SnuggleBunnies wrote: ↑Fri Jul 19, 2019 2:03 pm
Mord wrote: ↑Fri Jul 19, 2019 8:41 am
matlegob wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 4:32 pm
- can we hope siege battles in future DLC?
Absolutely wanna see this!
Mord.
Honestly the game is unsuited for sieges. Sieges would require an entire game designed from scratch on their own. Since so very few sieges ended by assault, it would have to take into account:
1) Cavalry skirmishes for control of the countryside
2) Both armies food supplies and attempts to cut one another off from supply
3) The building of fortifications, facing both inward and outward, by the besiegers
4) Sallies and counter attacks by the defenders
5) Disease
6) Decisions by the defenders about whether to expel civilians
7) Tunneling, counter tunneling and deadly subterranean knife fights
8 Finally, for assaults themselves to be interesting, the game would have to take into account not only breaches in the walls, but ladders vs siege towers, covering fire, and the seizure of individual towers.
The game would have to work on a timescale of months for most games, weeks if a a weak garrison falls to assault, or years in extreme cases. The scale would have to be able to range from a small castle held by dozens, to the sieges of Alesia, Syracuse, or Constantinople with tens of thousands involved. Perhaps even things like the initial Theban attempt to seize Plataea would count as a 'siege,' meaning the game would need to find a way to model surprise night time assaults, and the political/psychological contest that decided that action. The end result would usually be the besieging army giving up and withdrawing, followed by the negotiated surrender of the defenders. Less common results would be seizure by treachery from within, and least common of all would be the taking of the stronghold by assault. The game would have to take long term morale into account, along with a very strong focus on logistics.
None of this can be effectively modeled by a game designed for single day set piece battles, in which logistics and political considerations take no part, and in which the scale of 500 man units would be too large to take into account the small things that could decide assaults (the seizure of a single tower, a sally port that happened to be open, etc.)
This isn't even getting into trying to figure out things like the war for Chioggia or the Crusader assault on Constantinople, complex combined land sea operations.
This brilliant engine may not be able to carry out complete sieges from spade to sword, but it can model the latter stages of a siege in which the wall has been undermined or battered down.
For multiple battles I have done the following:
· Built a fort using medium or high walls, leaving a gap to simulate a pre-existing breech. In many cases, I’ve used the “broken wall” from the Phillipi building set.
· Placed an objective for the AI inside the walls.
In each battle, the AI did the following:
· Attacked the breech in force, invariably supported by missile units. The result was a desperate struggle to control the breech, with causalities from both sides piling “in the rubble.”
· Made less concentrated (e.g. feint) attacks in one or two other locations, often supported by archers, etc.
· Made extensive use of ranged weapons at various points along the wall, gradually wearing down the defenders in specific sectors.
The AI behaves logically, it seems to me. If the attackers gained the advantage, they pushed forward through the breech and reinforcements flowed in through the gap(s). Give it a try!