RAgghhhhh! SIEGES!!!

[Dr.Own]

I always have massive causlites on these battles
How to a minimize them-I treid to use little cav and lots of heavy infantry that use swords or axes instead of spears or pikes but thats all I can think of on how to good in a siege.

[SirRobin]

Perhaps you should tell the audience if you are talking about attacking or defending in a siege situation

[Stolet]

Probably attacking, defending shouldn't be a problem. Personally, I usually sit out and wait until the enemy sallies so I can pin them down by the gates. I attack earlier only if the enemy has less units so I can get some ladders to undefended parts of walls. Dunno if one can win a siege when attacking with few losses. Of course you can slaughter the enemy if you have loads of armoured swordsmen and they have peasants :p but the AI will often have decent units on the walls. So you can minimize your casualties by avoiding combat on the walls. Yesterday I won a siege with few casualties by bringing up ladders to an undefended wall section, opening the gates, getting my missile cavalry in and shooting the enemy to hell with arrows. If you can't avoid fights on the walls, get the heaviest infantry you can and hope they don't lose a lot of men

[Viking Prince]

Attacking is always going to cost men. You are at a height disadvantage against defenders on the wall. You will suffer loses from the towers aginst your men outside of the walls until you control the walls and the inside ground near the walls. The only effective counter is to keep the army back out of range and use the artillery to punch some holes for access points of your choosing and take out a tower or two.

[JusTheory]

If you want lower casualties when assaulting use a few units of catapults etc. They break wholes in the walls, destroy towers and can dish out some good damage to enemy units on the walls. The computer often retreats off the wall you are targeting as well. This helps a lot, especially when that unit/s were a missile troop. Other than that it's gonna be brutal, welcome to the middle ages.

[PotentSchraphlon]

Try and avoid fighting on the walls. In my experience, defenders have a massive boost on walls (ie scottish peasants slaughtering english knights) so try and batter through the gate or better yet use artillery. Other than that you're bound to lose a lot of men in a siege

[SirRobin]

Try and avoid fighting on the walls. In my experience, defenders have a massive boost on walls (ie scottish peasants slaughtering english knights) so try and batter through the gate or better yet use artillery. Other than that you're bound to lose a lot of men in a siege

I never saw wall defenders get much of a bonus, possibly this was fixed in a patch? (I only began playing recently, with the luxuries of a fully patched, semi-working game)

[Turtle Hammer]

Siege assaults are always messy unless you have an overpoweringly superior force. Artillery is very useful, but if you do have to use ladders, use them from several directions, the AI has a harder time defending against this. But, taking a city usually means taking losses too. But, it always did in real life so I never got too upset by it.

[Commander5xl]

Just as everyone says, neutralize every advantage that the defenders have, I usually have at least a couple units of artillery on hand, Even if its 2 catapults against a citadel they can be big help. Even those small catapults can still fire at the gate and smash it open with force (its kind of like a ranged battering ram I find) and will cause the AI to retreat to the next layer, keep doing that until the last one, and use ladders to get missile and infantry on the the walls and watch the tide turns as you rain death upon the infidels in the town square. :sparta:

[Paladin94610]

Ah!! Trouble with ballista towers or cannon towers sabotage them with your best assassin!!!

[InsaneHanz]

Flanking really cuts down on casualties, even in the town square. Punch at least three holes in their walls if they are heavily defended and focus on pushing through at least one of them very quickly. Once you gain access to the enemy's settlement, it is much easier to flank and route the men near their wall. Bring at least one cavalry unit into the settlement for chasing down any units that are retreating to the town square. When it is time for the final showdown in the square, split up your infantry and try to surround the enemy by taking different paths to it. Their men die much faster when they are surrounded.

[Loki_999]

As already said: Artillery. Don't bother with the gate (unless you really want to), take down a couple of walls first. If the enemy sally forth you can have archers just in front of your artillery do them some damage first and if they advance all the way then bring your cavalry/melee units into play. Dont bother firing archers against defenders on the walls unless fire arrows and you want to try and route them,.... it will generally take a lot of arrows to achieve this and pretty much a waste.

With some luck your artillery will take out a number of enemies as the wall collapses but you usually need a lot of artillery (or powerful artillery) to achieve this as the computer is usually clever enough to abandon the wall once it reaches a certain % of damage (something like 80%?). With a lot of artillery though you can take it from 70% to 100% in one volley therefore wiping our a whole unit if you are really lucky.

Once you have your holes in the wall then your next steps depend on what the computer does. If he fills the gaps with troops, stay where you are and let your artillery and archers have fun. If he places archers there then you can use cavalry to make shock attacks. My recommendation for using artillery against units is ballisata do not use fire ammunition (for accuracy and chance of multiple hits) and catapults use fire (as big balls of flame really scare the enemy and seem to do area damage). With trebuchets i do not recommend using the rotting cow option as you are going to go through those gaps later and then your own troops will get infected as the cloud stays for a very long time.

When you have driven the enemies from the walls then they usually retreat to the center where you can casually spread your melee (foot) troops around the city along the main paths to the center and when you are ready charge everyone to the center from every possible attack route. This should cause massive casualties on the enemy presuming your troops are up to the task.

Alternately as long as you have arrows pepper the enemy to get his numbers down although it will probably be slow as they will generally have to fire quite vertically without direct line of sight and therefore not so effective.

The one problem can be is if the enemy has heavy cavalry and you are lacking in pike units. Even in cities cavalry can still mount decent charges so you need to make sure you are prepared for the enemy charging you before you get to the center. Spear units can suffer from a charge but once they cavalry are engaged they should take quite a bit of damage in return as they will have little room to maneuver and slow to disengage.

[Muagan_ra]

Enemies will often fight to the last man in siege situations - the only way to minimise losses is to attack through one breach, and flank the defenders from another. If you're lucky you may be able to wither them down with missile fire, but the intervening buildings can make this difficult.

[KnightOfPortugal]

Pff, even the thoughest heavy infantry takes harsh beatings when pushing and pushing and pushing them into the town centers. And when you use archers, they always sally with their cavalry.

I like to use pikemen in street battles. Yea, say what you want, but I have rarely seen them drop their pikes in street fights, and with their massive numbers/unit they are good for pushing your enemy back into the town square.

Another cool thing is horse archers. They DO work in street fights.

[Muagan_ra]

Another issue with sieging is the pathfinding. Your units will often spread out, with only a handfull of men actually doing the fighting. I always manually move my men into the fight, before commanding them to start hacking - that way you get more of your guys actually into combat, which does help to increase your kill-count.

[SirRobin]

"Start hacking!"

(every soldier pulls out a laptop computer..)

Anyway, on topic, if a siege assault hasn't been hard, then it hasn't been a good battle.

[E.K]

A siege isnt meant to be easy, otherwise nobody would bother upgrading castles and walls.

[Loki_999]

Indeed, and its why in the old days it was considered better to try and starve an enemy out or use other tactics (infiltration etc) rather than a direct assault, because that could be very costly, and bad for the morale of the army.

However, TW is not RL, and if you have a decent army with at least equivalent strength of the defenders, plus some siege units/equipment, you should be able to win against the AI as long as you use your brain a bit.

After all, they are locked up inside, you control the pace of the battle. If they stand on the walls, don't join them, stand back and throw rocks until the walls come down (hence the need for enough siege units). When they retreat, you attack, use fire arrows to hurt morale and drive them back further allowing you to take up strategic positions inside the walls, put your own archers on the walls that you have just taken. Let then come to you if they are being adventurous, if not advance.

Once the bulk of their army is packed together in the center then they are perfectly positioned to more attacks by siege units providing you can find a good line of fire. I've had siege units gain several chevrons in a single battle with this tactic. If siege can't get a good firing line then weaken them as much as possible with archers if the enemy doesn't have many archers, or send in your melee (and possibly cavalry charges) from every side you can attack from simultaneously.

[E.K]

Indeed, and its why in the old days it was considered better to try and starve an enemy out or use other tactics (infiltration etc) rather than a direct assault, because that could be very costly, and bad for the morale of the army.

However, TW is not RL, and if you have a decent army with at least equivalent strength of the defenders, plus some siege units/equipment, you should be able to win against the AI as long as you use your brain a bit.

After all, they are locked up inside, you control the pace of the battle. If they stand on the walls, don't join them, stand back and throw rocks until the walls come down (hence the need for enough siege units). When they retreat, you attack, use fire arrows to hurt morale and drive them back further allowing you to take up strategic positions inside the walls, put your own archers on the walls that you have just taken. Let then come to you if they are being adventurous, if not advance.

Once the bulk of their army is packed together in the center then they are perfectly positioned to more attacks by siege units providing you can find a good line of fire. I've had siege units gain several chevrons in a single battle with this tactic. If siege can't get a good firing line then weaken them as much as possible with archers if the enemy doesn't have many archers, or send in your melee (and possibly cavalry charges) from every side you can attack from simultaneously.

Thats why I always go into a siege battle with a couple trebuchet or catapults. A lot easier than trying to ram the gates down or scale the walls.

[Loki_999]

I like to take 4 or more. :-O

EDIT: Just to clarify though, I tend to have two armies going around together. One optimized for field battles (plenty of cavalry) and one for sieges (plenty of siege). I keep them close together to allow them to reinforce each other in case of nasty surprises, and merge units if one unit suffers too many casualties. The field army tends to provide this with reinforcements coming from established regions to fill the ranks and damaged units either taking up garrison duties or sent back to other territories for retraining.