Super fast AI siege weapons

[LostWraith]

I'm not sure if this has been addressed before, but whenever I play an AI using siege weapons, the AI can "run" the siege weapons across the battlefield extremely quickly, and then fire them as soon as they stop. They run faster than infantry and are almost as fast and cataphracts, which is ridiculous.

On the other hand, my siege weapon move slowly as normal.

They can also fire extremely quickly in succession with almost no reload time.

Realistically, most siege weapons and early cannons are not even mobile, and are certainly near useless in a field battle.

6.2 has reduced the area of effect of flaming ammo a lot, but I think the siege weapons should be rendered even more ineffective in field battles. The movement speed and rate of fire of AI sieges has gotta be a bug.

Anyone have the same problem or have a solution?

Thanks!

[stevietheconquer]

i noticed this too but i can almost every time quickly overrun the computer siege weapons by mine horsemen so it doesent bother me that much

[LostWraith]

To be honest, I think all siege weapons and early cannons should be removed from field battles.

Instead they should be immobile, and constructed as a siege engine during the siege, like ladders and towers, and deployable only during the deployment phase.

This improves a few things. No more unrealistic mobile catapults and trebuchets in field battles that might kill your general based on pure chance. They won't slow you down on the strategic map, and they won't take up slots in your 20 units armies. Instead they will be crewed separately (or with random infantry) when they are deployed in sieges.

Later field guns of course would be exempted from this, but still shouldn't slow armies down on the campaign map.

I don't think this will be possible due to the nature of the code, but if it is that would be a wonderful change for the next patch.

[HighLord z0b]

I've never noticed the super fast siege engines, but it's possible I've just never really looked.

There may be a way of scripting what you suggest; it's possible that we could remove the ability to produce siege engines at siege workshops, but make a trigger that gives a special ancillary like "catapult engineer" to any general in a settlement with a siege workshop and then make a script that triggers catapults to spawn with the general when they siege a settlement, however there are a few issues with that system.

If the general already has 8 ancillaries then the engineer would not work.

If the general sieges with a full stack the siege engines would spawn next to the army, possibly forcing the AI to wait another turn to reorder them into the attacking stack.

The AI would not know how to use the generals with the trait properly and may keep sending full stack armies with the wrong generals or no general to attack settlements, whilst the generals with the trait sit in their home settlement.

I'm not sure what would happen to the engines once they've spawned.

It may just be easier to make siege engines move incredibly slowly on the battlefield or not at all. However again, I don't know how the AI would handle that.