Assasins

[cursedronin]

Iv'e read somewhere that assasinating alot of enemies gives you a really bad rep.
Does this also count for sabotage?

One of my fav strategies to get a city without going to war with a faction, and face excommunication perhaps is to just sabotage and send spies to make the city rebel, then take it over yourself.
But if it hurts my overall rep, is it worth doing that alot?

(also, are siege towers/ladders broken like ?, last night I was sieging england as scotland, and 2 highlander units that went through a siege tower got their ass handed to em by 1 peasant unit.
Seeing as highlanders are armor piercing and everything and can beat even spearmen easily on the ground, does this mean that using a siege tower/ladders gives a huge disadvantage to the attacker?)

[Goofy]

Iv'e read somewhere that assasinating alot of enemies gives you a really bad rep.

I believe this is noobs' talk. Don't trust it.

One of my fav strategies to get a city without going to war with a faction, and face excommunication perhaps is to just sabotage and send spies to make the city rebel, then take it over yourself.

I use this sometimes as well.

But if it hurts my overall rep, is it worth doing that alot?

It shouldn't hurt your rep if no one knows what you've done. My reputation rate is now "Very reliable" and just a little earlier it was "Trustworthy" or something. I believe it got decreased when I started a war with HRE and did many kind of things. So it's possible to use assassins and to have good reputation in the same time. But notice that your faction leaders dread rating raises while you assassinate people (and perhaps sabotage buildings?).

(also, are siege towers/ladders broken like ?, last night I was sieging england as scotland, and 2 highlander units that went through a siege tower got their ass handed to em by 1 peasant unit.
Seeing as highlanders are armor piercing and everything and can beat even spearmen easily on the ground, does this mean that using a siege tower/ladders gives a huge disadvantage to the attacker?)

Partly correct.
Always use ladders if possible. Though I've not tried how do siege towers work with archers. It may be worth testing.
When the attacker uses siege towers, he can only get a few men on the walls and when there are more coming, the first ones get killed by ~20 defenders. This causes that peasants can beat Dismounted Feudal Knights in combat. And of course their ability to shoot helps as well.
When using ladders, the attacker can get 3-4 times faster and more soldiers on the wall, and the defender can't kill them all before the rest of the unit gets up. Also, men carrying ladders can run. This makes it hard to hit them with arrows or crossbow bolts, especially if they're in loose formation.
Usually I build 1 battering ram, 2-4 ladders and no siege towers. Or simply attack with artillery, destroy the gate and take the units in. The enemy can't resist your attack power.

Hope this helped.
~Da Goofy

[cursedronin]

Urgh ladders I hardly use those tbh.

I Remember when I used em while ago, my armoured sergeants got beat by those moorish javelin throwers (they didn't take that many casualties before they were climbing up, think maybe 15ish men died, but still 105 armoured sergeants lost to one group of javelinmen in a melee fight ... is that normal? o.O)

Tbh compared to rtw, spearmen seem to suck ass alot.
Even armoured sergeants take heavy losses, if not rout when charged at by general's unit from the front :s

[John Doe]

When the attacker uses siege towers, he can only get a few men on the walls and when there are more coming, the first ones get killed by ~20 defenders. This causes that peasants can beat Dismounted Feudal Knights in combat. And of course their ability to shoot helps as well.
When using ladders, the attacker can get 3-4 times faster and more soldiers on the wall, and the defender can't kill them all before the rest of the unit gets up. Also, men carrying ladders can run. This makes it hard to hit them with arrows or crossbow bolts, especially if they're in loose formation.

When siege towers are used, the attacker will be protected by it going to the walls (if they go in straight and perpendicular line to the wall) , and have less casualty than running attacker carrying a ladder (and they'll get tired faster, obviously). Then when the tower door open, at least 15 attackers jump on the wall at once (after the reinforcement comes slowly one at a time).

As for routing units against peasant, other factors can influence: fatigue, a dreaded enemy general nearby, armour/experience level, camapign difficulty level. Another important factor is that manned wall towers that are not equiped with ballista will also shoot arrows on the enemy standing on top of the wall, eating away its morale.

If you attack a weaker enemy on the wall, command your unit to run so that it will be mixed with the enemy, then stop and fight, and repeat the process. If you let them fight just on the edge of the enemy unit, one or two attacker at a time, it take too long and the arrows shot by the wall towers will take a serious toll on your troops (add fatigue and they'll eventually rout). Also in some occasions, it's worth to concentrate 3 of your tower/ladder on the same stretch of walls,

[Dave Strider]

I believe this is noobs' talk. Don't trust it.


I use this sometimes as well.


It shouldn't hurt your rep if no one knows what you've done. My reputation rate is now "Very reliable" and just a little earlier it was "Trustworthy" or something. I believe it got decreased when I started a war with HRE and did many kind of things. So it's possible to use assassins and to have good reputation in the same time. But notice that your faction leaders dread rating raises while you assassinate people (and perhaps sabotage buildings?).


Partly correct.
Always use ladders if possible. Though I've not tried how do siege towers work with archers. It may be worth testing.
When the attacker uses siege towers, he can only get a few men on the walls and when there are more coming, the first ones get killed by ~20 defenders. This causes that peasants can beat Dismounted Feudal Knights in combat. And of course their ability to shoot helps as well.
When using ladders, the attacker can get 3-4 times faster and more soldiers on the wall, and the defender can't kill them all before the rest of the unit gets up. Also, men carrying ladders can run. This makes it hard to hit them with arrows or crossbow bolts, especially if they're in loose formation.
Usually I build 1 battering ram, 2-4 ladders and no siege towers. Or simply attack with artillery, destroy the gate and take the units in. The enemy can't resist your attack power.

Hope this helped.
~Da Goofy

I have found quite the opposite.

Sure, seige towers may be slow, but you can easily get a force of 30-50 men onto the wall in 3 Seconds. That gives you time to get more soldiers ready to deploy. Ladders, on the other hand, give you 90% less troops in the same amount of time(3 seconds). Those soldiers are not able to defend each other or themselves because of the 4-9 troops around them. If they're lucky, another man climbs up next to them and helps them before they're killed. That's also how I lost Fully upgraded Spear Militia to Peasant Crossbowmen during a seige in a French Campaign. So now I use Seige towers with covering fire from Ground archers and Catapults to destroy the Gate towers.

Also: Assassins DO give you more Dread for one or more Generals, but this is good; If you use that General in a battle, the enemy has less morale. For example, in a Welsh Campaign in Kingdoms, My Faction Leader, King Llweyln(Sp?), got Full Dread because of my Successful Assassin attacks on English Generals and Captains. I must've killed 30-40 of the s.

[Kayslay]

I believe this is noobs' talk. Don't trust it.


I use this sometimes as well.


It shouldn't hurt your rep if no one knows what you've done. My reputation rate is now "Very reliable" and just a little earlier it was "Trustworthy" or something. I believe it got decreased when I started a war with HRE and did many kind of things. So it's possible to use assassins and to have good reputation in the same time. But notice that your faction leaders dread rating raises while you assassinate people (and perhaps sabotage buildings?).


Partly correct.
Always use ladders if possible. Though I've not tried how do siege towers work with archers. It may be worth testing.
When the attacker uses siege towers, he can only get a few men on the walls and when there are more coming, the first ones get killed by ~20 defenders. This causes that peasants can beat Dismounted Feudal Knights in combat. And of course their ability to shoot helps as well.
When using ladders, the attacker can get 3-4 times faster and more soldiers on the wall, and the defender can't kill them all before the rest of the unit gets up. Also, men carrying ladders can run. This makes it hard to hit them with arrows or crossbow bolts, especially if they're in loose formation.
Usually I build 1 battering ram, 2-4 ladders and no siege towers. Or simply attack with artillery, destroy the gate and take the units in. The enemy can't resist your attack power.

Hope this helped.
~Da Goofy

How many spies u need to put ina city to make it rebel?

[RollingWave]

taking walls were tough business to begin with. siege assaulting in TW (especially the unmodded versions) are insanely easy compare to what it was like in real history.

Towers can't run , but they soak up a lot of arrows . though yes I too notice that it seems inconsistent at times. normally they work fine but occasionally I had much better units massacered by far inferior units while going through tower.

ideally you should just use both towers and ladders, have towers and rams go in first to absorb the arrows then quickly run the ladders to the other sections.

As for assassins , I'm not sure about reputation but it gives your faction leader dread stats. so if you want a chivalry leader than using assassins is counter productive

[Goofy]

Good post, zyxos, but how can you explain that my javelinmen, with poor combat stats (playing Stainless Steel 6.1 you know), can beat elite dismounted knights with siegetower and ultimate combat stats?

Yeah, it's the ineffectiveness of siege tower. Once the "door" opens, some 10 guys come out on the wall, but then there will come one in time and ~40 enemies are killed, then their morale breaks and they flee.

So I can't even imagine what's the situation in Vanilla, which has a lot more poor combat.

[John Doe]

Usually with missile infantry , if you put them on guard mode, the men not in melee fight will carry on using their missile attack (I don't use javelin, so it's a guess) and that could explain your guys beating stronger units. But if the same DFK use a ladder and beats javelin then you're right.

The OP was rhe attacker, so my answer was made in that situation. But I rarely use tower myself, siege attack is something I try to avoid (autoreslove a lot or try to get them to fight outside).

[cursedronin]

Yeah had that too, with javelinmen being in melee (the moorish ones with paddes upgrade, annihilated my armoured spearmen that were carrying ladders.

only lost about 15 ish spearmen before they reached the top, so thats 105 better quality troops trained in melee combat that lost to 86 (siege reduces their number each turn) javelinmen that were using melee.

Yeah, from now on, i'll stick to just artillery before trying to take a castle.
More fun too see the dumb ai not remove his troops from the walls anyway, just to see em fall to their deaths when the wall is destroyed. (I do miss that from rtw, routing units ontop of walls suiciding lol)

[Goofy]

I usually use 1-3, max. 5 spies and at least 1, usually 2-3 assassins. Spies usually aren't enough. Just make sure at least one of your units are near the city, so you can start besieging immediately and prevent your rival from conquering it back.

Just take some spies there and destroy all buildings which improve health or public order. It's enough if you manage to decrease the public order to less than 35 % I think. If there are lots of warriors in the city, then it's worthless to even try it, but usually AI keeps max. 6 units in one city.

Back to original poster: I tested the siege mechanics yesterday, and ladders are faster. However, if you use a siege tower, you can get lots of men in the same point; ladders take them to 3 points. But the minus of siege tower is that it can be burned by flaming arrows, and this is very likely to happen.

[John Doe]

@ Da Goofy and OP: I just realise from your picture that unit size influence the effectivness of towers/ ladder. In your case (xxl unit) it is definitely better to use ladders: with tower it's the first 20 coming at once but the 130 remaining arriving one at a time, ladders are 150 arriving 3 at a time therefore a lot faster (more than twice faster). My first answer was for medium size, and balances some of the con/pros of ladder/towers.