How to defend a settlement

[homefry]

So unlike Med 2, there is no fight to the end in the settlement?

And you how do you shoot arrows from settlements? Do towers just come with higher tier settlements or do you have to build them?

[Death_Sheep]

Archer towers do come in higher tiered settlements.

The second castle upgrade starts giving them to you. They play a good part in defense, but the most important skills in castle sieges are as thus follows:

Overlapping fire. Pretty self explanitory.

The general ability 'Stand and Fight'. It turns your archers, into machine guns. It improves their morale, their rate of fire, and their melee abilities.

This is how I usually organize my castle defenses.

At the highest level, the archers. Their large munition supply, and generally high accruacy are excellent in this. Plus flaming arrows from the highest towers look cool.

Next lowest tiers are musket armed troops. While their reload time may make you think you may want them higher up, their volleys against infantry that make the walls first will actually negate the penalty for their lower rate of fire.

Melee troops, I spread around liberally to make taking positions as costly as possible, and to hold key areas for as long as possible. Most notably gates, and archery towers.

When you see a section threatened pull the ranged infantry off the wall and replace them with melee troops. As long as they have arrows, they are valuable to you.

If need be pull them up to a higher level.

Thats all I can think of right now.

[I WUB PUGS]

Hold the walls with archers, bomb throwers, basically any kind of range troop. Hold a reserve of melee troops in 2 parts. One part for reinforcing any part of the walls that is under pressure, and the second part for actually leaving the castle and flanking.

The BAI doesn't know how to deal with a large mass of flankers when it is trying to climb a bunch of walls. Also you may want to have a light cavalry or two, because if you use this tactic you will have a ton of shattered men to mop up..... unless you want to fight them again.

And the larger the castle the less need there is to leave the walls. You can hold on to the top two tiers or so and just throw melee troops at the enemy when they come over the first wall, it's almost too easy.

Basically a fortress or castle with 12-15 units is unbreakable by the AI without several thousand reinforcements.

Don't ever auto resolve a siege against yourself, you could lose or at the very least sustain absurdly high casualties. Fight it yourself and you will clean the enemy out.