Hiding in cities

[gatehouse]

One of the things I disliked from the original RTW is that you can lay siege to a nation's capital and no relief armies will be summoned, other cities with available soldiers will just stay out of it and send no support, and because of this you can occasionally destroy a nation piece mail, one city at a time. Clearly this mechanic is wrong.
One of the oldest ways of getting your enemy to fight you and leave their castle is to burn their crops and destroy their less-protected cities, because it makes hiding behind high walls a costly strategy. So wouldn't it be cool if in RTW2 when you brought your Roman army into Greece, you could immediately start burning crops and ravaging the countryside to make the Greeks recognize the threat and respond? I am not asking the AI to block strategic points on a map, but if they were a little more willing to combine their disparate forces and try wholeheartedly to repel foreign armies I think the game experience would be a lot more fun. It would also probably result in more pitched battles as well.

[akkakk]

the Athenians hid in Athens when the Spartans were marauding about the countryside during the wars between them......

If a superior force is attacking, and the AI (or other player) knows that, even if he does have a similar number of troops, he would have a very highy chance of defeat, he WOULD hide.

easier to defend a city against a superior force than it is to defeat said superior force in a field battle.

[Dowie]

I understand what you mean but agreed with what akkakk said. At some point this was a tactic used by the Romans. When Hannibal was roaming roman countryside they kept to the city's and slowly ambushed small parts of hannibals army to wage a war of attrition. After a while the Romans got fed up and sent a army to defeat Hannibal. Needless to say the Romans where annihilated.

[akkakk]

I understand what you mean but agreed with what akkakk said. At some point this was a tactic used by the Romans. When Hannibal was roaming roman countryside they kept to the city's and slowly ambushed small parts of hannibals army to wage a war of attrition. After a while the Romans got fed up and sent a army to defeat Hannibal. Needless to say the Romans where annihilated.

...so the Romans decided to attack the troops who were sent out to rally more troops/forage/scout etc making Hannibal low on supplies, effectively strategically blind and forced to use the troops he had available without support from the Italic minorities.

[♔The Black Knight♔]

I like the idea of the armies hiding behind their wall to give them an advantage. I would also like seing soldiers baricading some buildings when the walls have been broken down and most of the units have been defeated.

That way if the enemy can't use siege units to hit the building, the soldiers will either have to burn them out or send troops in that could become very costly. It would give you abetter feel as you will have to wipe the last remnants of the forces in the city for a last stand.

If you choose to set the building on fire however, it may catch other buildings on fire and you could burn down a good portion of the city.