who hates catapults?

[gangreenkhan]

So I was havin a nice campaign as Scotland in the long road mod and everything was going great. Had a successful crusade, pillaged the entire coast of the holly land, decided to walk home and pillage austria and hungry which was under turkish control. Then when we got home decided to go after the french, well the rotten french had catapults by now. One flaming ball whipped out a third on my veteran crusader infantry in one hit. WTF? no way they used catapults on the feild in the medieval era. Totally broke the game for me. Sure you can run the cavalry round bake cause the AI doesn't cover the catapults. But seriously no medieval general ever said "oh no they have catapults."

i hate catapults what about you?

[Boogie Knight]

Yeah, catapults are a pain. In sieges I can understand them, and my normal response is to send out the cavalry in a full frontal assault on them and any other siege weapons or artillery they're pounding the walls with. But in a field battle? I'd be interested to know if there were any battles like that where catapults were used. I'm not sure it would've worked.

[SupplyWagon]

I doubt there were many (if any) such battles, since the siege engines were usually constructed on site, during a siege - not pushed entire way from your country to another.

As for M2TW catapults, what irritates me about them is the AI's tendency to build too many of them in vanilla game, resulting in useless "catapult stacks" roaming around. To add insult to injury, AI insists on ransoming them after their inevitable defeats, which allows to milk rich AI country by defeating the same catapults again and again.

[Deepstrike101]

Yes, this is something I hate in the Total War games. Medieval armies almost always build siege engines on site to attack walls, not assemble them in a city and then march them over hundreds of miles. They also wouldn't use them in a field battle. Ballistae were probably used on the field since they were easier to transport. I don't know if there is a way to disable catapults in vanilla.

I would recommend using the Stainless Steel mod with real recruitment enabled. It's basically a realism mod and real recruitment makes catapults a lot more rare. They still exist, but I have only seen one artillery army in several hundred hours of gameplay. There is occasional artillery sprinkled into stacks, but catapult effectiveness (especially flaming mode) is incredibly reduced against troops, so they never "wipe out a third" of any unit. At most, a catapult hit will kill 3-5 soldiers.

[Aeratus]

In M2TW, trebuchets have WHEELS that allow them to move on the battlefield. LOL.

[lolIsuck]

I don't like facing armies with artillery, they're mostly harmless but they can potentially mess things up. I've lost generals or got damage to elite units because of lucky artillery hits. It's so annoying to take them out though, I need to send a cavalry unit around the enemy and the bastards never flee so that takes up some time. Then there's always some annoying spear militia unit that runs into the fight too and before you know it the entire battlefield is a mess and I need to abandon my tactical play because of one bloody unit of artillery.

[gangreenkhan]

is there anyway to edit siege engines out?

[lolIsuck]

You'd first have to unpack the game, or at least the export_descr_buildings.txt file. There's plenty of tutorials for unpacking so you don't have to worry about that.
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...cking-the-Game
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...the-pack-files
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...or-new-modders
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...7-users-(M2TW)
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...al-2-Total-War

After you've unpacked the export_descr_buildings.txt you have to find the siege works and you either delete the building tree or just it's units and there are no more siege equipments to worry about.
If you want to do that for a mod, most mods have their own export_descr_buildings.txt file which you can find in the mod's data folder at the bottom somewhere.

[gangreenkhan]

I found the part of the file and deleted all the siege works now my game crashes when you try to load it, but a new game works fine, some1 must have already built siege works. I'm excited to see how it changes mid game cause I won't be fighting armies of balistas anymore.

[Maklodes]

I think the Mongols used some sort of stone-throwing siege engines at the battle of Mohi as an anti-personnel weapon. (They were used to force Hungarian crossbowmen to withdraw from a position defending a bridge.)

Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester was allegedly killed by a catapult stone to the head, although that was in a siege battle (sally).

I don't think it was nearly as common IRL as in M2TW, though.

[Darth Umbrage]

I don't typically have any problems with artillery. However I am more of a defensive type of General ( I like to lure enemies into traps by forcing them to act and then I counter attack.) Stray artillery shots have killed my generals and even kings while I have been preparing my defenses, frustrating stuff. But on the reverse I will also take a siege engine or two with a field army, more to cause panic than actually kill.

[vin2579]

Whats really fun is when the Egyptian army's have full stacks of catapults and hordes of horse archers so its pretty much impossible to flank and destroy the cata's with your few crusader knights.

[scdandme]

Well I had a good laugh while playing M2TW Third Age with mos the other night when my units were fighting the enemy in close combat on my side of the field of battle and then BOOM !!..."your men have slayed the enemy general"....one of THEIR catapult rounds went right into the middle of the fight and killed their own general !! ...of course some of my Elves were killed too but it was epic !!....it would be cool if you could fire flaming arrows and have a small percentage chance of setting the catapults on fire and thus doing damage to them though...just a thought cause they can be a pain.....