges only by making them a buildable siege weapon like the ram, ladder, sap point,and siege tower.

I think that the reason(one of them at least) they were taking out is that it was considered unrealistic to have them as a battlefield unit.

[Shos]

I think that the reason(one of them at least) they were taking out is that it was considered unrealistic to have them as a battlefield unit.

.... and too big for the time period.

[Marcus Camillus]

I looked through the EDU file of Vanilla RTW and RTR Platinum and yes, Scorpions are classified as seige weapons. I suppose we could experiment with reclassifing them as infantry and see what effect this had on there use by the AI and also how it would effect the player being able to use them too.

Here are the categories that the RTW game engine uses in the EDU file to classify various units...

• infantry
• cavalry
• siege
• handler
• ship
• non_combatant

[Cheexsta]

Speaker of Onagers, I though they were accurate for the old Roman period? No big siege weapons existed back in the day?

Onagers during this period were rare, if not outright nonexistant. I believe it wasn't until later that their use became more widespread, not to mention they were much smaller than in vanilla. If you try to find info on siege artillery on the net, you'll probably find lots of references to "catapults" used during this time period; this is slightly misleading in that the common view of a catapult is a single-armed missile throwing engine, however in this time it usually referred to Ballistae and similar weapons. Catapults at this time generally had two torsion springs to fling a missile at an enemy, almost like a bow, while Onagers used a single torsion spring to lob a missile at the enemy.

I seen a history channel special featuring ancient siege weapons, if you ask me the onagers should be brought back to the game but only made available for sieges only by making them a buildable siege weapon like the ram, ladder, sap point,and siege tower.

Hardcoded, simply can't be done.