Ideas to reduce sieges

[nameless]

The "So how to defend cities" thread has intrigued me so I decided to come up with a new thread hopefully for people to come up with ideas that could work in reducing sieges but retain the "historical" fortifications.

ProposalEDIT: This is for future games including the expansion if possible.

1. Go back to NTW style and have all cities have walls but still retain RTW2's province/region system (which I think is a good thing to have)

2. Make cities smaller on the map or back to what they used to be and spread buildings just like in NTW

3. When an enemy army enters a region, it goes into raid mode if there is no army to stop it and can at this point start "sucking" the region dry. Any buildings that it damages cannot be repaired so long as the army is within the region. So if it attacks a farmhouse and then moves onto the mining quarries the defenders cannot repair it until the enemy has left the region (I found this an issue in previous games as you could simply rebuild as quickly as they are damaged). At this point if the defenders have NO army on the field at or during this time the defenders have zero control over the region and it is on its own.

4. Therefore the enemy army can devastate the entire region and once all buildings have been damaged can "force" the defenders to "surrender" rather than just sieging them. The more buildings destroyed the higher likelihood the enemy will surrender and thus avoid a siege battle. Because the region is on it's own it's own local forces may defect or choose to surrender.

5. This provides time for the defenders to send in a relief army to raise the siege but if that army is defeated on the field then the chances of surrender increases exponentially and is thus almost "guaranteed" because once the defenders see that the army that was sent in to save them is destroyed they'd lose all hope.

6. If the defenders have extremely weak military forces then the chances of the region surrender by itself is also high.

7. The attackers can choose to siege the city if they want to but can make it surrender within 2-3 turns and increases if the army is huge and there are others.

8. Only the provincial capitol has to be sieged because it's the main governor so they'd either wait it out or attack directly.

Thoughts?

I do recall CA trying to do this since ETW ( in terms of drawing the enemy out) but they couldn't get it done pat.

[RomeJunkie]

I don't think they will change it. It's so close to release date and the smaller cities don't even look big enough to have the 3 capture point things that the big cities do, they definitely won't have time to change that.

Like I said in that other thread,

Open field battles are more fun anyways. And I honestly like the idea of siege battles being a rare, special event. I trust CA fully, they always make good games.

I just like the idea of doing a bunch of open field battles and then, to capture the full region, doing one big special "siege" battle. Almost like a boss battle or something.

[spanish_emperor]

I remember NTW had the surrender option. Why didn't CA simply keep it and have settlements with little to no army surrender against superior forces? Afterall, its not really a open battle map when you fight against un-walled (is that a word?) settlements since they will still hide in the alleys and streets...not exactly tactically interesting...

[nameless]

I remember NTW had the surrender option. Why didn't CA simply keep it and have settlements with little to no army surrender against superior forces? Afterall, its not really a open battle map when you fight against un-walled (is that a word?) settlements since they will still hide in the alleys and streets...not exactly tactically interesting...

True. The "surrender" option would work very well due to the limited armies that we can have on the field.

[Rittsy]

I guess as the human player, what advantage would there be in surrender if all my units were spawned for the siege?

Here's an idea, why don't we wait and see how the new system plays out before we start criticizing it.

[jtfjtfjtf]

Redesign the entire map for Cities and Towns

[RoyalNobody]

I like what CA are currently doing. I'm no historian, but I doubt most towns had huge walls back in the Roman era. Especially not in Northern Europe.

[m_1512]

Not going to happen, you don't exactly use past games to build a brand new game on.

[Strattios]

Cities had walls in real life. Especially most in the game. They need to drop siege time and give minor settlements a bulwark style open wall system so no siege engines are required.

My least favorite battles are open field with terrible odds in either direction. Very boring and they are increasing the number and forcing region outcomes to rely on them.

[2gutter67]

Honestly this idea makes 1000 times more sense that what is currently being done. Most cities should still be seigeable, but there should be some other way to take the region other than seige. Many cities throughout history have simply seen the army arrive on the doorstep and surrendered without a fight. This was exacerbated by the numerous refugees which would come flooding in from the countryside telling stories about the pillage done to their small communities who would sow fear into the defenders.

Now I won't lie, I'm terribly bored when I have to fight a seige as every other battle, and the seiges in Shogun2 were even worse because it was like I was playing the exact same battle over and over and over. However, now that there is a limited number of available armies I can't just spam stacks and seige 9 cities at once. If I send all my armies to take Gaul, then Thrace may decide my holdings in Greece look tasty and will declare war on me there and take 4 regions in 2 turns.

If nameless's ideas can gain some traction, maybe CA could see this post and debate it and maybe get this into the next game, or patch Rome II at some point in the (probably distant) future.

Even better yet, would be if every region capitol (not just provincal capitol) had it's own seige map!!!! No offense, I understand the time and effort it would take, but it would by far be the best option. This would prevent seiges from being so stale. Oh look, I get to defend a fort that looks exactly the same as one on the other side of the world - horray...

[Karnil Vark Khaitan]

seems like a bad idea. I really don't like it.

[nameless]

seems like a bad idea. I really don't like it.

I'm basing it off on CA's original intention with ETW.

ETW was where they started having the buildings outside the actual city itself because they wanted the attackers to be capable of "drawing" the enemy out of the city and fight them on the field which really did happened in most cases.

Some commanders preferred to sit tight in their camps but with the pillaging and raging that's going on in the countryside they sometimes have no choice but to sally and meet the enemy on the field.

The only problem with that was because the damage done to those buildings were at least minimal and could be repaired right after the army left. If the damage couldn't be repaired AND the region's control is locked out of the player then there's a chance they could do what they originally intended to do.

It was not uncommon for cities to swing their doors opened to invaders when their armies were defeated on the field or if they gained knowledge that no help was coming.

Don't get me wrong I like RTW2's idea but I think they could push more later on and make it even better.

[PROMETHEUS ts]

The "So how to defend cities" thread has intrigued me so I decided to come up with a new thread hopefully for people to come up with ideas that could work in reducing sieges but retain the "historical" fortifications.

ProposalEDIT: This is for future games including the expansion if possible.

1. Go back to NTW style and have all cities have walls but still retain RTW2's province/region system (which I think is a good thing to have)

2. Make cities smaller on the map or back to what they used to be and spread buildings just like in NTW

3. When an enemy army enters a region, it goes into raid mode if there is no army to stop it and can at this point start "sucking" the region dry. Any buildings that it damages cannot be repaired so long as the army is within the region. So if it attacks a farmhouse and then moves onto the mining quarries the defenders cannot repair it until the enemy has left the region (I found this an issue in previous games as you could simply rebuild as quickly as they are damaged). At this point if the defenders have NO army on the field at or during this time the defenders have zero control over the region and it is on its own.

4. Therefore the enemy army can devastate the entire region and once all buildings have been damaged can "force" the defenders to "surrender" rather than just sieging them. The more buildings destroyed the higher likelihood the enemy will surrender and thus avoid a siege battle. Because the region is on it's own it's own local forces may defect or choose to surrender.

5. This provides time for the defenders to send in a relief army to raise the siege but if that army is defeated on the field then the chances of surrender increases exponentially and is thus almost "guaranteed" because once the defenders see that the army that was sent in to save them is destroyed they'd lose all hope.

6. If the defenders have extremely weak military forces then the chances of the region surrender by itself is also high.

7. The attackers can choose to siege the city if they want to but can make it surrender within 2-3 turns and increases if the army is huge and there are others.

8. Only the provincial capitol has to be sieged because it's the main governor so they'd either wait it out or attack directly.

Thoughts?

I do recall CA trying to do this since ETW ( in terms of drawing the enemy out) but they couldn't get it done pat.

Already better than the system implemented now .

[crzyrndm]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

So please, someone, come up with a way of increasing the probability of field battles, or decreasing the repeditiveness of siege warfare, in a way that is better than how CA have decided to do it. When you do have a valid idea, bring up the problem, present your solution, have a debate on how to improve it. Maybe it will be taken up by CA in future products if it really is good. Until then, some peace and quiet would be appreciated.

The "So how to defend cities" thread has intrigued me so I decided to come up with a new thread hopefully for people to come up with ideas that could work in reducing sieges but retain the "historical" fortifications.

Finally, someone gets it...

I like the context behind the idea (forcing an enemy to meet you in the field via. a scorched earth/Chevauchèe style strategy), however from recent experience I think we know that it needs a little refinement to actually work as intended without being frustrating from a gameplay perspective.

A small flaw that need resolution from my experience and some gameplay concerns:
1) Something preventing the defeated scraps of an army running around devastating your region if you dont immediately finish them off. In Shogun 2 you could easily attack 2-3 of these outbuildings in a single turn and if the garrison was a large part of your defence, you can't just go and stop an AI from wrecking that province in its turn. Same applies to small raiding parties that the CAI in the past has loved (supposed to be resolved in R2)
Possible solution: Damaging an "outbuilding" could require X movement points from a unit. If you attack with two units, that cost is split between them so it takes half the time (so, if a full stack takes 1 turn to damage a building, a single unit takes 20. Or maybe a single unit takes 10, and a stack can still move a short distance. You could also have some exponential rate, ie. 20-13 units=>1 turn; 12-8 =>2, 7-5 => 3; etc.)

2) From a gameplay perspective it should never be: damage these X targets and this city will surrender to you. Players will find a way to exploit this and make some cookie cutter expansion strategy. There needs to be some disadvantage vs. directly sieging a settlement (maybe it takes longer, maybe your army takes attrition type casualties to simulate your raiding parties meeting pockets of resistance, maybe the region takes much longer to bring under your control after surrender), because you are forcing the defenders out from their fortified position (ie. you gain a field battle, you need to lose something fairly significant).
IMO, significant attrition is a must. To enact these strategies you need to split your forces into raiding groups which are relatively easy to pick off (reality here, not gameplay). Whether by angry civilians or organised counter-raiding parties. Along this train of thought, you could make use of the new stance system to implement the raiding. Post-surrender, a decent chance of rebel armies spawning each turn (say, 1 in 3) because you annoyed all the peasants.

3) Cities with large garrisons (professional, not spawned levy) should atleast be able to last a while without caring (size of garrison judged by relative strength of forces) for the gameplay reason of the player not having a heavily defended city just revolt on him which I can't imagine ever being fun (If you want a reason, garrison means they have supplies and inspire confidence in the populace. However if they never act the populace will eventually get angry and throw them out). Along the lines of this, province capitals should probably be immune to surrender via. raiding to prevent human exploits from excluding sieges completely.

Already better than the system implemented now.

So why didn't you 'ing suggest something along these lines instead of 'ing moaning everywhere you could lay your hands on...