I dont think that how easily trivialized the sieges are is the problem. I think the problem is that engaging with the sieges the "intended" way is incredibly unfun. The movement of units inside the cities is just so janky, only made worse by the way the barricades work.
This. Everyone praised CA for city maps, but the maps are not that good. I mean they look nice, but designed in way which makes the batlles inside the walls frustrating and boring. Not to mention AI can't handle these maps as well
Exactly, I remember a campaign where once I started getting strong heroes I never played a "legit" siege battle, because they're frustrating to engage with in so many ways
@@maximum9977 Very unlikely scenario tbh, esp if you bring a spells and artillery, but yep that sounds boring. I mean there's something to the idea that sieges require methodical preparation followed by slow and painful grind, but hell, that's a video game where's my fun)
Sieges are very big maps with ridiculous mazy pathing. The ai is not smart, it cannot handle defense from multiple sides. There is no universe were sieges work while I can attack on multiple sides. Blind spots on towers don't matter, towers will target the closest unit, you can have heros dodge shots while your infantry advances right at the towers and tak no losses. The map layouts make it almost impossible to effectively use artillery or missile units as the defender. There is no solution to sieges without scraping literally every map and going back to warhammer 2 style maps. Then at least the ai could stay facing the correct direction and could use its missile units
The Warhammer a.i cant even Go through Open Gates and climb ladders insted. But the a.i was Solid with huge Siege Battles in Medieval 2, but why Not in tww3? CA did Something wrong big time.
Defensive Sieges are some of my favorites Battles in Medieval 2. The ones with 3 layers of walls in citadels we're so Epic. In tww3 they are super underwhelming.
I think sieges in TW3 is definitely better than in the other games, but the siege update was kinda like a patchwork solution. The ideal fix imo would be to implement multiple layers of gates, so a outer fort and inner fort. The lotr mod to Medieval 2 has this on some siege maps. If they did that, made it possible to place artillery on walls/high platforms inside and made it so you must actually build the ladders and carry them, that would improve it a lot. Its not gonna happen in this game though, it would take quite a lot of work.
A bandaid fix would be more siege engines, for example some type of catapults we can use against the city or specialised ladder carriers. Some factions that are good ar sieging could get some loreful additions that are better. Beastmen of course being the weakest at sieged and dwarfs being the strongest. That would somewhat make it less of a pain in the ass and make sieging bearable without reworking the entire system from ground up. I usually play out important capital sieges just for the rp aspect.
I enjoyed the siege battles in Warhammer 2 and the Medieval 2 seige battles were absolutely superb, Warhammer 3 went in a direction that I find inexplicable, I normally auto resolve the 🙄
The only complaint i have is how weak and useless the towers you can build inside the city are. They inflict almost no damage no matter which one you build
The only complaint I really accept is that pathing is insane. Units have way too much of a tendency to just go crazy, and it can happen at any time, anywhere, but sieges and especially the walls are where it happens the most and the worst. Honestly, I don't buy any of the other complaints I've really heard about sieges. Yes, you can cheese them in specific ways, and the AI will not cheese you back to level the playing field, oh no. Well, I've enjoyed siege battles since shogun, and I can confidently proclaim that these are the most interactable battles I've generally had, and I find them usually very appealing to try and figure out how to make them work. Every race has to approach them differently, and they all need to take different layouts differently. Some battles are better tried to stealth your way in and take over victory points. Others, you need to get the AI to move into specific kill zones. Sometimes you need to rely on the passive defenses to help wittle the enemy army down. The only reason I find all these complaints ridiculous is because I've seen them inconsistently applied. Siege battles are too hard/easy/lazy/fast/slow/pointless/campaign ending/confusing/simple. I am convinced only that people all have a distinct way of thinking of how sieges "should" be and that it interferes with any objective views that could be applied. People want historic sieges? If you are talking about storming a castle, history will show you those basically never fell; better get used to spending 13 rounds for every single province. Talking towns? High variability could take it over as a happenstance, and you could end up losing most of your army to Gurrila tactics and an unhappy population. So we don't want super high variability, or basically just making siege battles a no-sell? Then we aren't being realistic, so get off the high horse about it. So we are being unrealistic, making the walls a lot weaker than they realistically would be, and incorporating some of the things we've seen in movies to help make them a lot cooler. We have towns, so allow some defenses and such to be built that can assist the garrisons. I find this approach to be incredibly reasonable, providing the defender with a significant advantage in battles, yet not insurmountable or unbeatable. If your complaint is that there are ways to cheese the battles, one that's partly built in, so you can think your way around problems or try to bash your way through. But two and more importantly, that's basically just how the system is built, even in normal battles. You can build and figure out a way to cheese with every faction, partly with how all of the systems work together and partly because the AI is only programmed with so many responses, and this is pretty much true for any game ever made that I'm aware of. If you think you are making things too easy for yourself, either start putting some real challenges on yourself or stop using the cheese tactics. If both of these are unacceptable, try going into the speedrunning community and seeing just how fast you are compared to others in completing specified goals. This rant isn't really directed at anyone specifically; I'm just getting so tired of people talking about sieges, saying how they think sieges would be so much better with x,y, but cut out this z. Then we see mods or CA implement them, and they still don't like it, so it must be that y was never a good thing; take it out and put in h instead. If it really bothers you so much, mod them out. And that's a fine response. Also, holding up Shogun 2 for "good siege battles" seems incredibly silly when I was routinely using the garrisons to turn back 20 stacks with charging antics or just overwhelming elite armies with ashigaru spears., while sneaking into the castle was even easier than in any other total war I've played.
Honestly I don't mind the sieges in Total War Troy. Sure sieges always suck but it's less painful to play. There is no artillery so you don't have to waste a unit slot on that. You rush the walls and secure an area to enter. It's a slow process. And the way the walls are designed, you can't really cheese the game by using slingers / archers to kill everything from outside the walls, as you wont really be hitting them or you'll hit the front of shielded units doing no damage. It's a more cinematic melee confrontation.
honestly siege battles need to be completely redone from the ground up. frankly, nothing in it works and all previous attempts have been nothing but a polished turd. some mods have done it pretty well, giant walls and large, tiered battle zones with lots of space. but they were passion projects full of bugs and too long of a battle, to do it professionally will require much more manpower. which leads to the inevitable conclusion that the game simply does not have enough years left in it to bother with that, and frankly with the spaghetti code rumors they might not be able to. In other words, were gonna have to wait until wh3's successor (probably TW40k) until we see some proper fortress battles again.
The WH2 system was much better than the stupid WH3 one, it should have been a toggle in the options. Also the towers and walls are simply NOT strong enough.
TBH I think they changed the capture system so you couldn't cheese every siege with a solo fast lord or stalking units (or on some maps just have your reinforcements arrive directly on top of it, did they fix that yet?).
the main problem I see with sieges is that the AI is terrible at defending against them, while it tries to avoid ever letting you have any hope of defending at all via starving your armies until they literally collapse. I have seen many more winnable, engaging siege battles back in warhammer 2 then I have here.
I honestly don't mind the overall design of sieges that much. However, the pathfinding and bugginess around walls eliminates a good portion of strategic decision-making. Ogres are actually quite fun in sieges, since you can just barrel through the walls, avoiding the gate bug and pathfinding issues from siege ladders/towers. But if you want to avoid jank with almost everyone else you have to choose to either go over the walls or through the walls, not both. With the gate bug being a thing, I usually just swarm the walls with melee-heavy factions like Khorne, or barrel through the gates with monsters.
pro tip for the ai, dont even BOTHER breaking the gates or docking ladders, break a fat hole in the wall with anything and go through that, ALSO ANOTHER FUN FACT FOR SKAVEN PLAYERS, DRILLS actually break the walls in like 9 seconds, verrry fast. just keep 1 in army if not doom stack early, as RANDOMLY every province city even lvl 1 has fucking WALLS now
Sieges have the same problem that real world fortresses had. Once there are weapons that easily destroy walls (or fly over them in Warhammer..), then it becomes obsolete. I think sieges could only work in Warhammer if CA completely redesigns the function and purpose of sieges. Probably walled settlements are not compatible with warhammer's weaponry..
My main gripe, is the poor POOR pathfinding of your units. The gate's open and unused? 'Nah! let's climb those ladders that one of the other units assaulting the walls used! There's a hole in the wall AND gate open? 'Nah! ladders'
If you look at famous sieges in history where walls were actually breached for example the fall of constantinople it took the turks weeks of constant bombardment. So no breaking the walls in a few minutes.😂😂 In Both unsuccesfull attacks on Vienna the defenders defended the breach succesfully. The first time without help. The second time the combined polish-german-habsburgian army came to rescue the City. My point is that breaking walls should be an attrition effect and not obtainable during the battle. Maybe the attack could start in that moment. Towers should not be buildable during the battle at all.😂😂😂 Experimental archeologists who rebuild a historically accurat trebuche for a documentary on tv bombarded an experimental castle wall and they did relatively low damage and would have needed days of constantly hitting the same spot to break the wall. Are there any mods that make walls stronger?
The Towers inside the Cities are just the worst, they come out of nowhere they look the same for every faction and they are extremely powerful. The tactic is just to build everything around these towers.
It's so hard to even disentangle all of the things CA has got wrong about every aspect of the game, to even say what's wrong at the core about sieges, but certainly the TWW3 version is terrible. I just have no faith in CA to ever solve it because the people who understood how to design games are clearly no longer calling the shots. This is going to sound so out-of-left-field, but I have what I think is an informative challenge, and it's related to sieges; Get a victory on Very Hard or Legendary as any civ without ever becoming a high strategic threat to the AI, the little triangle indicator can never exceed yellow. Short or long vic, I don't mind, it should show up in either but it's probably easier to stay unthreatening in short. You'll have to intentionally self-cripple, and not play hyper-aggressively, and I think that particular line in the sand of "high threat" is part of what CA thinks is going on. Sieges are tough because a well defended capital makes *sense.* If I put a garrison building in non-capital settlements, it *should* be two armies or at least 3 turns, or else why did I build it? The "Siege attacker" trait allowing sieges to be skipped is a core problem, I think. It would drastically slow campaigns down, yes, but I think the biggest complaint is from a meta shift perspective, how it feels worse to not blow through places with your endgame armies. Both sides of this are fighting against each other, Defenders need to defend but offense needs to make progress, and that's why the overall campaign pace ties into this. Just taking 2-3 turns extra per settlement to lay on some siege damage will also help the losses considerably since the autoresolve overpenalizes damaged units, so my challenge isn't all terrible, I think you're skilled enough to find at least one line which survives and learn something about what CA thinks they're doing with the pace.
Walls are useless since the ai will never fight a siege battle where you have enough units to man them and it certainly can't use them effectively at all There are like 3-4 layouts that get reused between all factions Almost none of them are fun to fight since a lot of them are mazes where you can't use the layout to defend since again the ai will never fight you when you have a decent army and its misrable to invade since you have to make sure your units aren't clumping up in the same alleys Rams and towers are jokes if ca removed magic ladders they would become bad jokes Overall garbage experience
Middle sections should immediately collapse if both of the targetable sections next to it go down, and make it so you can only get off the walls at specific points, and suddenly, actually holding the walls is worth the defenders time, and destroying multiple sections wont look awkward...
Make ladders something you have to build again too, but you can build 2 or three in one turn. That combined with my above comment and sieges will immediately feel WAY better, at least in my opinion. Being able to just hop off the wall wherever you want makes them pointless since the second the enemy has access to a single point of the wall then they might as well have access to any point of the wall, effectively turning walls into glorified speed bumps instead of something you actually have to plan around.
This is the same as any battle, if you play the battle no shit you take way less damage than an auto resolve.... Once you get good at the game you stop taking damage in just about any battle.
Magic ladders, siege towers with nothing to push them, units just warp up and down the walls, horrendous pathfinding and city layout, sieges have been reworked like 5 times and they're still bad lol
Couple of things that i think actually make sieges bad. 1. Biggest offender imo is siege attacker. Its overshadowed by other issues sieges have but if you think about it what stops you from playing a siege like in other total wars well siege attacker does. In wh3 nearly every army gets siege attacker. This means you always attack instantly. Why build rams or siege towers when you can always instantly attack? Better to just fill an army with ranged units and cheese it. You never have to wait and risk reinforcing armies coming for you. You never have to waste army slots or upkeep on artillery or big expensive monsters to start a siege. The risk/cost vs reward that sieges used to be is basically non existant here. Siege attacker should just be rare and not given to lords easily. Of course someone like kholek makes sense. He is himself the big monster. But gelt, Karl, malekith, tyrion and others on foot or horse? They should not have it. 2. All defensive equipment inside the city is in predetermined positions and outside of towers it doesnt damage units. Remember when you could have flamable balls of hay that had to be lit from units? They could make it so that you can build traps like that which can then be activated by units. Also every defense in the game except towers can be destroyed by any unit. Towers can die to ranged or flying units but at least those cant die to dogs lol 3. The AI doesnt care about what you are doing. Back when total war games didnt have stupidly strong non artillery ranged units and archers were good but not able to solo armies from crazy distances the AI could play the same way it plays in wh3 and it would still be somewhat challenging. In rome 2 for example cheesing a siege with incredibly powerfull ranged units is only really possible with ship artillery and even then you dont have a strong hero or lord to just sit there and tank a blob so the AI actively tries to dodge artillery and hide behind buildings. In wh3 the AI needs to simply learn to either pull back and draw you into the city to start negating the ranged units cheese or if your army is weak in melee and slow it could march out and just flank from other gates. Similarly to how it flanks in field battles. When its flanking units are close, the majority of their force comes out of the settlement from the front. Could you still kill some troops with your ranged army? Sure. But you'll take casualties and if the garrison has cavalry, chariots and/or monsters you wont even attack with a full ranged army because you'll get smashed
1. Most of cities maps are just terrible desing to defend. 2. They too big mostly - you must have full army and garrison to even man essential positions on 1 defense layer, theres no way you can use 2 or 3 defense layer like in Medieval II. 3. Walls in most cases are just platforms to get your troops killed. No really protection, no advantage when enemy can climb them in seconds. Artilery and flying units - well, ok, seems legit. But nothin else makes sense. 4. You want to create stronghold on borders of your kingdome? Good luck, spend 50 turns, tons of money, and enemy will just move around, cause strategic map has 0 strategy in it, they can just move around your stronghold cause its protects nothing and there`s no such thing like logistic.
The sieges in tw3 are bad, the positions of the towers often dumb allowing units a easy route into the castle. Worse the interior is full of fluff making it hard to see whats going on. My pet hates are dwarvern settlements - toital sprawl of crud although vaguely defensible end point. And Vampire coast, dull dirty and sprawling with 0 defensibility, the main point is hard to defend whatever level of settlement. One other thing CA haven't got is this is a fantasy setting, Dragon magazine got it, its full of dangerous creatures that can fly plus magic, the worst offenders are the elven walls - bare bones. I'd like to see more concentrated sieges where the enemy comes from one or two main sides, building defences during should be limited to temporary things like barricades and ditches along with ammo replenishment, if at all. Major settlements should allow artillery to go up certain walls to defend, we should be able to pick and upgrade defending units. Top tier settlements should have multiple walls, main gate should be a bastion with defences for the gate.
The most stupid argument i ever heard about sieges in TWW3: "Sieges should be slow and boring like in real history!11". Sieges in TWW3 are doomed because of maps. You cant make battles fun on such shitty map. It is impossible. Too little space, to much pathing restrictions, no choises, no maneuvers, you cant flank, you cant surround. Thats why NO ONE plays siege multiplayer. Look at Shogun 2 sieges maps. They have SOOOOO much open space for your and enemy troops.
In real history most sieges, as in populated settlements being taken over by conquest, were decided quickly. Only a prepared, well stocked, supplied and heavily defended location could withstanding any siege for a length of time.
as someone who has played a lot of total war siege is beyond broken . i have done like 5 defence battels why because the attrition is instant and the ai don't attack at all unless its literally impossible to win. and yes you have range and artillery its just you sat outside bombing. its just boring as the auto resolve will always be broken and crap. fun bug still never fixed to this day brake a elf tower and watch the entire wall vanish apart from a small bit of the battlements it looks really bad and should have been fixed DAY 1 but no CA IS JUST TOTAL TRASH AND MOD'S CAN ONLY GO SO FAR!
Sieges have more bss rlly, some points dont have any sense and their defenses .. build slots for towers, for barricades.. they need to do rework... Rlly some of the sieges I fight like normal game from WH2 bc placing towers or barricades is useless..
Why have battle timers for 20min and whine about 2 stack not winning the fight. I'm always baffled when i see these youtubers cheesing every battle and whining about bad AI and unfun battles and so on. Why not give the AI proper time to fight. You don't have to figure out every minute details and every tower range. Just let your units assault the walls, many will die, maybe you will lose, so what.
@@Costin_Gaming I'm sorry man, I just watched the video again, but I don't see the point in having everything on very hard and limiting the battle time to 20min and barely getting a draw to not lose a city. In my book that is cheese. I agree that there are flaws in siege designs and unit pathfinding, and by using tactics that AI can't deal with is just unfun to begin with.
I dont think that how easily trivialized the sieges are is the problem. I think the problem is that engaging with the sieges the "intended" way is incredibly unfun.
The movement of units inside the cities is just so janky, only made worse by the way the barricades work.
This. Everyone praised CA for city maps, but the maps are not that good. I mean they look nice, but designed in way which makes the batlles inside the walls frustrating and boring. Not to mention AI can't handle these maps as well
Exactly, I remember a campaign where once I started getting strong heroes I never played a "legit" siege battle, because they're frustrating to engage with in so many ways
@@AleksT-g7p do you think that 30 minutes face to face grind in a choke is boring?
@@maximum9977 Very unlikely scenario tbh, esp if you bring a spells and artillery, but yep that sounds boring. I mean there's something to the idea that sieges require methodical preparation followed by slow and painful grind, but hell, that's a video game where's my fun)
Medieval 2 had the perfect formula, I have no idea why they keep trying to re-invent the wheel
Then attula did it just as well and they ditched a second good formula
Because Medieval 2 is a completely different game than Total War Warhammer games.
It's a shame since sieges are supposed to be climactic showdowns or epic final stands
Sieges are very big maps with ridiculous mazy pathing. The ai is not smart, it cannot handle defense from multiple sides. There is no universe were sieges work while I can attack on multiple sides. Blind spots on towers don't matter, towers will target the closest unit, you can have heros dodge shots while your infantry advances right at the towers and tak no losses. The map layouts make it almost impossible to effectively use artillery or missile units as the defender. There is no solution to sieges without scraping literally every map and going back to warhammer 2 style maps. Then at least the ai could stay facing the correct direction and could use its missile units
The Warhammer a.i cant even Go through Open Gates and climb ladders insted.
But the a.i was Solid with huge Siege Battles in Medieval 2, but why Not in tww3?
CA did Something wrong big time.
Defensive Sieges are some of my favorites Battles in Medieval 2. The ones with 3 layers of walls in citadels we're so Epic.
In tww3 they are super underwhelming.
Siege battles are the start of auto resolving only 5 turns into a campaign 😭
I think sieges in TW3 is definitely better than in the other games, but the siege update was kinda like a patchwork solution. The ideal fix imo would be to implement multiple layers of gates, so a outer fort and inner fort. The lotr mod to Medieval 2 has this on some siege maps. If they did that, made it possible to place artillery on walls/high platforms inside and made it so you must actually build the ladders and carry them, that would improve it a lot. Its not gonna happen in this game though, it would take quite a lot of work.
A bandaid fix would be more siege engines, for example some type of catapults we can use against the city or specialised ladder carriers. Some factions that are good ar sieging could get some loreful additions that are better.
Beastmen of course being the weakest at sieged and dwarfs being the strongest.
That would somewhat make it less of a pain in the ass and make sieging bearable without reworking the entire system from ground up.
I usually play out important capital sieges just for the rp aspect.
I enjoyed the siege battles in Warhammer 2 and the Medieval 2 seige battles were absolutely superb, Warhammer 3 went in a direction that I find inexplicable, I normally auto resolve the 🙄
The only complaint i have is how weak and useless the towers you can build inside the city are. They inflict almost no damage no matter which one you build
Okay damage, but pathetic accuracy and low rate of fire is the issue.
The only complaint I really accept is that pathing is insane. Units have way too much of a tendency to just go crazy, and it can happen at any time, anywhere, but sieges and especially the walls are where it happens the most and the worst. Honestly, I don't buy any of the other complaints I've really heard about sieges. Yes, you can cheese them in specific ways, and the AI will not cheese you back to level the playing field, oh no. Well, I've enjoyed siege battles since shogun, and I can confidently proclaim that these are the most interactable battles I've generally had, and I find them usually very appealing to try and figure out how to make them work. Every race has to approach them differently, and they all need to take different layouts differently. Some battles are better tried to stealth your way in and take over victory points. Others, you need to get the AI to move into specific kill zones. Sometimes you need to rely on the passive defenses to help wittle the enemy army down. The only reason I find all these complaints ridiculous is because I've seen them inconsistently applied. Siege battles are too hard/easy/lazy/fast/slow/pointless/campaign ending/confusing/simple. I am convinced only that people all have a distinct way of thinking of how sieges "should" be and that it interferes with any objective views that could be applied. People want historic sieges? If you are talking about storming a castle, history will show you those basically never fell; better get used to spending 13 rounds for every single province. Talking towns? High variability could take it over as a happenstance, and you could end up losing most of your army to Gurrila tactics and an unhappy population. So we don't want super high variability, or basically just making siege battles a no-sell? Then we aren't being realistic, so get off the high horse about it. So we are being unrealistic, making the walls a lot weaker than they realistically would be, and incorporating some of the things we've seen in movies to help make them a lot cooler. We have towns, so allow some defenses and such to be built that can assist the garrisons.
I find this approach to be incredibly reasonable, providing the defender with a significant advantage in battles, yet not insurmountable or unbeatable. If your complaint is that there are ways to cheese the battles, one that's partly built in, so you can think your way around problems or try to bash your way through. But two and more importantly, that's basically just how the system is built, even in normal battles. You can build and figure out a way to cheese with every faction, partly with how all of the systems work together and partly because the AI is only programmed with so many responses, and this is pretty much true for any game ever made that I'm aware of. If you think you are making things too easy for yourself, either start putting some real challenges on yourself or stop using the cheese tactics. If both of these are unacceptable, try going into the speedrunning community and seeing just how fast you are compared to others in completing specified goals.
This rant isn't really directed at anyone specifically; I'm just getting so tired of people talking about sieges, saying how they think sieges would be so much better with x,y, but cut out this z. Then we see mods or CA implement them, and they still don't like it, so it must be that y was never a good thing; take it out and put in h instead. If it really bothers you so much, mod them out. And that's a fine response.
Also, holding up Shogun 2 for "good siege battles" seems incredibly silly when I was routinely using the garrisons to turn back 20 stacks with charging antics or just overwhelming elite armies with ashigaru spears., while sneaking into the castle was even easier than in any other total war I've played.
Honestly I don't mind the sieges in Total War Troy. Sure sieges always suck but it's less painful to play. There is no artillery so you don't have to waste a unit slot on that. You rush the walls and secure an area to enter. It's a slow process. And the way the walls are designed, you can't really cheese the game by using slingers / archers to kill everything from outside the walls, as you wont really be hitting them or you'll hit the front of shielded units doing no damage. It's a more cinematic melee confrontation.
honestly siege battles need to be completely redone from the ground up. frankly, nothing in it works and all previous attempts have been nothing but a polished turd. some mods have done it pretty well, giant walls and large, tiered battle zones with lots of space. but they were passion projects full of bugs and too long of a battle, to do it professionally will require much more manpower.
which leads to the inevitable conclusion that the game simply does not have enough years left in it to bother with that, and frankly with the spaghetti code rumors they might not be able to.
In other words, were gonna have to wait until wh3's successor (probably TW40k) until we see some proper fortress battles again.
The WH2 system was much better than the stupid WH3 one, it should have been a toggle in the options. Also the towers and walls are simply NOT strong enough.
TBH I think they changed the capture system so you couldn't cheese every siege with a solo fast lord or stalking units (or on some maps just have your reinforcements arrive directly on top of it, did they fix that yet?).
the main problem I see with sieges is that the AI is terrible at defending against them, while it tries to avoid ever letting you have any hope of defending at all via starving your armies until they literally collapse. I have seen many more winnable, engaging siege battles back in warhammer 2 then I have here.
I honestly don't mind the overall design of sieges that much. However, the pathfinding and bugginess around walls eliminates a good portion of strategic decision-making.
Ogres are actually quite fun in sieges, since you can just barrel through the walls, avoiding the gate bug and pathfinding issues from siege ladders/towers.
But if you want to avoid jank with almost everyone else you have to choose to either go over the walls or through the walls, not both.
With the gate bug being a thing, I usually just swarm the walls with melee-heavy factions like Khorne, or barrel through the gates with monsters.
pro tip for the ai, dont even BOTHER breaking the gates or docking ladders, break a fat hole in the wall with anything and go through that, ALSO ANOTHER FUN FACT FOR SKAVEN PLAYERS, DRILLS actually break the walls in like 9 seconds, verrry fast. just keep 1 in army if not doom stack early, as RANDOMLY every province city even lvl 1 has fucking WALLS now
My solution for Siege battles is: Play the changeling, bring 18 changebringers (flying ranged) and win everything.
Sieges have the same problem that real world fortresses had. Once there are weapons that easily destroy walls (or fly over them in Warhammer..), then it becomes obsolete.
I think sieges could only work in Warhammer if CA completely redesigns the function and purpose of sieges. Probably walled settlements are not compatible with warhammer's weaponry..
My main gripe, is the poor POOR pathfinding of your units.
The gate's open and unused? 'Nah! let's climb those ladders that one of the other units assaulting the walls used!
There's a hole in the wall AND gate open? 'Nah! ladders'
If you look at famous sieges in history where walls were actually breached for example the fall of constantinople it took the turks weeks of constant bombardment. So no breaking the walls in a few minutes.😂😂
In Both unsuccesfull attacks on Vienna the defenders defended the breach succesfully. The first time without help. The second time the combined polish-german-habsburgian army came to rescue the City. My point is that breaking walls should be an attrition effect and not obtainable during the battle. Maybe the attack could start in that moment. Towers should not be buildable during the battle at all.😂😂😂
Experimental archeologists who rebuild a historically accurat trebuche for a documentary on tv bombarded an experimental castle wall and they did relatively low damage and would have needed days of constantly hitting the same spot to break the wall. Are there any mods that make walls stronger?
The Towers inside the Cities are just the worst, they come out of nowhere they look the same for every faction and they are extremely powerful. The tactic is just to build everything around these towers.
It's so hard to even disentangle all of the things CA has got wrong about every aspect of the game, to even say what's wrong at the core about sieges, but certainly the TWW3 version is terrible. I just have no faith in CA to ever solve it because the people who understood how to design games are clearly no longer calling the shots. This is going to sound so out-of-left-field, but I have what I think is an informative challenge, and it's related to sieges; Get a victory on Very Hard or Legendary as any civ without ever becoming a high strategic threat to the AI, the little triangle indicator can never exceed yellow. Short or long vic, I don't mind, it should show up in either but it's probably easier to stay unthreatening in short. You'll have to intentionally self-cripple, and not play hyper-aggressively, and I think that particular line in the sand of "high threat" is part of what CA thinks is going on.
Sieges are tough because a well defended capital makes *sense.* If I put a garrison building in non-capital settlements, it *should* be two armies or at least 3 turns, or else why did I build it? The "Siege attacker" trait allowing sieges to be skipped is a core problem, I think. It would drastically slow campaigns down, yes, but I think the biggest complaint is from a meta shift perspective, how it feels worse to not blow through places with your endgame armies. Both sides of this are fighting against each other, Defenders need to defend but offense needs to make progress, and that's why the overall campaign pace ties into this. Just taking 2-3 turns extra per settlement to lay on some siege damage will also help the losses considerably since the autoresolve overpenalizes damaged units, so my challenge isn't all terrible, I think you're skilled enough to find at least one line which survives and learn something about what CA thinks they're doing with the pace.
Walls are useless since the ai will never fight a siege battle where you have enough units to man them and it certainly can't use them effectively at all
There are like 3-4 layouts that get reused between all factions
Almost none of them are fun to fight since a lot of them are mazes where you can't use the layout to defend since again the ai will never fight you when you have a decent army and its misrable to invade since you have to make sure your units aren't clumping up in the same alleys
Rams and towers are jokes if ca removed magic ladders they would become bad jokes
Overall garbage experience
Every time i have to fight a siege battle it kills my enjoyment of playing this game
Middle sections should immediately collapse if both of the targetable sections next to it go down, and make it so you can only get off the walls at specific points, and suddenly, actually holding the walls is worth the defenders time, and destroying multiple sections wont look awkward...
Make ladders something you have to build again too, but you can build 2 or three in one turn. That combined with my above comment and sieges will immediately feel WAY better, at least in my opinion.
Being able to just hop off the wall wherever you want makes them pointless since the second the enemy has access to a single point of the wall then they might as well have access to any point of the wall, effectively turning walls into glorified speed bumps instead of something you actually have to plan around.
I’m so bad I can only win with sieges I pray for them lol
This is the same as any battle, if you play the battle no shit you take way less damage than an auto resolve.... Once you get good at the game you stop taking damage in just about any battle.
They should just have layered defense and all or key building garrison-able so that every chokepoint is a defendable position
Magic ladders, siege towers with nothing to push them, units just warp up and down the walls, horrendous pathfinding and city layout, sieges have been reworked like 5 times and they're still bad lol
If I cheese it it's not fun. I couldn't possibly NOT DO THAT
Couple of things that i think actually make sieges bad.
1. Biggest offender imo is siege attacker. Its overshadowed by other issues sieges have but if you think about it what stops you from playing a siege like in other total wars well siege attacker does.
In wh3 nearly every army gets siege attacker. This means you always attack instantly. Why build rams or siege towers when you can always instantly attack? Better to just fill an army with ranged units and cheese it. You never have to wait and risk reinforcing armies coming for you. You never have to waste army slots or upkeep on artillery or big expensive monsters to start a siege. The risk/cost vs reward that sieges used to be is basically non existant here. Siege attacker should just be rare and not given to lords easily. Of course someone like kholek makes sense. He is himself the big monster. But gelt, Karl, malekith, tyrion and others on foot or horse? They should not have it.
2. All defensive equipment inside the city is in predetermined positions and outside of towers it doesnt damage units. Remember when you could have flamable balls of hay that had to be lit from units? They could make it so that you can build traps like that which can then be activated by units. Also every defense in the game except towers can be destroyed by any unit. Towers can die to ranged or flying units but at least those cant die to dogs lol
3. The AI doesnt care about what you are doing. Back when total war games didnt have stupidly strong non artillery ranged units and archers were good but not able to solo armies from crazy distances the AI could play the same way it plays in wh3 and it would still be somewhat challenging. In rome 2 for example cheesing a siege with incredibly powerfull ranged units is only really possible with ship artillery and even then you dont have a strong hero or lord to just sit there and tank a blob so the AI actively tries to dodge artillery and hide behind buildings.
In wh3 the AI needs to simply learn to either pull back and draw you into the city to start negating the ranged units cheese or if your army is weak in melee and slow it could march out and just flank from other gates. Similarly to how it flanks in field battles. When its flanking units are close, the majority of their force comes out of the settlement from the front. Could you still kill some troops with your ranged army? Sure. But you'll take casualties and if the garrison has cavalry, chariots and/or monsters you wont even attack with a full ranged army because you'll get smashed
I really hate how rigid unit placement is.
A nonsensical step back from previous games.
13:20 i got that mass effect 2 reference
1. Most of cities maps are just terrible desing to defend.
2. They too big mostly - you must have full army and garrison to even man essential positions on 1 defense layer, theres no way you can use 2 or 3 defense layer like in Medieval II.
3. Walls in most cases are just platforms to get your troops killed. No really protection, no advantage when enemy can climb them in seconds. Artilery and flying units - well, ok, seems legit. But nothin else makes sense.
4. You want to create stronghold on borders of your kingdome? Good luck, spend 50 turns, tons of money, and enemy will just move around, cause strategic map has 0 strategy in it, they can just move around your stronghold cause its protects nothing and there`s no such thing like logistic.
sieges are definitely the worst part of the game.
The sieges in tw3 are bad, the positions of the towers often dumb allowing units a easy route into the castle. Worse the interior is full of fluff making it hard to see whats going on. My pet hates are dwarvern settlements - toital sprawl of crud although vaguely defensible end point. And Vampire coast, dull dirty and sprawling with 0 defensibility, the main point is hard to defend whatever level of settlement.
One other thing CA haven't got is this is a fantasy setting, Dragon magazine got it, its full of dangerous creatures that can fly plus magic, the worst offenders are the elven walls - bare bones.
I'd like to see more concentrated sieges where the enemy comes from one or two main sides, building defences during should be limited to temporary things like barricades and ditches along with ammo replenishment, if at all. Major settlements should allow artillery to go up certain walls to defend, we should be able to pick and upgrade defending units. Top tier settlements should have multiple walls, main gate should be a bastion with defences for the gate.
The most stupid argument i ever heard about sieges in TWW3: "Sieges should be slow and boring like in real history!11". Sieges in TWW3 are doomed because of maps. You cant make battles fun on such shitty map. It is impossible. Too little space, to much pathing restrictions, no choises, no maneuvers, you cant flank, you cant surround. Thats why NO ONE plays siege multiplayer.
Look at Shogun 2 sieges maps. They have SOOOOO much open space for your and enemy troops.
In real history most sieges, as in populated settlements being taken over by conquest, were decided quickly.
Only a prepared, well stocked, supplied and heavily defended location could withstanding any siege for a length of time.
@@Costin_Gaming people want something like Siege of Constantinople 674. With bombarding, assaults, navy battles, sally outs, underground warfare.
as someone who has played a lot of total war siege is beyond broken .
i have done like 5 defence battels why because the attrition is instant and the ai don't attack at all unless its literally impossible to win.
and yes you have range and artillery its just you sat outside bombing.
its just boring as the auto resolve will always be broken and crap.
fun bug still never fixed to this day
brake a elf tower and watch the entire wall vanish apart from a small bit of the battlements
it looks really bad and should have been fixed DAY 1 but no CA IS JUST TOTAL TRASH AND MOD'S CAN ONLY GO SO FAR!
Sieges have more bss rlly, some points dont have any sense and their defenses .. build slots for towers, for barricades.. they need to do rework... Rlly some of the sieges I fight like normal game from WH2 bc placing towers or barricades is useless..
Why have battle timers for 20min and whine about 2 stack not winning the fight. I'm always baffled when i see these youtubers cheesing every battle and whining about bad AI and unfun battles and so on. Why not give the AI proper time to fight. You don't have to figure out every minute details and every tower range. Just let your units assault the walls, many will die, maybe you will lose, so what.
Imagine actually using the game mechanics to win.
@@Costin_Gaming I'm sorry man, I just watched the video again, but I don't see the point in having everything on very hard and limiting the battle time to 20min and barely getting a draw to not lose a city. In my book that is cheese. I agree that there are flaws in siege designs and unit pathfinding, and by using tactics that AI can't deal with is just unfun to begin with.
bad ai