THIS NEEDS TO CHANGE: Total War Sieges Have Never Been WORSE
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- Опубликовано: 26 сен 2024
- Siege Battles in Total War games were some of the most memorable battles of my childhood gaming experiences. Playing them for the first time in the original Medieval Total War completely altered my perspective for how fun strategy games could be. Watching my army surround a mighty castle, breaking down multi layered walls with trebuchets, charging masses of infantry, it was just incredible.
But looking back at all of these games I can’t help but notice that siege battles got worse over time, with Rome & Medieval 2 though having really nice features like city viewing, and of course introducing proper 3D siege battles suffered terribly from a non responsive AI and unit pathfinding issues that have largely persisted throughout the rest of the games and have absolutely not aged well at all.
So in this video I want to explore why siege battles in Total War have been such a chore to play & why CA has (for the most part) failed to improve them. In fact how in some cases they've just got plain worse. Hope you enjoyed this video and found it informative! If you did give it a like and subscribe to the channel for more videos just like this!
#TotalWar #SiegeBattles #HistoricalTotalWar
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Honestly, I'm tired of crappy pathfinding, silly AI that has no idea how to strategically attack or defend a city, I'm tired of mechanics that are far too easy to exploit and I'm tired of just autoresolving most sieges because I've got the numbers. These battles should be challenging, last resort, massive spectacles. Total War battles in future need to do sieges justice.
Last I heard its tech debt halting progress. Every game since Rome 2 shares the same foundational engine which has problems/limitations that can't be solved. Think the only way they will fix sieges (and the wider game tbh) is with a new game engine (which they 100% need to save the franchise from going stagnant). It's a money/time investment for sure. I just hope SEGA/CA can see the value in it.
Great video btw :)
Sadly the future in CA isnt bright after the sega incident
@@MattsFiefdom it could be solved if they hired competant programmers.
@@MattsFiefdom ive seen modders for rome 2 fix the seige ai and remove the torches
@@cal2127its not that they need a good programmers its the executive who call the shot. CA executive hinders the programmer capabilities why wh3 is a buggy launch compared to wh2
I absolutely hate the mechanic in Attilla that causes towers and gates to collapse when you capture them. It makes no sense and ends up killing your own guys.
Yeah that’s the worst part. Like disabled them so they can’t be used anymore or something but don’t destroy it killing your entire unit and sue to some bugs fall of the edge. Just defending them is a big gamble
To be fair attila was designed against the player who would have disadvantages in a chaotic period.
i enjoy it at times i feel like it should be optional
I disagree. First, few if any of your own units die in the collapse. It is usually the enemy under the tower. Second, the attackers don't need to be strengthened by seized towers if they can control. They idea is they are sabotaged.
also too many friendly fire from the watch towers! our soldiers dying to a ratio 3 to 1 in every siege battle (total war attila)
Having an Onna bushi unit win in a last stand alongside Samurai Retainer unit were some of the most clutch moments in Shogun 2 Castle Sieges.
or even lost as the last man watching my poor samurai retainer get pin cushioned by 50+arrows
shogun 2 sieges were so dumb. The cities didn't even look like cities they were just hilly terrain with a wooden short wall around it
@@VinnieG- That's because you weren't fighting over cities, you were fighting over forts/castles. And the reason why they could be scaled, is because historically they built the walls at those angles and in those ways to be resistant to earthquakes. A common occurrence in Japan.
@@persepolis4836 looked like a crap village compared to medieval 2's castles
@@VinnieG- You're not getting it. They weren't settlements or villages. They were keeps/strongholds that allowed clans to project power into the surrounding area. Look up historical Japanese castles. They were pretty well done in Shogun 2 if you look at historical examples.
2:00: Siege battles in Empire and Napoleon were centered around star forts. Actual urban warfare was extremely rare in that era, and cities were fortified by interlocking systems of fortifications like this ringing them outside the city proper.
still, cities are way too small
i take over moscow and all i see is a small town with a few farmhouses and 2 townhalls
on another note, it is kind of weird that there is no water in siege in empire
sweden takes on my recently landed force and boom, we are in farmland
why is there no river in sevastopol siege battle
Extremely rare? Most battle lines would anchored to towns and hamlets tho. Plenty of "urban" combat throughout Napoleons campaigns.
@@azoniarnl3362 I'm not talking random small villages, I'm talking major cities.
Siege battles in napoleon were total shit, but the city battles were pretty cool
@@azoniarnl3362 sure, towns in maps are bigger than empire, but the main city is in the distance (not that fun tbh)
I WANNA BLAST GAZA TO THE GROUND (as napoleon not the idf)
Since i am the modder that did Helm's Deep map for The Dawnless Days, i can say that i tried a lot in order to implement multi layer walls siege maps in Attila and i can Say that the AI Is so stupid that don't understand that there Is a second layer of walls, it's even dumber on caputure points, and the huge issue Is that if the enemy pass the First layer, you can't have a second gate because that destroys the AI pathfinding because the AI thinks only about going on the Victory Point to capture, i am trying a lot of my own Custom siege buildings in order to make siege battles more unique
thanks for your effort.. i was wondering why those multi layer cities wasnt implemented in 1212mod :)
I have a couple of questions, though I barely know anything about modding, so I might say some dumb shi:
- Is it possible for siege equipment to cross a destroyed wall, or for a battering ram to cross a destroyed gate?
- If the Battle Map is coupled with a custom made Battle AI mod, could it work? or is the AI pathfinding hardcoded?
- Lastly, could you send a link for your maps? I'm really curious
Thank you so much for your effort man, Helm's Deep maps was awesome 🙏
@@BellumCinematicsTotalWar The AI pathfinding is made by the map creator, but it has to follow precise rules, otherwise the AI will Just break. For siete engines, yes it's possible to cross a destroyed gates and walls. And final, a link for my Maps? There were never stand alone maps mods.
It's just a shame CA has a monopoly on the genre. I really wish another developer would enter the space.
Competition means nothing, you really think CA will start to make good decisions just because other studio is making similar games?
@@sebaaullador1292CA is already bottom low even if theres a competition they will just copy paste the previous engine add a little blur without effort no new mechanics just the same old doomstack
@@sebaaullador1292 No, I want to play a total war like game from another developer. Done with CA
@@brutus42690 Manor Lords, though mainly a realistic town-building game, will release soon, and aims to have Total War-esque real time battles, though more limited in scale. From what we´ve seen, it has a more tactical and slow-paced approach to combat, since your units are also your village population. I´d keep an eye on it if I were you.
@@Astraben I've been waiting for manor lords for what feels like a number of years now. It's a melding of my favorite types of games and I'm pretty hyped for it.
In the meantime, I've been playing bannerlord. It's a very different game, but its kind of similar, and the seige battles are one of my favorite parts.
The thing with Warhammer sieges is that with magic and artillery, the attacker doesn't even need to enter a city to destroy it completely... Defensive sieges are fun sometimes, since there are nice chokepoints in most maps now, but offensive sieges are virtually a guaranteed heroic victories for the player past the first few turns
Well, the siege battles for me is like sending a few tanky lord and hero to breach the gate, than cast the spells on them/heal them.
As long as the game has a flying unit, siege battle will always be mediocre
they could have added things like vine magic to create ladders or burning down gates with fire magic but ass ladders for all
warhammer has a big problem with breaching walls. A game that literally has large single entities and bigger units like the ''dragon ogres'' but when you destroy 2 parts of a wall next to eachother , it would literally be a single breach with a skinny ass wall in between. Who thought of that??
In Atilla when you destroy 2 sections of walls next to eachother , they crumble and combine into a bigger breach
@@Smokey348 Yeah, granted for most units it's not an issue but then you have things like the dread saurian which is too big to fit in the gap, so it's impossible to use them to attack a city. Not sure what else is too big to squeeze through the gap but yeah, that's not good, the wall should have large portions collapse if you destroy more wall sections.
To be honest. It isn’t just sieges. Battles have been really underwhelming for a while. Fast, bum rush battles, dumb AI with zero tactics. Really puts me off this series. It was ok until you play multiplayer or games like UG where real tactics impact outcomes
A siege should be an epic climax to a war. Or a decisive moment in it. Either that or you sit and wait the enemy out. Enemies should be able to force you to abandon a siege by out-manoeuvring your armies or attacking you elsewhere while banking on the fact that the siege can hold out long enough or that you'll cripple yourself if you attack.
I would agree but often times in these games even on higher difficulties it just doesn't feel like that. Whether it be Shogun 2, Medieval 2, Attila, I basically steamroll the sieges on the attack more often than not. And for defense, they're usually my way of making quick work of multiple enemy armies with little to no cost to myself. Not a single total war has been perfect in that regard. Now does this mean I'm fine with WH3's sieges, nope, the ass ladders are annoying, the supply system is better now but before it was a major problem, and even now it's still not good. The lack of map variety is a big issue, and the fact they felt like they had to remove minor settlement battles, which is stupid. They should've simply put a sally out frequency setting in the campaign option menu for players who don't like settlement battles.
There is also the issue that units can't cover enough space.
In theory an attacker attacking a defended position needs approximately 3 times as many troops as the defender to break through. But becuase units are fixed you cannot send half your archers to one wall and the other half to another wall if you only have one unit of archers.
The most annoying thing about this is a former CA dev once told me that they made a system to split units into smaller units, but decided not to implement it.
@ElZilchoYo that is madness, there have been so many times when i wished i could peel 60 men off a wall to support a weakening position or take advantage of an exposed flank.
@@ElZilchoYo That's similar to what they did in Med 1, Units were limited by how big the Castle was and even when they could fit many of the units would split into smaller units when the battle map came up. It helped to keep the player and AI from just grouping all their units in one place and meant they only had enough units to defend the castle and navigate through it with little path finding issues and give them enough advantage to hold off larger forces. Even as someone who did not like Med 1 sieges in general that was a nice feature that should have been brought over to the next games.
In atilla place the archers on the wall, hold the placement button, and push outward. Thats how you stack archers in single file to cover more of your wall.
or vice versa, where you have 3 units who've been chewed up, and it would make sense to combine them into a single unit
Shogun 2 actually has arse-ladder too, as any unit can climb the wall. The game however punishes it severely by having your men fall to their deaths if the wall is too high, and I think climbing units also have huge debuff to their combat.
Troy's lack of siege equipment is like, the point - the entire setting is based on the fact the Greeks can't conquer the city after 10 fking years. Troy's siege is the only time the fortification does what it's supposed to do: become a true pain in the arse for the attacker. Gone is the day when you can just arrive and take over a fortified city in 1 turn, then immediately move to the next target; quickly carve out a huge territory in the first few turns. Now you have to wait till the besieged army sally out due to starvation, or crash your army at their wall and have to wait 3-4 turns just to recover for the next campaign. Not a game style for everyone, but still a game design I can respect. (Still, they make the city map way too big for the AI to properly man the wall, giving you ample opportunity to sneak in without much resistance.)
On a side note: I actually like minor settlement battle , especially when defense with only the local garrison.
Despite cons of medieval 2 total war sieges it's still the best and I have so many memories still today of epic heroic last stand sieges in defence I did against unwinnable odds.
Or this specific huge random siege in late game, where I was attacking with my 2 full armies, having 2 full ally armies arriving, then suddenly 3 full enemy reinforcment armies arriving and then the enemy army defending in the Citadel level of defence with ballista towers.
But still won.
I also used to watch Pixelted Apollo medieval 2 multiplayer sieges. Which was the only ones I watched. There was just something about medieval 2 sieges despite it's flaws that just hit it beautifully and perfect.
I still remember watching the Rome II Carthage Siege battle video from CA. Oh how we were lied too.
Was never or has never been that hyped for a game as I was that day. My favorite line from that video, "we're still way way pre alpha. The final product will be much better."
@@agonsfitness7308maybe after 15 patches 😂😂😂
We were so easily gullible back then, now we're too cynical
I still remember and still hope.... Till now, sadly😢
a shameful display, indeed.
At least a part of the current problems with sieges in the more recent games starts at the campaign: namely they're too close to each others. more often than not you reach the next settlement within a single turn meaning that you fight one-sided siege battle after one-sided siege battle until reach a major city with an army and a garrison and you suffer losses which makes you temporarily halt your campaign to replenish your numbers.
There are ways to solve this (which have been used in older games):
Above all other suggestions (!!!!) make the distance between settlements larger (preferable with a fog of war which hides the settlements in places you have no information about) I can recall at least one campaign where I lost several turns because I lost my spy after an unexpected declaration of war and thus I was forced to choose between sending my army in blind (and leaving a gap in my defence) or hunkering down.
with regards of the battlemap:
I did like fighting in unfortified towns in troy (the best low tier settlements in my opinion, not gone disagree about the AI though) although I usually skipped fighting the walled settlements myself. I think they should expand on this: for example at the lowest tier the only advantage of fighting in a town is choke points and a garrison, the second tier adds barricades, pits and the like; third tier you get bulwarks (reinforced position at higher ground and at at least one of the entrances, ideal for desperate last stands, but with plenty of ways to pass around if you're willing to risk the archers on the top behind the protection of a breastwork) at the fourth tier you get proper walls and after that further upgrades to the walls and towers.
In this context whereas promoting a town from tier 1 to 2 and 3 should be fairly easy and cheap (to the point that it feels properly expendable), tier 3 to 4 especially should be a huge leap and whereas the jump to five and six should be (comparatively) smaller, it still ought to feel like a jump and by extension even a single such settlement should be of huge importance to your empire.
You ought to fear besieging a town like Syracuse, Carthage, Rome, Alexandria or Athens. We know that such sieges could literally take years. Besieging such a city should be a huge event, the entire culmination point of a campaign and most likely the end of such a war except for some mopping up. This should not be a lightly taken decision, there were good reasons that quite a few cities and polis remained (at least nominally) independent for a long time even after Rome became the dominant power.
Allow an army in such a city to regenerate unless the harbor is also blocked and the option to recruit even when it is under siege. make it multiple tier so that you not only have a fight for the wall and gate, but also for the inner city and citadel. add numerous low tier units to the defenders at every stage so that these can turn the battle in bloody meatgrind whilst their better units get to retreat for the next round.
Make the death of such a city a long drawn out affair that will lock at least one full army in place for multiple turns and preferably requires you to support it with a stream of reinforcements and/ or mercenaries. Rome wasn't build on a single day, it shouldn't fall on a single day either!
In short, more distance between settlements, greater differences between the different sorts of settlements and the advantages provided to the defenders (because they aught to be in the more advantageous position, it should not be a fair struggle to start!!!) Make the traditional siege a proper, epic, drawn out affair that feels like the high point of your campaign and provide the defenders with plenty of advantages which allow it to punish the assailants with huge losses and the ability to lock large numbers in place.
One solution i always solve with mods is using slower movement for armies. Makes everything much better.
I think the problems over at CA go above and beyond any singular issue like seige battles.
Im honestly not at all confident Creative Assembly will be around much longer because it seems like your usual braindead corporate type has a stranglehold over the company and as long as that continues, the series will continue to decline.
Need some chad to come who understand the very basic principle of what made total war so good and just do that. Feel so sorry for the devs who are forced to deal with the higher ups. I can only imagine how many meetings they have had/are going to have trying to figure out why they cant squeeze more money out of a failing product. Which in turn means layoffs (Pretty sure this just happened) and the cycle continues.
I hope the battles in manor lords are good.
A chad with a lot of money.
Problem is that total wars are 2 games in one.
A grand strategy one and a tactical one.
So it needs a lot of money. And has a diminishing player base. (Because original fans are getting older and recent shenanigans and drop in quality)
Not sure how a newcomer could manage to build all this from the ground up at the level of quality people now expect.
@@etienne8110 dev tools are cheaper than ever, some even free so don't @me with that "need lotta moneyz" bullshit.
The only times i ever felt happiness was Medieval 2 and Shogun 2 siege battles
I remember my single peasant unit managing to fend off Milanese spearmen while i quickly got soldiers to reinforce the castle
Shogun 2 is , Shogun 2
The rest were pretty nightmarish and a chore , Empire and Napoleon felt like i was charging the Isonzo River for the 300th time
Sieges in Attila are better than M2 and Shogun 2 combined.. Shogun 2 had very very basic sieges.. but yes they were fun.
Nah Medieval 2's were ruined by pathfinding and other bullshit, units getting stuck in siege towers, units getting partially stuck on walls, cavalry charges stopping before they hit, Shogun 2 and Attila are peak historical TW for me, rome 1 and medieval 2 haven't aged well imo.
Honestly, Medieval 2 as a whole is incredibly overrated. And this is coming from someone who played TW games since Rome 1.
I mean, there were literally only 6 truly unique siege maps in that game, yet people try to ignore that.
Because I played a lot of Rome 2 sieges in multiplayer, and while not perfect, I still had plenty of fun with them, as they actually had a lot of improvements since M2, but I know lots of M2 fanboys will try to childishly ignore them.
I mean, being able to actually knock down more than multiple sections of wall was pretty helpful.
@@chubbyninja89 And the Pathfinding bugs STILL EXISTS UNTIL NOW 😭
@@danielomar9712
In Medieval 2 or Rome 2?
Because the AI pathfinding has always kind of be troublesome in the TW games, not just the newer ones.
Players can manage to work around most of it, but not the AI.
A siege battle rework was one of the biggest marketed features of W3, promising actual sieges reminiscient of older titles. Instead we got two superficial reworks that pretty much adressed none of the issues, and sieges are the worst they have ever been.
Ya know, one thing im hearing, and I agree with ya, but AI is the recurring theme. I, like many, found Thrones to have the strongest siege elements in spite of what became a slog of game play. Especially the unique major cites. Those were amazing. Still, and ever again with CA and Total War... they need to at least try to make AI that functions beyond an assumed rock paper scissors schematic. Id love it in a deployment I placed my cavalry center, and put my archers on the flanks, when i enter the battle, the AI demonstrates that it responds to that set up.
Amazing that modders gave fixed the bugs and improved the AI but a multi million triple AAA organization can't???
Talking about visual cringe how about units not retreating into the city say when holding a gate. They will literally break and then try to run out the gate the enemies are coming in from and just run into the enemy's swords and die, so fucking stupid and they used to have this right in M2TW and they also had a feature when surrounded they'd go into a desperation last stand mode where they fought to the death and it was cool! idk how this isn't mentioned more. its horrible and completely immersion-breaking.
It was also a rather important mechanic, because surrounding a dangerous enemy unit so they would fight to the death could easily end up maiming you far worse than the enemy.
@@MartinTraXAAIt's an awesome feature because the Art of War actually has a section on not fully encircling the enemy and leaving a gap so they try to escape instead of fighting to death.
not sure why is AI so suicidal ever since Medieval 2 :D
There’s a reason why I don’t have large unit size because I don’t want to wait 10 minutes for John Citizen who’s the last man in the unit to finally get over the walls or to reach the ground, it makes pathfinding 100 times worse and makes my troops vulnerable
Yea it'll really make you pull your hair out!
Im so agree with this. The IA is really old, not only in the sieges... The IA doesnt know to attack or encircle or defend propertly
I think it does pretty well with large cav armies but thats just it. but beinging sieged by AI opponment often looks atrocious :D
Shogun 2's sieges are the best for me personally. The layered walls, the upgraded tower defences, the decision making to burn your towers, and the key rationing of your ranged unit ammo. One of the few total war games I keep coming back to.
Shogun layouts are what wins it a gold star over prior TW's. I disagree on later. The pathfinding is very bad in Shogun. Even better is Troy and Pharaoh TW.
I love my Med 2 sieges, but I loved the scale of Rome 2 sieges.
That's just nostalgia. CA never had good sieges. Rome 2 was probably best, but there were so many I auto resolved almost all of them.
@@mcmarkmarkson7115 the problem with Rome 2 is, that city models on the campaign map are too big and to close to eachother, You can reach one city from other one within 1 or 2 turns, so this leads in 80% or 90% city battles in many areas
@@Lukaskovac-ex4nf there will always be things like that. Cities too close or too far, too many or too few sieges. Sieges taking too long or too short. Walls and towers being too good or too bad.
@@mcmarkmarkson7115 there are good things and bad things, and one bad thing about Rome 2 (and later TW) are these city models very close to eachother, comparing to "older TW" (Shogun 2, Rome 1)
@@Lukaskovac-ex4nf that's not the point, you simply can't make sieges everyone will like
I liked the Empire TW feature wherein having an overwhelming army gives you the option to demand the surrender of a garrison. This should be a randomized feature in games. The chances are higher when you besiege a city the first few turns after defeating a full stack.
Atilla was good with the multiple platforms in the city but it needs to evolve now to 2 or 3 sets of walls where you can upgrade the defences. It's not in depth enough
campers dream.. Sieges are already easy with gatling arrow towers, no need to change vanilla ttila. Would be cool to see 2-3 layered citadels in 1212mod tho.
Even though the castles in shogun were really small. I do think they were among the best. Since the AI actually decided to attack settlements, now they just wait until you are starve.
I totally agree, but would go further and say that battles in Warhammer in general are terrible. There is zero tactical depth to them it's purely about min maxing your troops and the battles are so unnecessarily fast you barley have any time to employ tactics in the first place.
I just wanna know what the thought process behind the idea of turning the game into basically a bare bones arcade game as technology has gotten better.
“I know most of our fans got into the game because of its technical and tactical appeal but let’s strip all of that away for the few people that complain about how long battles are.”
I enjoy Pharaoh and I do feel like the AI responds quite well to defend areas of towns and cities. For me the most annoying thing in that game is that your units will forget attack orders on routing enemy units if they are inside a fort or settlement.
I lost interest once I saw the devs didn't care about historical accuracy.
What really kills Warhammer sieges are the ass ladders... Large monsters or even ogres destroying walls is totally fine in my opinion, but every random melee infantry being able to climb walls its totally removes any tactic...
Empire, Napoleon, and I think MAYBE also Shogun II use forts, but ETW + NTW for sure. They're not supposed to represent the actual city but one of the several forts outside them. If you look and zoom in, there's always a low poly city way off in the distance on every siege map that represents the city you're wanting to capture by taking this fort.
and that's entire nonsense since forts outside of cities were extremely rare.
i would say that the biggest issue with Troy and Pharaoh are the price tags : Troy is 50 euros and Pharaoh is 40 euros . They should have been 30 euros maximum since they are basically dlc's.
Ofcourse the unsolved issues you mentioned are definitely a big issue too
One of the biggest problems the series has is the HP system from R2, that utterly moronic mechanic completely breaks so much of the game flow and balance. You could get a lot of work done in R1 with basic Round Shield Cav even against high tier units despite them being rather trash as long as you used them right, but due to the HP mechanic low tier units are literally unuseable as they have too low of a damage stat to do anything (Rear charge with even horse archers in R1 and a Legion will take quite a few losses and take good morale damage, in R2 lighter shock cavalry need several charges to even kill a single soldier and by that time your infantry are toast). This also means ranged combat is ass as you no longer have devastating volleys from your Bow Samurai tearing apart the enemy as they try to advance, as it takes several hits to drop a single guy so you get this weird situation where the first two volleys do basically no damage but then suddenly 20 people drop from the 3rd (Assuming the archers even bother with volleys, 3K it seems just has them firing a constant stream of chip damage rather than coordinated volleys).
Combine the fact that raw numbers are all that matters rather than actual tactics with really bad AI and siege gimmicks and you get absolute messes posing as battles. Add in a sprinkling of collision issues and unit weight problems as well as the units themselves blobbing instead of holding a formation to add that last bit of zest to your turd pie.
Now thats bullshit.. The whole battles are balanced about hp system, you cant just take it away.Although theres some mod for attila ´´fixing it´´ :D tbh we probably play different games, bcs in Medieval2 without hp´s most of lower tier archers were literally useless as they cant kill anything with some armour or shield defense yet in attila archers can be quite op sometimes.
@@krystofcisar469 I am currently playing M2, and unless you are using peasant archers to shoot plate armored knights you get results on your first volley unlike R2 and beyond where you need several and suddenly after the 3rd or 4th people fall over.
Why isn't any CA siege battles were you have a moat or a ditch around your castle?
Medieval 2 castle battles have a most and only 1 gate to attack. Much harder to assault.
Remember, in rome 1 units fled to the center of the city, which gave an advantage to the defender since they fought to the last man and also gave a feeling that it was a decisive battle and that winning or losing it was decisive for the campaign. What I think it lacks is realism, a defender should be able to defend a city with few troops, which is impossible, nowadays the defending and attacking armies usually have the same troops or the attacker a little more, which is absurd. Attacking a fortified city requires vastly outnumbering the defenders. If that mechanic is implemented there would be fewer sieges, they would be more significant, and it would even make the players think about whether it is worth attacking or simply waiting and starving them.
One thing that I think would help somewhat is having less settlements on the campaign map and smaller settlements on the battle maps (with unique locations being the exception on settlement size).
That way most battles would be land battles, giving siege battles more significance since you have less settlements and can't afford to lose many, and making most maps smaller or more focused would help the AI by giving it less options to think about.
I agree that Thrones has some of the best siege battles of any TW, ultimately handicapped by the mediocre AI.
I never really understood why some think so highly of Shogun 2 sieges - the ability to climb walls without siege equipment was basically one giant, immersion-breaking bandaid that CA used to address its crappy AI and pathfinding.
Rome 2 and Attila, while flawed in their own ways, had much better sieges than anything offered by Medieval or Rome 1 - to say that the pathfinding and unit behaviors and AI was the same between the newer and older titles is disingenuous.
At least war hammer 3 has not all flat one sided cities. The one walled ones are alot more rare now
Sooo true and so sad. Sieges were the battles that i wanted the most and now i'm avoiding it.
Such a fail fromage CA. I agree with all your list at the end
Hope they will be best
The biggest issues I’ve had with siege battles us these massive square walls, with very thick wall ways. You never see any castles or unique designs off these time periods. I’d much rather have it set to were my archers and infantry are in static positions in cool looking castle walls with windows, levels, and drop points for rocks and stuff. It’s just sad to see that CA has made absolutely NO progress since Attila; graphically and gameplay wise. They have actually regressed in gameplay.
Attila is my favorite TW game
Total War Three Kingdoms was the nail in the coffin for my love of creative assembly. Also limiting units to only be a part of a generals army took away a ton of tactics used throughout history. I don't think it's just the sieges but that Total War literally lost it's soul.
wym, Total war three kingdoms has actually some of the best systems ever introduced, it prevented a lot of boring gameplay habbits as well as actually innovating after a looooooong time.
People wonder why CA doesn't innovate anymore yet they trash on any titles that try to do that:D
Thrones - superior juicy battles and population tied to unit count
3kingdoms - general system was actualy awesome, prevented every battle with every army being the same and it was actually very historical approach to have specialized commanders of regiments, diplomacy was superior to all other titles and it was the most beautiful looking total war game without a doubt
troy - actually the best grand campagin mechanics in terms of resources and how much tactical you need to be during campagin instead of classic boring ''conquer everything'' strat.
yeah, all of them had their mistakes, but these titles had actually something extra. More innovation means better games in the future, but not if fans trash on it
My two cents: the main design change that has negatively impacted the series was the switch from regions (MTW1) to an open map (RTW onwards). Not only did this (in my opinion) bog down the strategy part in unnecessary micro that slows the pace of the game down, it also significantly increased the number of siege battles. In MTW1, you would attach a region. Only if you won this battle, or the enemy chose to retreat to the keep, did you start a siege; you then had to decide whether to keep besieging passively or initiate a siege battle. Sieges only focused on the castle, not the town, but despite the castle designs being very simple, it was a tremendously fun experience to watch your siege engines batter the walls down. The switch to an open map also causes the frustrating mechanic of winning a field battle, only for the remnants of the enemy army to flee, requiring you to fight again next turn, and so on until they are completely decimated.
My biggest gripe with M2TW's siege battle was how hard it was to place units in the streets.
You'd get blocked by non existing walls constantly when trying to set your infantry and god forbid your cavalry especially.
there is one issue too, the siege usually takes a lot longer then "one battle", most of the siege battle contained tons of sieges and a final victory or retreat. in TW this just all became attrition and one clash...
CA had a good think going on with the way you recruited units in Medieval 2. Making rare units rare and losing them a high price made sieges a high risk high reward situation
Map design absolutely needs to be looked-at (I personally would just want realistic maps with defenses I can place PRIOR to a battle) but it’s really the AI that ruins everything.
We need a new engine, period.
I’d argue that we need a new dev… they’ve messed so many things up that all it will take is one pioneering developer to give people what they’re asking for and CA will lose half its customer base overnight.
Oh yea in empire Siege battle were terrible, the AI is clearly not made for this and many things are missing, Vauban had a strategy to dig trenches to get closer to the walls for example, siege Battle in this game were boring and I always ask if there's a mod to take them out
Shogun 2 be like
Me: So what is my option on sieging the enemy?
CA: Bows and arrows!
Me: Bows and what?
CA: Bows and arrows! And tons and tons of body to pile up.
at this point im convinced they outsourced their entire programming staff to a bunch of h1b visas
Bingo
I wish your handle was tied to your real identity.
My problem with sieges in Warhammer is that I never feel like I have the time to actually properly siege a settlement. Every settlement in IE is basically a single turn of movement away from another settlement. The opportunity cost of sitting around a settlement for more than a single turn is too high in the early game, especially on higher difficulty. I want sieges to be more difficult, something I can’t win on the turn I get there, but I also don’t feel like Warhammer facilitates slower, measured play.
Attila managed to be the modern peak, although buggy. Since then it's just a glorified land battle with a big hump in the middle.
Bring back the original medieval citadels, those shits were all but impossible to take
Siege battle have no sens at all when both army have near the same number of people in it. If you lay siege to forteress with a 1 to 1 ratio, you either die very stupidly trying to storm the walls or you just wait till they have no food (which is fairly quick when you have a big army inside the walls).
Siege battles in TW were never something to brag about, not even back in the days of Medieval Total War 1, which arguably was the last time time when they were any good. In fact, if memory serves, back in the days of RTW1 we used to call that game jokingly Siege total war, due to the fact that every war devolved into fighting full stacks in siege battles by the end-game, and quite often even sooner. Armies have no business defending city walls or castles. Then again, the entire TW formula is 20 years stale by now. If simulation of historical warfare was ever their goal, they have abandoned it ages ago.
biggest issue with seige battles for me is the lack of realism, it should be heavily defence sided with the walls being costly to take but then once taken it becomes more even with the street by street building by building fighting, whereas in most tw games it can often be better as the defender to let them into the city, abandon the walls and gates and just block the roads
Couple of points on things that have contributed to sieges and battles lacking importance. The replenishment system and the predictive auto resolve system. When I replay some Medieval 2, I find myself manually fighting almost every battle because of how devastating army loses can be in that game. Even housing guerilla warfare with archers and cav archers to dwindle some forces as they approach and then retreat off the map to gain a tactical edge in a future battle. Currently there is no tactical edge. Armies replenish in a couple of turns and army losses mean nothing so long as the unit doesn't get fully killed. Because of that and how predictive the auto resolve is, I find myself auto resolving most battles in Warhammer. Sieges lack importance because you know as long as your army isn't wiped out you can be as cavalier defensively or offensively and your army will be replenished in a couple of turns to full strength as long as you win. There is no real need to be tactical when unit losses are meaningless and your units are always expendable
AI in med2 will at least retreat from the walls and defend chokepoints instead of just dying on the walls like later AI
Thrones could of been such a goat of a total war game but I feel like the way they did the towns/city mechanics where your cities could be disrupted by razing the small towns around it was pretty atrocious. But it was such a clean game for being on the Attila engine.
I have a really memorable last alliance siege where I had a glorious last stand against like 5000 orcs. It was so much fun even though I lost
Something that no one talks about,shogun 2 sieges would be perfect if everyone DIDN'T climb walls. There are features of siege that most people don't even know existed because every unit has siege ladders hard coded. Making it false doesn't even disable it. Instead of ninja being special, everyone is ninja. Did any of you even know gated can be torched in shogun? Did you know you could guard gate ramps with archers firing down after the gate is breached? Creative assembly is always crippling siege mechanics by insisting that the ai ONLY climb walls.
Well, let's just wait, and we have the same as with naval battles, that they aren't around anymore, that seems to be Sega, Ca best plan for a problem.
My biggest issue with siege battles has always been the lack of variety in settlements. I get it would be a ton of work but we have archeological evidence of what many ancient cities look liked. Why not use this to create settlements that would have been similar to their historic reality? This would make sieges of towns/cities unique and enjoyable rather than a drag.
All I want is for my units to stop climbing towers when I don’t tell them to
I couldn't agree with you about the Warhammer Sieges more, Terminator. The Siege Rework fell flat on its face the day it made its debut! And even though the rework fell flat on it's face, I try to deal with it, and I'm hoping that Creative Assembly will be able to fix that siege rework.
There was this guy, belaruse?, who talked about technical debt which to me sounds like a main issue.
So the concept is that every total war game since wascape engine 2 (Napoleon) is simply built on top of the older game leading to a "debt" of old issues that was never resolved and has become an issue so a fix that should take a few weeks to finish x takes ages to fix cause it is webbed in with so much old garbage.
Reason I believe this is partly that people have found traces of older games in the code.
But also from experience. I work in industry programming and we have had a challenge where everyone just inherited some one else foundation.
That brought with these issues that lay deep in a code that looked like they worked but was not tested properly and what specific situations occurs was brought to life.
I got so tired of this so I just made my own foundation from scratch.
I can believe that if it is true that they just continuously keep building on an old broken engine with the gate bug and the pathfinding bug they just inherit tons of problems.
Then need to make something new. Take the best bits from the games and code that has worked and redo the bits that haven't worked.
Or something completely new.
Otherwise they will loose customers.
I have vowed to never pre order a total war and never buy one of I hear that that these issues still exists.
I think that on the war hammer universe the siege battles got huge potential, the lore design of the cities of each race was great but got none impact on the game. They were all the same, yet they got the potential to be so perfect...
Imagine if we still had the CA from 2000 - 2011. The amount of innovations that we could've gotten must've been through the roof.
The fact that they're still using the same warscape engine since empire, more than a decade old engine is insane.
if you innovate and make games more complicated it isn't AAA title anymore...
You can innovate only on indie scale, that's how the market works
CA should release 1 game in 6-7 years but that is worth our investment. Then iterrate and update (DLCs) for atleast 4-6 years. By that time another 1 title being developed and released.
DLCs - not just faction packs but an update that improves gameplay substantialy with new mechanics and new capabilities.
At least for Warhammer 3, I think just getting rid of ass ladders and making it so only specialized infantry like naturally stalking units can climb walls would go a long way for major sieges. Minor sieges without defensive buildings should just be one capture point and a couple decent defensive positions that might be better for the attacker if they have ranged superiority. Every tier of defensive building gives the settlement better defensive positions to the point that without artillery or specialized units the attacker just can't get in. You sacrifice a building slot or maybe two so that the region becomes a fort instead of a town.
I checked out after Thrones of Brittania. No title since has really interested me. And I’m likely not going to return to the franchise until we see either Empire 2, Victoria total war, or WW1 total war. I also wouldn’t be opposed to a LOTR total war either.
And then theres me:
-play warhammer 3
-play as skaven
-unlock nuke
-just nuke cities, completely avoiding siege mechanics
Shogun 2 had great simple sieges. Gun units (on defense) have never been more satisfying before or since.
Honestly Shogun 2 is by far my favorite when it comes to siege battles. The fact that all units can climb all walls just made it so chaotic and fun while still retaining some form of tactical thinking due to the multi layered design of the higher level forts. Only downside is that the campaign is filled with tons of level 1 boring castles that totally ruin the immersion.
Finally, someone who likes Thrones of Britannia! One of my favourite ToW games!
The issue with CA is the same issue that plagues all companies. They start out small and innovative, and then they become successful and the lackies and grifters pour out of the wood work and destroy companies with red tap / beauracracy / and saddle it with ineficiency and lack of creativity. I have been in project management for 20 years, and without fail the larger companies I work with are always the most ineficient and worst managed.
Could you imagine Thrones with an expanded map that expands all the way to cover the same area as Rome II? It would be far too big but it would be amazing.
You would still get Attila’s combat, Thrones sieges, and Rome IIs culture/unit diversity, in Medieval IIs historical setting.
Hopefully we see better siege mechanics when you wait. How good would it be to able to choose where the breach happens/repairing breaches, digging mines/counter mines, quick sorties to disrupt siege works. These actions using up supplies, soldiers, and advanced ones requiring advanced engineers.
Turn actions like 'plague trebuchet ammo' from a technology to be researched to a general trait-related (Cruel Genghis Khan isn't going to lose any sleep).
breach happens when u make it. wtf? :D
When you watch a historical battle, you see how the side starts the siege, tries to dig tunnels to try to undermine the walls, builds parapets so that their soldiers/engineers can draw trenches to bring firing positions closer and builds positions from which to use siege weapons/cannons with the aim of trying to break a point or more of the wall and try to overwhelm the defenders. All this with limited resources for both, which can mean that defenders must launch an attack or that attackers have an urgency to launch theirs.
Total wars don't have that sense that a siege is serious for both sides. And the only thing that is reflected or attempted is something as vague as leaving the army besieging hoping that the enemy will have his units greatly reduced. A simplification, which kills the relevance of sieges.
OK, let's ask .....to improve their siege mechanics. If not them, maybe Paradox will lend a hand in 10 years.
Biggest problems;
1) AI sucks
2) Pathfinding is awful, doesn't allow for historically accurate cities
3) Identical siege maps, there are 3-4 maps per faction type in the game maybe 20 maps total but realistically the player will play the same 5 siege maps 100 times in a campaign
4) no ability to design the castle walls IN GAME, I want to be able to lay out my fortifications in response to the local geography!
5) No risk for the attacker or bonus for the defender
6) BLOB, massless blob of clipping
I disagree about Rome 1 not aging well, last week I had a blast taking Sparta from the AI, with no pathing issues. You can make the AI seize up if you know how to make it get choice paralysis, but if you avoid exploiting its weakness, you can have fun ala Shogun 2 style fight to the end.
sucks that sometime AI will paralyse themselves :D just few days ago in attila mod huge - 3 huge AI armies made of lightcav and skirmisher spam sieged me and then finally attacked with 4 siege towers. it worked for them until they lost llke 1/3 of army and then it was just stuck.
I’ve had a total war Attila campaign going with a friend for going on half a year now. With us always playing on opposing sides the sieges are great.
Depending on the period sieges should be anything but risky with most of the warfare based around that. Of course besieging a city far away in enemy territory was always a risk, but the next door fortress or castle should not
there should be way more options, sally out radious should be entire province, also, with ur ideas it would help, that way armies cant just march all over the place, crusader kings style of options for sieges and campaign, look at how popular just a mod that combines attila and crusader kings is! they need to double down on that because thats why we love it, because of the options. trojan horse ideas, tunneling, commander duels they added from three kingdoms was awesome, and historically accurate to an extent, . in the towns, you should be able to hide troops within buildings, and ambushing options, maybe intentionally flooding surrounded areas of towns, or other geographic based options. Hate how they tease you with it by letting you place ONE weak barricade ona aroad in attila, like that could have been expanded so much.
I’d love to see some more in depth mechanics for the actual process of laying siege to settlements. I’m reluctant to use the word ‘mini games’, but some kind of limited time events to reflect the lengthy back and forth nature of historical sieges would be a really nice touch for immersion, and perhaps add a little more risk as well.
Walls also need more health and importance. Having the walls provide buffs for whoever controls it like missile evasion, infinite ammo for missile troops, and accuracy and missile damage buffs. Breaching a wall should actually compel you to take as many turns as it would need to weaken it before the upcoming assault. And a forward operating base for the besiegers would be nice as well to provide some resupply buff for missile troops and a defensive position for address defending troops sallying out to meet you in battle. But of course they would need to fix the AI and pathfinding to make this actually work among the many other items you brought up.
Pharaoh had actually decent siege and battles. When we have family trees, more faction and mortal characters, i think it will become the new gen overtaking shogun 2 and rome 2 modded.
Ima spit some facts here. Total war's biggest problem is the battle AI ever since the beginning. If CA wont invest in skilled AI developers and rework the overall AI design. Then it is not worth to buy your game no matter what cool feature they add.
A very good AI design is the only thing im asking for, and let modders do the rest for CA's incompetence
Sadly I doubt CA is gonna spend the time and money to fix siege battles since they're in such dire straights right now. After the Shadows of Change debacle and all the layoffs, they don't have a lot of wiggle room. Warhammer is pretty much the only thing keeping the lights on, and only recently have they gotten back into the communities good graces with Thrones of Decay.
The path finding in med 2 is fine on lower unit scales.
Did you seriously say napeolon and empire were equally bad as Rome and med 2…?
How is that even comparable ? Empire sieges vs med 2 multiple layered sieges. What a joke.
Decent ai alone would make all sieges in the games feel 100x better
Defenders should get some kind of bonus for defending walls and staying on them, like receiving some extra missile resistance and melee defense while on the walls or something. If they lose walls they were defending, they should receive a leadership penalty.
I mean the multi layered castles from shogun 2 are because that’s how japanese castles were built
There are two TW that are incredibly strong and have their full potential:
Darth Mod by TW Rome(classic) and Thee Kingdoms.
The fact that Medival2 is repeatedly called the "best" TW probably has something to do with the fact that at that time many films took place in the Middle Ages, and from a mechanical point of view it is one of the worst TWs ever....
The original. Rome TW had the tunneling and undermining walls. Required build time even
For ladders. What happened?
sapping emchanics would be definitely cool in any TW game! as far as i know only old rome and some Warhammer kinda does it.
The biggest issue is CA literally removing chat... permanently.
What would probably affect CA the most at this point is if people A. Stopped buying their shitty games
B. Stopped talking about them at all
A more dynamically destructive building/wall environment has always been my dream.
I had some of my most memorable, and absolutely massive battles (units on the field wise) in shogun 2 and the AI was definitely good, but to say that shoguns sieges were one of the best is eh. From a combat perspective maybe yes, but absolutely zero siege equipment and essentially just climbing up the walls like spider man in relatively small castles kinda through me out of immersion a lot of the time. And Kyoto was about as big as a medium sized estate in rural Europe.
Your right. I honestly wish they would have made special maps for Constantinople and other major cities Rome as well. CA feels like they just want to release and not fix bugs taking their customers for granted.