The other problem with Ass Ladders is that it removes the possibility of giving certain units a special "can climb walls": spider units, gutter runners, chameleon skinks, et al. Heck, you could even have Vampire Coast monsters disgorging little dudes who are riding on their shoulders....
You could have them getting over as a unit, since the major negative of ladders is having your soldiers take a minute or two to climb while getting slaugthered, so if spiders could all get up there as a single group in 10 seconds it would be good, avoiding that time where the first to arrive are fighting 150vs5
Ohhh that's something i can see, those towering creatures could be battling the units on the wall without stepping on them, some of those could climb and do slighty mostly flavor damage (5%?) because of their height just for fun and maybe flank some of the units that are trying to stop infantary from climbing down the walls
I think my biggest gripe is how the towers you build are identical. They're the same between factions and even the same between tiers! Well actually I don't know if it's my biggest gripe, I seem to have a lot around that level with this game! They just didn't improve anything with WH3 like enemy units routing into your city, the gate bug, and the stupid walls...
Or their reinforcements spawning IN the city, which is something I had happen in one game recently. Forgot which city it was, but it was one around Nagarythe's starting point. The entry point for their reinforcements was literally behind one of the capture points inside the city. XD
I think the fundamental thing im looking in sieges is that it's primarily about keeping the enemy out. The walls should be your main defense, not just a very temporary hurdle for the enemy to pass right over/through... Helms deep is epic because the enemy breaking through is such a major development.. It's our heroes starting to lose hope.. In Warhammer the attackers get past the walls in every single siege.
Lets face it. It's a moba with lots of micro management, not a strategy. They want us to micro on the streets, not let us attack frontally. There used to long be cinematic battles.
What siege battles lack is tactical diversity. Even with the new map layouts, most siege battles end up feeling the same anyway. Because most factions are given the same approach in both defense and offense. Skaven, spiders, and ethereal units shouldn’t have to use ladders to bypass walls. A Karak siege shouldn’t play the same as a Bretonnia siege. Every siege equipment, tower and defensive fortification has the same function with a different coat of paint. Sieges needs to be mechanically different to complement their visual difference.
I also hate that walls are useless since every units have a ladder. I also hate that defensive equipment can only be placed in predetermined (bad as fuck) locations.
Honestly my biggest gripe is that sieges are where uniqueness goes to die. Most of the problems I have could be overlooked because I would be having more fun if ghosts could walk through walls, Skaven could sap, huge monsters could clamber over, zombies could WWZ their way over, Dwarves could add cannons to walls, keep the pop-up towers but only for Orks etc etc.
All sieges being "ass ladders and gate-breaking doggos/infantry" as an attacker and "pop-up towers and maybe walls" as a defender in the exact same 5 layouts is like having a Dwarfs vs Skaven battle where slayers rout because the dwarf chariots charged into a unit of skavenslaves with slings and lost, so the dwarf wizard casts the "Buff" Spell from the "Magic" lore of magic (the only one) on the dwarf wolves fighting the Skaven furies, who can be attacked in melee while flying because the AI doesn't understand what a flying unit is.
There's a mod I was looking at that made the pop up towers pre battle only and compensated the amount of supplies so you could build a fair amount that i liked the idea of, other than something along those lines I have to say magic pop up towers every minute or 2 during battle just has to go they are a dumb arcade idea that's ruining sieges and just drag them out, placing them before hand then having the system disabled worked well tho.
I always felt the Dwarf/Ork and Skaven where a massive missed opportunity where you have have some very unique underground map designs what have smaller caves and sections that flying units were unable to get in to or were forced to land before they could enter.
@@zaleost I still wish the underway was an actual second map layer that connected settlements with tunnels. The way it is now is just super lazy and lacks any strategy.
Great point about the defenders being able to walk through the barricades and prevent the attackers from destroying them. That has really frustrated me. And when a barricade pops up suddenly your units forget where they were walking to.
Maybe a good update would be to make the unit automatically attack barricades if its on his way rather than trying to find another way. Because they are so easely destroyed anyway…
Thats not exactly how medieval or shogun Era castles worked. They often did have essentially a villages worth of people to actually keep the castle running with food wood, etc. But it is true they didn't need a whole city around them
One point on Shogun 2 sieges: the reason the inside of the castle is so empty is that you're not fighting in the actual town, Shogun 2 provinces had a separate building chain and slots for the town and a separate building chain and slots for the castle. You win control of a province by controlling the castle, so the siege battle takes place there. You don't actually ever see the farms houses shops etc in a siege battle because that's not where the fight is happening at.
@@phillipharrison886 Samurai did not live in the castle. They reside in their own houses in the outside, in the town or villages. The lord would rally them when needed, else they are not in the castle. Not like in movies.
except real armies did fight inside of towns and cities, and castles had more than just walls and a keep in the middle. shogun 2 siege battles are, by and large, kind of cheap in their overall construct.
@@boarfaceswinejaw4516 in sengoku era japan? Why? What's in random towns that's worth fighting over? If you're the defender you want to hole up in your purpose built castle when available, or ambush the army on it's way to besiege it. That's not gonna happen in some town in the middle of nowhere. If you're the attacker why do you care about taking random towns, your goal is to control the administrative center for the area of land you are looking to take, and/or get rid of the military aristocrats on the opposing side of the conflict. Conveniently both things are happening at the local castle most of the time.
@@TheWujuStyle "whats in random towns worth fighting over" outside of the fact that towns are defensible and that they are full of things such as food and loot, as well as most of the population. Idk, you tell me why the fuck someone would defend the thing that makes their goddamn province worth a damn. Europeans loved their goddamn castles but even they understood that sometimes you have to fight in or near a town or city, whether to gain defensive advantage, defend your territory, or because going around the town takes more time than marching through it, lest we forget that most settlements were surrounded by farmland which is less than apt to march through for an army, thus making the path along developed roads to a place where you can extort food and loot from locals more worthwhile. Why the fuck do you think so many japanese towns and cities, especially old ones, still have walls if there was never intent to use it defensively against would-be attackers? War is all about attrition and leaving your food sources to be gobbled up by a marching enemy army is beyond stupid. Which is without mentioning how most castles were generally attached to a city, town or at least hamlet since lords, oddly enough, wanted to have direct control of their immediate fiefs. your argument is legit befuddling. the city of Kyoto was all but annihiliated during the years of fighting in and around the city, yet the concept of a battle occuring in an inhabited area is apparently alien. i get that people love shogun 2, but stop trying to defend lazy design.
Important thing to note about Shogun 2 walls is that a certain number of the unit models would fall to their death based on how high the wall is. I think that would really help to balance ass ladders in Warhammer.
Reminder while Rome 2 do have Burnable Iron Gates, getting through a Gate in Rome 2 is super dangerous due to Boiling Oil which can literally melt any unit, making it important to use a disposable unit to neutralize the gates first by going through the gates.
that happen in even Rome 1 as I remember correctly and people could fall off from walls -_- that feature was removed. it was so epic to see that in 2004
For me the main huge issue with chokepoints and barricades is that they completely break unit pathfinding. Units will break up or chage routes or just get stuckin narrow corridors so you have to micro every single one of them all the time.
@@FilipMoncrief That's because cities in Attila had larger pathways, specially near the walls. There was usually enough space for two units to fight side. WH 3 siege system is very reminiscent of Attila but it manages to be worse than it.
The one point I disagree with you on, are the chokepoints, since forcing the attacker to fight in tight corridors is exactly the whole point of any fortifications throughout history. It’s supposed to take away your advantages and ability to move around. If anything, maps in TW III are more forgiving than they should be, since even relatively small castles in history would have multiple sets of walls and gates, to trap the invading forces between them. I’d expect a tier V city to be able to fight off 20unit doomstack with just it’s garrison, because that’s basically what cities were built for: holding off assholes who want to kill your people and take your stuff.
The thing is some factions in HW, unlike historical ones, are particularly terrible at choke point battles like Bretonia and Slanesh. Why would you build your defense in a way that actively hurts yourself?
I agree with this. Chokepoints and corridors are good thematically, and I think they suit the gameplay. I also agree that CA made a lot of effort actually to open op the maps, like most corridors are huge, and the streets are incredibly wide, so moving units aroung is not an issue. I actually think some of the maps look more like Hot-Wheels tracks because of this. They just neet to get rid of the supply system, keep the victory objectives, in plazas and such, for units to fall back to and hold. Just remove the buildable towers. The towers should be there statically around the map always, and then let us build the barricades in the deployment phase. Edit: I support the idea of both having narrow corridors and wider open areas, the Rome 2 sieges like the one showed were pretty darn great. Just do something with the god damn copy paste walls in WH... And well also the siege equipment, I think the siege towers and rams look awful and stupid, especially the dwarf ones...
@@bz6587 Regardless of your faction, it's always advantegous to force your opponent to lose time and stamina zigzaking around your defences in tight corridors, while you shoot at them from above. Any race specific traits are just a cherry on top; with Slaanesh or Bretonnia you can just hide the cavalry outside and strike from the rear, when your opponent is nicely packed inside your walls, with no way to escape your cycles of charging. Doesn't make having multiple chokepoint a bad idea. Anything more sophisticated than historical data would require a really good imagination and effort, since developers would have to consult military experts to figure out how medieval cities could protect themselves against dragons/magic/monsters. However that is asking way too much out of Creative Assembly, since they're rather uncreative, despite their name.
Agreed. Shogun 2 was following historical precedent, based on how armies fought sieges during the Sengoku Period, in which the walls were never meant to completely halt an attack but give your troops the ability to shoot and stab at attackers, and tiring them out before you engaged with their forces at various designated areas within the fortress. A lot of this was brought about by the Bushido culture the Samurai class enforced onto the peasant soldiers/ashigaru, which encouraged soldiers to fight hand to hand and one on one. This is why Nobunaga was such a prominent figure, he disregarded the strategy and tactics that were common, utilizing gunpowder weapons and formations, mixed unit tactics, for his levy forces. As a result they see him as cowardly by his opponents, as he scoffed at the impractical nature of the Bushido spirit when it came to tactical fighting. Most of the rest of the world, especially the West, instead built walls designed to hold off attackers for months or even years, and often built more layered defenses within the fortresses and or cities and towns, including a keep/castle that would be the ultimate holding point if they breached the outer defenses. As said in this thread, many would build death traps (Barbicans for example) for invading forces, forcing them to fight between gates/walls/barricade structures, with fortifications that would let them attack from higher/safe points. All the while, on the ground of barbicans, some castles would have actual booby traps, such as spikes, caltrops, floor/wall blades, etc. this isn’t event to mention more common anti siege defenses like outer wall and keep wall moats. They could legitimately design maps based on different factions fighting styles, and mechanics related to that if they wanted to but they won’t do it. It’s the kind of thing I wish wasn’t hard coded, so modders could give us more realistic sieges that give attackers real disadvantages in a non-gamey way like we have with wall tower ranges and defensively supply system/barricades/inner tower mechanics.
one aspect that I think is a big issue is just the amount of them, 80%+ of battles in a campaign are sieges, even if they were almost perfect that 'almost' would wear on anyone very quickly when its battle after battle after battle.
That is related with the AI at the moment. They simply dont move enough, they sit there in their settlements waiting for you to come and once they are besieged they will rarely sally out.
Ai is just a coward which hides in their settlement or going for overkills to ensure the win. I had a skaven which sieged an empire t3 settlement without garrison and an half stack army inside with 4 army stacks of mid tier units.
A solution could be to only have walls on minor settlements when they reach tier 3. Makes them rarer, almost unheard of in the early game, and at least a bit less common in contested areas towards the late game.
Yes, this has been my frustration as well. Battles on the field seem few an far between -- and when a campaign gets going I'm either taking or losing a settlement every turn.
My main problem is that siege maps are nto tailored to each race's strengths: This is specially obvioys for races like the Skaven and the VC who would rely on powerful magics, devious contraptions and a good amount cannon fodder to whittle down the attackers as they advance. Imagine that the skaven would have something along the lines of explosive Skavenslaves with different payloads: Acid for Armor, Sharpnel for maximum damage, HE for AOE, some cataclismic Warp bomb as the ace in the whole. All of of this with warp mines and temporary Rat Ogre Summons to represent the chained defence-beasts. For the VC imagine that each fresh kill adds to their "supply, and they rely on unit summons to represent the rising of the dead attackers, having progressively powerful summons to represent the winds of death getting stronger as the carnage goes on. From hordes of zombies to powerful Hex Wraiths, Wraths, crypt horrors,graveguard, etc
God this. I dream of sieging a Dwarf settlement that is actually designed around the quirks of the race. Huge gates which are far more of an engineering feat compared to the greatest structures built by Man. Multi-layered walls with those chokepoints to complement the strengths and weaknesses of Dwarfs. A couple of raised areas for artillery. Special paths that maybe Miners can only take? Would make them really cool as a flank unit during sieges. I detest the tower + barricade building, sure it's useful for any faction but I just kinda wish that every faction had their own form of defenses during a siege. Akin to your ideas with units.
Have you fought in a wood elf tree, the entire front area is a barely defensible kill zone that the AI deploys all of their troops in outside of the firing range of all of their towers, there are no good places to put archers that is protected in any appreciable way, and if you bring arty they just stand around and die.
I feel this since I play a lot of tomb kings. Their garrisons are already awful, and the siege mechanics don’t help very much since their towers also aren’t that good compared to other races.
I think that it all comes to the issue of balancing and pacing. Honestly, with a large number of settlements and too many different factions in warhammer, a mechanically complex siege battle will drag the game on forever. And unlike historical TW where humans fight each other, there are so many races, and faction mechanics for the player to learn. Putting too much stuff in and forcing a beginner to learn all of those is a bad user experience design. Game is supposed to be enjoyed, not a real war simulation. I myself find the current game content to be quite overwhelming, and don't need it to be more difficult to learn. If people are looking for a more complicated and enhanced experiment, I suggest installing mods. Mods that allow more different siege equipment and defense weapons. With the current WH3, it is possible for the modders to execute more interesting ideas and perhaps, someone is able to make a siege battle overhaul mod.
Or, hell, having areas that periodically summon units that gradually become higher tier as the battle progresses. Starting with zombies and skeletons, working their way up to grave guard and black knights. Lizardmen should have a similar thing to your skaven idea and another commentors dwarf idea. Massive multi-layered defenses making usage of walls and bridge chokepoints, with periodic summons of dinosaurs and more saurus to defend the city.
12:41 Could you imagine how great it would be to see the city's populace trying to resist and fight against the invaders? Example, you have a Skaven settlement and random skaven slaves are popping up to defend in a hasty panic, or how about seeing Sigmar Priests defending an Empire settlement as they come rushing out of the temples in a religious zeal. That'd be awesome to see and help make them more entertaining.
Unique racial pre battle deployables would be boss. And ya multitiered defenses are very cool. One of my favs from WH are the empire super forts on the mountain ranges that have a secondary raised wall to fall back to. Fingers crossed we see dome of these great ideas made for WH in future updates.
My wishlist for better WH3 sieges that's feels like it's not too much to ask: * No placeable towers, possibly create some fixed (not shit-looking) towers inside the settlement with defense buildings * Realm of Chaos battles can keep the current towers * Barricades behave realistically and are not destroyed by any unit within seconds * Similar with gates - only siege attackers or battering rams take those down quickly I feel like the WH3 devs were looking to capture that multi-layer cake defense that Shogun 2 had, and it would be nearly there if not for the failings of the build-a-base mechanic. Fix the most glaring problems and it gets much better. And of course, the paper-mache gates of the Warhammer World have felt ridiculous ever since you figured out how quickly Empire Swordsmen take them down. I fail to understand why that is still a thing.
Funny thing is that many major settlements actually have towers built into the maps, but they are useless. They are thematic, bigger, nicer and more sensical than the pop-up towers but they are just decoration.
And just place the barricades wherever you want to... I like the idea of layered defences, but also that it would be difficult to take settlements and would even require specialized armies. Honestly I wish they'd make the sieges more difficult, as in the defenders have a huge advantage, but also have options to bribe the defenders to open the gates so that you start some kind of "ambush" battle against the defenders or similar options. That way you have more difficult sieges but also slightly more variety and options to work around them.
@@ivanlagrossemoule They had almost this exact thing in Medieval 2, where your spy could open the gates and the battle started without giving defenders time to set up.
@@brianlevor6295 heroes can damage walls (ie create breaches) in the Warhammer games. The Witch hunter can at least, and I'd imagine the equivalent for other factions could.
I think the comparison to Shogun 2 sieges was really spot on. As some who played WH1 & WH2 before playing shogun 2 I vastly preferred Shogun's sieges over Warhammer's for all the reason's stated. Well Said!
i think it has a lot to do with HOW they scale the walls, while i myself prefer rome 1 and medieval 2 system, i can tolerate shogun 2 just fine because they scale the walls SLOOOOOOOOWLY, and if the wall they are scaleing is rly tall (there are some maps where you can scale directly to the 3rd level from the ground) if you put range units there the units that are scaleing the walls would rarely make it to the top, another thing is the map itself, and i am surprised that zerk did not mention it, the map OUTSIDE the town is to SMALL, what all the previews total war had was a BIG outside part, imo the tower range is fine AS LONG AS we get a bigger, A MUCH BIGGER outside area where we can move shit around, not just for the attacker but for the defender as well, you see, in the previews games having 2-3 units of cav as the defender was absolutly phenomenal, because i could harass the enamy, or go after there arty, or intentionaly pull back from the first layer of defences, setting up a strong defensive pozition much forther in, and than w8 a bit, after the enamy moves in the cav goes after the arty (if possible) or just SLAM into there rear (witch was ussualy the archers) and in thous games there was no such BS as in WH where archers win battles vs cav, nope, you made a mistake and cav got into the archers line? THEY GONE DIE, like it should be!
damn, Rome sieges look fun! I grew up with games like Battle for Middleearth so im used to nearly indistructable, nearly unclimable walls and doors than can hold for quite a bit. Walls are ment to be scary to attack imo
Sieges are hard to balance. They're exhilarating when you hold off an overwhelming force with a shit garrison but when the tables flip, you don't wanna have your main army bled dry as the attacker. Stuff like chokepoints everywhere and the supplies are skewing this to the defenders direction, which is why so many peoples cheesed sieges since WH1. It's not fun waiting days for replenishment after every major settlement. They also show the breadth of preferences in the community that's hard to cater to. Like when I heard people clamoring for bigger, 360 sieges for WH3 I was scared CA would actually deliver since that sounded like a micromanagement nightmare to me. The only siege battles I actually enjoyed were the Empire forts - one access point, logical chokes, good firing platforms. A solid, focused Helm's Deep experience. All I'd want was more and more tiers of chokes and platforms as you upgraded them and to rework factions capitals into them. Sieges really shouldn't be nearly as prominent in WH as other TW games. Siege logic just doesn't bring that much to a game where doomstacks like full flying cavalry or full SEM exist. Sieges without infantry just don't work and so many races just don't really field infantry in numbers warranting a siege focus.
Yes, this exactly captures the problem. Sieges need to offer major advantages to the defender so it's possible for human players to (try to) defend with just a garrison, but NOT offer major advantages to the defender so human players don't get bored and annoyed by their army getting trashed every time they dare to expand their empire. And sieges need to be huge and expansive to give a sense of drama and spectacle and make you feel like you're fighting over a massive city, but NOT huge and expansive to be manageable to play and for choke points and desperate last stands to be meaningful. Inherently difficult problems.
Well you could solve the problem by giving the attacke a big bones to refill hus troops after he conquered a major city. Our you can provide some cannon fodder units in the siege options who disappear after the fight
Solution: make the AI have severely reduced siege hold out time. Then have the ai sally out after suffering a certain amount of attrition. This is how it worked in Shogun 2, you really only had to fight offensive sieges if a relief army was on its way and you needed the castle for a defensive siege.
Game programmer here. Your not asking for to much from “implementable” side but from design side with monsters, flying units, and crazy lords making a balanced and fun system with above mechanics would need much effort but doable. With many creatures in warhammer they could come up with many things such as certain Skaven digging below walls, beast men that can jump off walls and so on. That said Rome 2 should have been used as a base.
I do like the idea of using your supplies for defenses, but after the battle begins the defenses are fixed. The Rome 2 push ladders also made a lot of sense. Also, for each settlement battle the city or settlement should gain experience, resulting in more supply points. And armies garrisoned can allow for additional supplies, which could be boosted by the general's or hero's skill tree. Thoughts?
Maybe allow changing/upgrading things you've built with new supplies gained during battle, but like everyone says, you can't build a whole tower in 30 seconds, or even during the longest battle.
While it is somewhat CA's fault for not explaining it very well or making it obvious, there is a reason to capture the various points during a siege battle in TW:WH3 other than the supply system. There is a "momentum" mechanic for attackers which increases for each point they capture and grants them charge bonus and melee attack (iirc). The momentum mechanic goes up 5 tiers of increasing effect (1 for each point), and can have it's effects decreased or denied if the defender retakes captured points.
The worst is when part of your city defence is a cannon. Absolutely useless. Why can't I start it on the wall? Yeah, I shouldn't be able to move it up and down mid battle, but let me start the thing up there.
There is a mod to allow Skaven weapon teams on walls, but it should absolutely be possible for everyone to deploy siege units on special parts of the walls
one thing that I'm really want to see is formation and mustering, I hear many people calling Shogun 2 or Three Kingdoms unit are all the same and lack diversity but in those game because your unit are the same as your enemy the one that make a difference is how well you use those you could have two spearman going at each other but if one in turtle formation the other one would get exhausted first while the one in turtle formation is still fresh and pretty much less damage then you break formation and counter charge the exhausted opponent, in warhammer I feels like all I'm doing is getting an OP unit of your race then just point them at enemy then repeat and occasionally cast magic and when unit damaged I'll just disband or merge then recruit fresh one in one turn meanwhile in 3K if you lost half of a unit you'll gonna want to redo it cause it'll took 4-5 turn just to replenish or recruit them in Shogun 2 you can quick recruit but you can't merge unit plus most unit other than ashigaru need at least 2 turn and recruiting slot is also low since you wanna invest in select region for a castle so either wait another turn or just push on
In WH3 I have been been using a mod which disables all siege building during battles. So all towers, blockers, etc have to be put down before the beginning of the battle. Then when they are gone, they are gone. Also that drives me crazy when the AI runs through their own barriers.
What I would want is to remove walled sieges completely and instead using the mod you mention to replace walled sieges with minor settlement battles. Sieging is just poorly designed in this franchise, it's just not fun and lacks tactical variety for each faction.
I disagree on the chokepoint issue. The problem is that there are too few genuine chokepoints, not too many. Settlement battles ought to be easy for the defender and very hard for the attacker - instead, in TWWH you have no true chokepoints because there are ten roads leading to every capture point. If you use a unit to block a street, it doesn't matter - the enemy doesn't need to fight it. It can just turn a corner into another street and have a straight shot at your back lines. That's the worst aspect of the siege design in TWWH 3 in my opinion: you need more units to defend a settlement than you need to attack it. In every fortification design in history, it was the other way around: fortifications are designed to allow few men to defend against many. This really needs to change. And for those who say "this doesn't translate well into gameplay", I say you're thinking too narrowly. There could be specific units and buildable siege equipment for each race that would allow the destruction, or bypassing, of certain defenses. Artillery could play a role. These things should have their economy costs balanced so that capturing major settlements would be more expensive/time-intensive than minor settlements. There could even be another tier for certain significant settlements: Want to take Altdorf? Well, you're going to need money & time, because with those you could construct a few queen bess type cannons to kill part of the walls, or mine them, or prepare a spell to destroy them etc depending on your faction. Without it, you'll stand no chance, with it, it's doable, with plenty of artillery, it might work but no guarantees. What do you guys think?
7 months late, but I absolutely agree with you. Even with a fully upgraded garrison and a reinforcing 20 stack, you do not have NEARLY enough men to man the walls, and certainly not the 800 chokepoints in the streets. The maps are simply way too damn big. Realistically, a city of that size would have a garrison of THOUSANDS already there. Not 3 units of Dwarf Miners. It blows my mind that they had this shit figured out in 2006. Because you didn't have these problems in Medieval 2. The mechanics were very simple: [For Defenders] Hold the town square, or die trying. [For Attackers] Take the town square, or kill the defenders. And sieges were great. Other things Zerk mentioned like 360 degree settlements were also a thing. You attacked from whatever angle you wanted.
@@cmasonw 7 months ain't too late :) and I absolutely agree. Sieges in Medieval 2 were great, and I see no reason why they should be any different in Warhammer 3. Hopefully they will fix it in Pharaoh, I've no hope for them fixing it in WH3 at this stage.
MSB and new sieges are literally the definition of “careful what you wish for” I think it would’ve been so much better without any of the buildings and just the maps lol
In Napoleon TW, you could chill back and use artillery to level walls and open city gates to open up some space; that would be impossible for WH3 as artillery ammo is too low for that
@@RamonesFan201 NTW and ETW had a range of 'artillery forts' of different sizes and for the European, Middle Eastern and Indian cultural groups. The layouts were all fairly same-y however.
Possible solution to artillery ammo? Have a new siege equipment that is just an ammo dump placable. It's static but has a replenishment range and value to resupply ranged units? Can't be moved inside or anything but allows slow siege, also gives a target to Sally out and try to destroy to prevent the slow whittle down. Maybe explodes when HP reaches zero or something?
Wow, I started playing Total War with Warhammer 2, so I wasn't aware of all the cool features that some previous games had. Uh... huh. Some of those sieges in earlier games look really fun.
I think that's what CA has recently been counting on - that Warhammer players have no prior experiences with older games, and won't realize how bare bones it is when compared with them. Not to demonize them - previous TWs had a tenth of the factions and mechanics Warhammer has, but they went deep to compensate, and that depth is really missing now.
In Three Kingdoms, you could use fire to your advantage, setting a whole city ablaze to demoralise the enemy and more importantly, take out their towers and barricades. Unfortunately, it seems buildings are fireproof in Warhammer. Would be nice to set the Oak of Ages on fire.
Haven't played shogun but damn during that sync kill I could hear somber music from a movie playing in my head. He even reached for his weapon at the end when he fell the ground. Got some real Boromir vibes from it. Too bad they keep removing features people love.
While I overall agree with pretty much everything you're mentioning here my absolute biggest gripes with sieges atm are two things, the gates and the lack of stairs to the walls. I'm pretty new to the Total War series, Warhammer II was the first one I played, but since then I have also played Total War Troy, and while that game is by no means perfect I got a taste of proper wall defence in that, positioning my troops strategically not over the entire walls but around the stairs to block them. And then if I had to leave the doors I could camp outside the stairs on the ground and wait for the enemy to try and leave. Just that makes fighting on/with walls a lot more fun and engaging. And then yeah same about any unit being able to break gates. I understand large monsters like giants or dragons but bloody warhounds should not be able to knaw through castle fortifications, but maybe that's just me.
What makes me not to fight siege map is how big the city are, like i have to manage on a lot of fronts and its annoying to control your camera. Like your troops gonna get crushed the moment you change your angle trying to manage other units, but i do play siege map and put whatever units i want on custom games just for the entertainment
I know it wasn't popular, but Three Kingdoms had some of the best settlement battles I can recall in Total War. Being able to MANUALLY place my defenses was huge for me.
05:07 actually it is considered normal for a castle to have many choke points and as few open areas as possible. You want to be able to defend a fortress against a potentially overwhelming amount of enemys, so you dont want to give them a chance to play there cards. So I think, rationally, the amount of choke-points is justified. Even if you want to argue, that it is more of a settlement, than a fortress, there have never been major settlements with huge open areas all over the place. To use your given area effectivly for building housing, choke-points will accure.
EXACTLY! As much as I can understand the challenges of the implementation. If it could be done so many years ago with older titles, I see no reason why it shouldn't be implemented now... It's not like they didn't make most of money on this game anyways... It's insane how they fail to realise that the siege battles and faster than ever steam-rolling campaign is what is killing this game and making people bored of the game within few weeks. It's INSANE for me tbh... 1) Look at the size of the maps, the actual size. Previous TW games had WAAAY larger maps, entire background seems gigantic in TWW yet actual fighting space is tiny, in some cases You can barely squeeze 1 unit through, while in previous games You could place 2-3 units next to one another and that was A CHOKE POINT! in TWW maps are completely immobilizing troops, are ridiculously tight even if they're huge, they're just badly designed. While most of the spaces like some markets or seemingly open little squares, turning out to be invisible walls just because there's a fence there, which can't be crossed, there's so much unused space on most of the maps, it's actually ridiculous. 2) MORE OPEN SPACES! RE-DO THE SIEGE MAPS! 3) Ladders are beyond MAGIC! Even daemons using them! lol xD But on a serious note, pushed, wheeled ladders were rather rare occurrence in the historical battles. They were usually carried by soldiers. BUT that being said this should still be the case, and a unit like that should be slower and suffer heavy vigour penalties, that would also give the chance to limit the number of ladders and assign them even in the battlefield to the units, just like towers or rams are. 4) MORE OPEN SPACES!! RE-DO THE SIEGE MAPS!! 5) Damage to gates, yes. It's absolutely dumb that normal units can attack and damage Gates. Still we have large units in TWW, monsters, but even they should have some type of penalties in damaging the gates. Unless they are single entities which could have no penalties and actually could take gates down equally to lets say rams. Even in LotR, trolls couldn't do that much to the main front gates of lets say Minas Tirith, they were only useful in attacking smaller gates in the inner city. Same should be here. 6) Quality of sieges, walls damage, traps etc is significantly decreased in comparison to titles like Rome or even friggin Medieval in which sieges were actually one of my favourite types of battle... While in TWW i literally HATE them... I don't get that... So much potential gone to waste. 7) MORE OPEN SPACES!!! RE-DO THE SIEGE MAPS GOD DARN IT!!! 8) YES! Maps were way more interactive, more immersive. 9) Ropes only for light infantry for fast climbing, ladders for heavy and others. Etc. Changes like that might not be essential but would give a lot of tactical flavour and could be simple to implement. 10) Sieges are actually making attackers stronger vs AI... AI just sits and wait, while scattered all over the city so You can pick them up one by one. This is stupid af. It's easier to defeat 10-1 army as attacker than as defender... Because of how badly AI operates in those trillions of tiny, tight choke-pointy streets, in ROME or Medieval, You had streets as well, but there was few of them, so AI didn't get lost that easily, everything was larger and not so cramped up. I think ALL Siege maps needs a do-over, and even just that simple change, would help a TON, it's not so hard and doesn't require any changes in the programming, JUST RE-DO THE MAPS!!!
In the older titles i dont like seiges cus the ai gets buggy on my units They are hard to control and command on the wall and somehow my seige monster got thru the gates without breaking it leaving it alone attacked and unable to attack the gates to get the rest of my armies support
My main thing is just that I wish there were more LAND battles. I miss the land battles. It seems like in my campaigns in tww3 its hard to draw the AI into land battles, all fights take place in settlements unless the AI has overwhelming numbers and are willing to attack you.
@@ross.metcalf ...speak of the devil, the new patch attempts to address this. Low level minor settlements will be land battles now. If you wanted to avoid them altogether you would still need a mod however.
@@TheTankbus Yeah, I was happy to see the change notes. Think its finally in a state where I want to get the guys together for a big simul campaign! :D
I'm coming to Total War from 4X world, so I'm having quite a lot of fun with campaign map part of game. Battles I mostly auto resolve (not playing on higher difficulties yet). Recently I tried to challenge myself to play Immortal Empires campaign with fighting manually all battles. It went OK for a while, even had some fun while doing it. Eventually I failed with that challenge though. Settlement/siege battles were too much of a chore for me and I can't stand them. Indeed I mainly agree with "not enough space"/"choke-fest" arguments. Those maps are boring compared to open battlefields battles. It's just putting units against each other in choke points and waiting to see which one will survive this. Magically reappearing towers that I just destroyed also not helping in liking this part of game.
Don't worry, most people fail at that challenge as sieges are always a huge chore, and honestly for me even normal battles becomes a chore when it's 40v40
I used to play Total War for the battles. In Medieval 2 and Rome Total war I never Auto-Resolved. But with the advent of Total War Rome 2 battles have become so garbage that I auto-resolve everything I can and just play it like a Turn based Grand-Strategy. Which is why Attila is my favourite TW game
I can see why CA implemented a bunch of these simplistic changes into the Warhammer games, such as the ass ladders and magic elevators. Flying units, Monster units, (and flying Monster units), units which could logically go over or through the walls with little effort. These changes keep infantry units competitive in sieges when compared with this second rate shaboingery. Although I agree that the Rome 2 way of setting up traps and barricades is far better than the Fortnite style supply system we have currently. Also having the objective points give army wide leadership penalties/buffs like you said sounds really good.
Sieges in TWWH 2 were less involved but the path finding was so much better. In TWWH 3 My problem with all those choke points is my units will take a terrible path unless I go with single entities so I find myself avoiding cavalry and infantry as I know they will get wrecked in sieges but my monsters and heroes will find their way fine.
Everything you said is spot on. The seige rework for this game is so bad it made wh3 almost unplayable for me. It wasn't perfect in 2 either of course, but i'd take wh2's seiges anyway over this mess.
Wh2 sieges were objectively worse, I'm glad they at least made an attempt. Sieges within the warhammer setting are just hard tbh, and I'm not sure they'd feel good however they did them, people don't like using units and sieges are supposed to be super duper easy so, I think CA is just gonna make people unhappy regardless of what they do with sieges.
@@fidelcashflow4940 They're both bad. Even Age of Wonders 3 had more fun siege battles, and those tend to slow down the gameplay to a crawl. Tactical variety for each faction is severely missing. I'd rather they remove walled sieges and replace those with minor settlement battles.
this was all really obvious long before the game even released. they were actually quite transparent for once and showed that this was going to be how the game worked. they made videos describing and showing this stuff and uploaded it as part of the marketing.
Fantastic video, you finally summarized all of the doubts and frustrations of a tactically minded player who don't want to win (or lose) his/her sieges in TW Warhammer easy. I completely agree on all the points you discussed, besides the one on the chokepoints, where i'd like to have a few open space areas in the settlement but not the whole town/city (with the exception of Bretonnian settlements, which would definitely be better as you illustrated). At the moment, the superficiality of the sieges holds me back from investing in buying TW 2 and 3 and the related dlcs. It must feel empowering for younger players to conquer three settlements in a hour of campaign gameplay, but if you're a tad older and can afford less time for pc games, it's definitely more rewarding having to develop an actual tactic and take a hour or more to win a settlement battle well (as in suffering few casualties). Thanks for the effort, always precious.
You mention Helms Deep and Minas Tirith as example of cinematic sieges, those aren't 360, and that's exactly what makes them cinematic, they're not as empty. One of the main gripes I had with previous TW games was exactly this, there's no way you can cover the whole city no matter how many units you have, they can just go around and climb walls, I'm super happy it's not 360. Regarding tower ranges, they're perfect, you have spaces on the map where you can avoid them, you're placing units if that's what you want you can go there. If there was easy room to just move around, it would absolutely invalidate them, they're already not as effective as they should be TBH. Regarding building things inside the cities, I think it's a huge improvement over before, it makes you able to actually fight not just get overrun, I agree it's not great implemented, maybe instead of towers have buildable platforms for ranged/artilery, with some special solutions for non range factions. Also regarding choke points, that's the whole point of the sieges, attacker is supposed to be at a HUGE disadvantage, if anything I feel like it's not enough tbh, you should need a huge army to take even a base garrison and probably a super elite army with a LL to take a fully upgraded lvl 5 settlement with max walls, if not 2 armies. That's kinda the whole point, I never got why you're so against the current thing, it's not perfectly implemented, but it's by far my favourite thing about the warhammer 3, I thought it was crazy that before you would just have generic mini land battle with no advantage. All that being said, I absolutely agree with all your suggestions, sieges felt WAY more fun in rome 2 and other games, but tbh I have no idea how it would all be implemented with magic/monsters/flying, I mean... you plan your spikes and oil and fire archers and stuff and Manfred flies in masacres arches spams spells and its all gone. But here's hoping for the future.
Those sieges for Shogun 2 were so good. And it was so simple, just some walls, a few levels, and open space. I want a mod that just ports these maps to Warhammer 3 and see how it feels.
I mean my only real issue is the new tower defense mechanic. I don't see the issue with choke points, sieges are supposed to be battles of attrition. Some more open areas may be nice bit I think it should still be like 80-90% chokepoints
My biggest (personal) problem is I don’t like how cities can be captured with the main point still being under your control. Some of the main points are really defendable and it’s a shame that whilst outnumbered you have to spread your army out so thin and you’re unable to use the really cool areas. I wish all points had to be taken and there was just a leadership debuff for losing supply points.
One of the main problems with each new Total War release is that they strip out mechanics and replace them with half-baked gimmicks. If they struggle to make something work the first time around, maybe they'll use it again, but more often then not they'll just remove it since why even bother trying to fix efine something when you can just dumb it down and strip it out.
I think one of the big problems with TW Warhammer is scale. Since the first game the maps have been descaled to make it look more spectacular. However, this has caused units and battles to lose focus. Dragons look like flies walking the streets of some cities. This is also seen in the walls, many times they seem simple barricades compared to the rest of the city, when they should be the most remarkable elements in a siege. The design of the cities has improved but some seem illogical, lifeless, they are just elements that generate strange spaces. Where are the houses? What are those huge endless wells? I also think that the walls need a rework, as they are not very organic elements that do not go well with the rest of the city.
I think part of the problem no one really talks about is how the addition of SEMs reduces the size of the army by replacing the 120 men you’d have in other games with… a guy.
I scrolled looking for this comment. Yeah I think alot of the stated problems come from the introduction of single unit entities aka monsters. They kind of ruined the old balance of missile units versus infantry versus cavalry. They had to make everything tankier just to make the action more manegable. And Shogun 2 sieges would not have been so great if your gunline infantry shot down maybe five guys total before abandoning the wall. Also you can't give rush factions access to gate-busting monsters unless everyone can bust open gates, because that would further disadvantage range-heavy armies who are already having a harder time getting over the wall anyway.
@@Grauer1510 There's actually a different mod that does the same thing but works with port settlements. It's called "Minor Settlement Battle Remover", just found it the other day :)
I think one thing you missed is how the enemy AI would rather defeat you by attrition than fighting even the garrison. In Warhammer 3 the Great Bastion was a letdown since the Kurgan forces would rather whittle you down than fight, and when I do have an army sitting at the great bastion, I'd end up sallying out for a field battle. It makes settlement battles absolute trash. Back in Warhammer 2 I would often pull clutches against a full stack with just a fully upgraded settlement garrison with walls. In Warhammer 3 the AI would siege until your garrison until half health; I get that it gives time for your forces to come in, but at that point what point is the garrison beside being a counter of how long I have to intercept.
yeah, you cant put units to face other units on the walls, if an enemy is on the wall, you should be able to e.g. position your gunners in a line 90° turned to shoot at them
@@generalharness8266 that too, but thats a general pathfinding problem in settlements i believe(if you mean e.g. a unit only attacking with a few models while the rest stands in a square 5m away) but i think i always have this near dockable points, so if its that i assume you get this on walls even more frequent
@@randomredshirt5274 Yea I had a game in 3 where I saw enemy running at my archers I tell them to pull back and my melee inf to charge. Not this distance would have been about a quarter of crossbow range (don't know how else to describe the distance). My infantry decides to run away from them instead and my archers get wrecked.
Also wall have advantage for the attacker! The main penalty you may suffer in a fatigue penalty. Once you reach it it can't affect more. Meanwhile for the defenders the guy on a wall always have their back secured + you are not able to shoot them! So in the field battle you can use you cavalry to strike on the back, you have archers that can shoot or you can flank them. On the wall you have none of that!
The Best Sieges were in Total war Attila. Large Maps, Gates and Walls were much stronger ->A big disadvantage for the attacker. Also you could combine your attack with your Navy.
I use a simple mod that makes it so you start with a lot more supplies for barricaded towers etc, but you don’t gain any during the battle. And the capture points give buffs for the side that holds them. Made sieges way more fun for me
16:00 that's what made me a total war fan aside from the campaign map. The Matched combat and Sync kills were epic. A Samurai fight, a Roman Shieldwall or a Hoplite phalanx were amazing to watch due to animations. Now they keep hiting the air and having a heard attack
I agree with a lot of points you bring here. What i would love instead of the supply points would be a more strategic approach. why not place an armory, a church or temple, a hospital or such on various points of the map that give buffs to the faction that is control of them. so instead of running over walls that are no obstacle straight to the victory point, you could split forces to take the armory and gather a for example 10% buff to weapon damage and armor. create multiple points of interest on the maps so they feel filled, not just look big. I'm happy they got rid of the partial walls in big sieges and brought back the whole city thing, where you can place units all around a city though
Yeah , I like the new siege overall but I agree that it often feel too cramped. Some map are okay but some have obstruction everywhere. For the gate problem, maybe only unit with the siege trait should be able to attack gate.
I disagree about the tower range. The wall tower one, not the deployables. It's a change I welcome from game 2, where all towers on all maps essentially had infinite range. In game 3, most (If not all) maps have spots where the towers won't get you. And, if you want to create more of those, so you can use your artillery, well, you can use it on the towers first.
I mean the biggest thing, by MILES AND MILES AND MILES, the number one unforgiveable sin this game commits.... Walls. The walls.... THE GOD DAMNED WALLS!!!!! They need to mean something, they need to be better and they need to actually make your ranged units useful, they need to be more defendable, they need to provide bonuses and they need to be something there 2 units can share a wall section to allow both melee and ranged units to defend against those scaling them.
You hut the nail on the head with this video awesome work... only if we could get the bosses to see this and agree I think when they made it "more appealing for a wider audience" they assumed that non total war players are a little dumb they should have never changed from there old gameplay loop that's what mad total war so different and appealing
"Designed for a faster pace, to be streamlined, dumbed down, etc" While this is true, the sieges in this are such a chore that I'd rather just play open map battles in 100% of cases, which would be a further stream-line but would still be better (and I'm one of the people who used to LOVE long sieges in Medieval 2 and have some of my fondest memories of TW being about winning ridiculously long sieges, and especially watching the AI cavalry charge into my longbow stakes that were set up just behind the gate!). I think minor siege battles are one of the biggest issues; scrap them entirely, and bring back a few really nice big siege maps for the capitals. The one issue in the past was that the way provinces were made up you could potentially have lore inaccuracies, but seeing as they have added Praag and Kislev as their own single-city province, they should just do that with the rest. Make Moussillion (sp?) its own province too, and probably a few others, and its fine.
21:00 respectfully, I disagree about the unit abilities you have to select. in Rome2 it was just a silly amount, every unit seemed to have a selectable ability, so I spent tons of time cycle clicking all the unit cards and popping abilities rather than looking at the actual battle. Even TW3 it gets overwhelming at times with all the hero abilities and magic CD's
Most "improvements" were made to make the ai have a fighting chance, but it makes the player have to use the same tactics as the ai, such as rushing and deploying all over.
@@divout6688 This is genuinely how some of the people on the team think about the game. Instead of providing fun mechanics/units and then allowing players to break them as they wish (cheesing/exploits in a single player game doesn't hurt anyone, lol) they are more concerned with exactly how people are playing and patching out fun units/abilities because they are too powerful. That and the whole game is patched based on what mutiplayer weirdos are up to, and that's a small fraction of the playerbase.
Minor Settlement Battles should be a close-copy of the Domination multiplayer game mode. It's a fun game mode that a large portion of the Total War Warhammer 3 community don't interact with since they don't play multiplayer. Moreover, CA wouldn't have to create anything new and instead just scrap the settlement battle maps and adjust some numbers when balancing for campaign. This would be the best solution with the least amount of work since everything already exists. Scrap the wacky and buggy settlement maps (that both the AI and your units can't path for shit through) for simpler, flatter Domination maps (the current Line of Sight bugs for gunpowder units would be less noticeable too!). Adjust the defensive buildings (walls, garrisons, etc) in the campaign map to give even more supply so that you can spawn units (in addition to your initial garrison) at the start of the mode as a sort of choose-your-own garrison. If you want to go one further: have some heroes with a "add supplies in region/province when defending" blue line; this way you can still be rewarded for having heroes out on the campaign map (especially those heroes that have terrible campaign effects/were heavily nerfed from Warhammer 2 to 3). Fuck knows what they need to do about Siege Battles though. Siege Battles will need a total overhaul so I don't expect to see siege changes for quite a long time.
I'd really like to see boiling oil or faction specific versions pouring down on enemies as they pass through the gate. Pretty sure this was in medieval 2 and Rome 2.
Ít was there in Rome 1 and Medieval 2. It was in fact so powerful and so difficult to avoid ( because you would need to use ladders or siege towers to capture the gatehouse, and somehow, sometimes, it would still pour boiling oil killing everything) that I just ended up avoiding sieges altogether or blasting through a wall instead. Fun fact: it was not used at all. There is no historical evidence of it ever being used, and it is purely a Hollywoodesque idea. As historian Roel Konijnendijk says, it is needlessly elaborate. You can through boiling water and it achieves the same, without having to burn things for no reason, or just throw rocks, plenty of them available without any need for too much unnecessary preparation.
Possibly although the uses of hot sand being poured over attackers exist, regardless rock's etc were dropped onto the heads of assaulting forces from murder holes. This being a fantasy setting I think a few poetic licences can be taken, could definitely see dwarves and skaven shooting fire down on attackers and other races having their own faction specific variant.
Lost me with chokepoint rant. Urban maps are always going to be cramped, that's to be expected - huge open spaces in the middle of a city (outside of the occasional city square) are not particularly realistic. (Edit: those Shogun II castles are pretty silly; I've been to the real thing and while they do have open courtyards, they're mostly a series of chokepoints and you can't just climb up anywhere.) Otherwise I agree with most of your points, and would add that siege equipment needs a serious overhaul. It's too hard to build rams and siege towers, and they're too slow compared to ladders and simply attacking a gate. Siege towers and Rams need to move and build faster. Gates should be much tougher to crack without a ram, either being immune to infantry damage or preferably to have boiling oil to drop on attacking infantry. There needs to be a greater penalty for using ladders. Multilevel siege maps are a must as well, and defenders should have pre-battle deployables in both sieges and encampment battles.
The issue with sieges is that they don't fit well into the rest of the game, at all. Sieges are supposed to be narrow fighting and choke points, it's a city. If walls and gates were more of an obstacle, if barricades worked better and could block of all streets, sieges would take hours to play, and as they are already bad as is why would we want them to take longer? TW: WH is a game about movement, units and tactics, strategy and battlefield maneuvers. Sieges are about choke points, restriction of movement, slowing down, attrition. They are at complete odds, which is fine IF sieges were rare. Like a strange spice, something different. But they are not rare, they are constant. The issue with sieges is frequency.
I sometimes get the feeling that people don't like attacking in sieges because (if they don't play the capture the point with stealth) it means you lose units... people want victories with minimal losses. Sieges will get your units killed, you have to ram your units over wall, into barricades its the price you pay for attacking a defensive fortification. I do agree with many of the points in this video though
I respectfully disagree. I think there are a lot of things that can be improved, but I wouldn't lose sight of how fantastic this game and this series is. Mods improve on a flawed but already-excellent game.
@@kianqalashahar I could agree with that statement for WH2 where I have only a few minor mods installed. But vanilla WH3 is such a slog with its endless minor settlement battles and cowardly AI that I honestly can't enjoy it without modding it to hell.
My personal preference if I could have everything I want: Lots of emphasis on defending the walls. We love Helm's Deep for a reason. Minor Settlements: You have medium walls, nothing else. Enemy wins if they take a (single) point in the center of town or your army is routed. Sieges: You have huge walls, possibly two rows of walls, and a large bastion of support fire/towers and artillery behind you. As well as a few major abilities unique to the settlement/race that give the defender a big advantage. You can disable those abilities by sabotage or taking points beyond the wall. Just a straightforward, difficult slog for the attacker without turning the map into a giant checkerboard of nonsense. Keep the maps really scenic and iconic but lock most of the decorative stuff outside the boundaries of the actual fighting. In Warhammer I'd want them to keep the medieval stuff streamlined while emphasizing all the fantasy stuff. Siege giants snatching men off the walls and shit like that. Right now sieges look really pretty but, as was noted, strangely empty and lifeless.
I do think the choke point gripe is kinda weird. For gameplay sure but when building cities in times of war yea they are going to be built with as many choke points as possible to slow an invading force.
Something I think that could be cool or immersive with the whole choke point thing is make abit of the city destructible or building that you have in the settlement be actual buildings you can see in the battle as well. The less buildings in the settlement the more room in the battle map. An make those buildings on the map distructable to the amount of damage the building takes dictates how much campaign map damage it has taken
We've had this in previous total war games. Particularly the siege escalation system from Attila where longer overmap siege resulted in a very battered settlement whenever you actually engage the battle.
The fact that (in 2 at least, don't think I've tried in 3) you could just plant one hero/lord on foot slightly closer to a tower than your artillery/archers and render it more or less useless while you shred the defenders always struck me as a bit silly.
WH3 is a game where the devs got so wrapped in doing new stuff that they forgot that it was supposed to be fun first and foremost. I doubt they will but I definitely wish they would add a check box that would allow for WH2 settlement sieges or even 100% land battles.
I love how they have put effort into siege improvements, especially with the new maps and minor settlement maps. In concept it's great versus what we had before - one-wall maps everywhere. But in practice, there are a lot of flaws with the system. Some of the flaws can be fixed however - if they actually wanted to. Flaw 1: Minor settlement battles are often going to be 20v20 battles or more due to the fact that the AI and players alike have every incentive to camp on minor settlements with a full stack army to defend them. Yet minor settlement maps are extremely tiny and don't have room to reasonably fight with so many troops - so you almost never get an interesting battle (maybe 10 units vs 10 units). Flaw 2: Poorly balanced and lacking supply system. I think that the supply system is actually a good idea overall - some people hate it, but I think the idea of being able to customize your defenses is a good thing. But they should change it to either be done entirely before a battle - not "during" a battle - or they should make things like barricades able to be placed more freely and make them take longer to build, but make them stronger and don't let units just walk through things. Flaw 3: This has been a problem since TWW1 and TWW2 - inability to use magic near or around walls. It's incredibly stupid that I cannot cast spells against defenders on a wall, and they need to change that so that spells are actually useful in sieges as the attacker. Give units on the wall magic resist, and encourage the AI and players to not put all of their units on the wall at once. Actually the walls are just flawed overall, as you mentioned. They need to introduce proper stairs for them rather than having units teleport on and off of them. There are other flaws too, of course. They need to change the supply system to be more similar to what we had in Rome 2 - that system was ideal, and I think that system in fact should also be adapted to some extent for defensive battles in the field to represent the defenders probably not encamping in place without defenses (at least allow some defenses in encamp stance).
The thing I don't understand is that we *told* them we hated the buildable towers as soon as they were revealed. They had over six months to do something with them; and it's not like you can't do anything as modders have fixed it. Somebody influential at CA must just be really wedded to the idea, cuz otherwise I just don't see why it ever made it into the game.
My experience with every single total war since Medieval 2 has been that the best strategy is always "Open space in the city? Just abandon it, retreat back to the next set of choke points" And I'm not sure it's worth adding big open spaces to the city when it's pointless space defensively. Speaking of walls and gates I'm reminded of how it worked in Shogun 2 where gates and walls could also be taken out by any unit but the penalties in melee for doing so made it somewhat of an interesting choice. I feel like in every game where walls have been a serious challenge gameplay devolves into "never ever siege unless you've got three to five units of artillery and can flatten the whole town into a field battle."
One of the things the could do to improve siege battles is give the defenders the ability to reinforce the gates to make it much harder for the attackers to get in, even with a battering ram. Look at the Battle of Helms Deep and Minas Tirith as examples and the gates were being attacked, the defenders were bracing it with wood, metal and even soldiers leaning against the doors to keep them shut. It took the Orcs and Uruk Hai longer to breach the doors. In the case of Minas Tirith, the Orcs were constantly trying to breach the main gate with a standard battering ram, but the door wouldn't budge because it was made with iron and steel and the Orcs ended up bringing in Grond (A much BIGGER battering ram) to knock down the gate in four hits.
I have enjoyed the mod that disables building during the battle. You just get increased supply at the start, and that is it. This actually lets you properly set up barricades since the AI won't destroy them if they are down before the battle starts. My tactics have changed a bit on offense, too. Pretty much every army has dedicated tower snipers now, and while the AI is pretty bad at allocating their supply it is still a more enjoyable experience overall.
As a TW noob (only played WH2/3) I definitely feel like 3 has a weird "sameyness" even when compared to 2 in regards to its sieges. Maybe it's just how I'm making the AI play but if I'm attacking it's globs at the gates or first chokepoints and either the better glob wins or I sneak a stealth unit in to cap and win the settlement that way, and if I'm defending, well, they don't attack unless they have an overwhelming force so I either win via towers or get overwhelmed while trying to protect the entrances how I see happen to the AI when I'm attacking. From WH2 I do have some stories where sieges went weird and unexpected things happened, I have yet to get much of that in 3, and I feel like that's pretty objectively a bad thing.
The multi-layer walls is an amazing idea. I love the thought of strategically falling back to an inner wall, its also very cinematic (or movie-like) I think the reason Shogun 2 feels more alive to you is, that the maps are significantly smaller but dont feel that way because they are so open. This is the perfect combo, and what we need is better designed maps, not bigger maps. The maps should have some real thought put into them like "route A is faster but has a chokepoint or two, and route B is slower, but there is a capture point on the way, its more open and less opportunities for enemy archers, route C (...)". My point or ideal here is a map with real thought and design put into it, instead of a bunch of city blocks thrown into some random shape with some capture points sprinkled in. Im also not saying all maps are like this, but a lot are - they feel soulless - and what Id prefer is something that feels alive. I love that a lot of Skaven maps have a very distinct feel, and the same applies to the empire, bet high elf maps? Dark elves? Tomb kings, lizardmen, cathay, kislev, etc - they all feel the same to some degree, and play out the same too. The different races' maps should be tailored to their lore AND playstyle. Dwarven fortresses should be strong, defensible bastions, and Bretonnian castles with their mounted knights should have unprecedented amounts of freedom I also agree so much on the point about doors, rams, and walls. Why have a siege attacker trait if anyone can break down the gates? And why is siege attacker even required if any shitty skavenslave can just scale the wall with ladders? Its absurd, and its wayyy too easy to get past the walls. The only times its not easy is on those maps where the walls intersect to create an L shape, and youre constantly under fire - but those siges are difficult for the wrong reasons! Its the enemy units and the wall layout that makes it harder, not the mechanics of the game I also liked your idea of more meaningful capture points, or at least more varied. I think an addition to that is also more varied and interesting terrain. Shallow water that decreases stats, pits of nurgle-shit that damages you if you walk past it, and so on - these add challenges to the player and gives them both options and food for thought. Is it worth leaving your giants behind and bringing your army over the weak bridge? How about areas/terrain that give you buffs or provide you with a benefit, like a tunnel that allows you to silently go somewhere the enemy didnt expect? Or maybe the opposite, a vantage point that allow you to see all spottable units, or maybe increase the missile range of any unit in that area. Winds of magic buffs exist as well I'm just spitballing, but the essence of the idea is pretty simple: a siege is more than chokepoints, simply killing the enemy and practically meaningless capture points I will say they (perhaps involuntarily) did something right. I hate getting peppered by towers while fighting the AI, so I do actually make some concerted effort to capture the smaller points, despite my goal being the key/victory point heres to hoping for improvements, a mod or just *something* Ted talk over ~
I really don't even want to play this game until this is fixed. I just booted up after winter sale, got ALL the DLC that I want, was STOKED to play. Was having an absolute blast for hours until I had to defend a settlement. It just sucks the will to play right out of you. I highly doubt CA fixes this though, and it's a big ask for modders, which depresses me thinking that this is just how it's gonna be.
Agree with everything you said. Most of the things you mentioned can also be changes relatively easy compared to massive reworks. Some battle changes to, battles are still way to fast.
Something else with Shogun 2 walls is that soldiers would slip, fall and die. Scaling a small wall was not much bother but try and scale a 2 or 3 story wall and a significant amount of the unit would be claimed by gravity. Combining this kind of mechanic with weather effects making rain more impactful (not entirely sure if Shogun 2 did this or not) would also be wicked.
There are some really interesting points you make here, but when it comes to game design specifically, a lot of the things you mentioned are gameplay concessions, such as units being able to hop down from the wall anywhere. It's a QoL change that doesn't really have a lot of tactical impact, but I can see why it's confusing from a realism perspective the game otherwise tries to create. Minus the dragons. :) The unit ladders are tricky. I think it's a way to help prevent an unprepared player from sieging and getting their whole army smote because they didn't consider ladders. I think there can be a happy medium, though. For example: they could make the initial sieges all about the gates. You need to break them, or take control of them in order to siege. To make that change, they could: - Give walls and gates a special type of armor (building armor trait?) that has resistance to most damage sources, except explosive damage. Units can still break down the gates, but it will take them a long time if they just have axes and swords. - Some units get the "siege damage" trait, which means they ignore building armor, such as dwarven canons or flaming attackers. - Infantry can still set up and climb ladders, but they are fewer per wall segment, have a per-unit cooldown to when they can put up another one, and can be broken by defenders. - When a ladder is broken, the entities on the ladder fall to the ground, and have to rebuild the ladder. I think it would also be a nice change to see most defenses can only be set up at the beginning of a siege, like you suggested. Players can build up defensive resources through buildings, perks, etc. They can build refuse barricades through the fight, but it requires a unit of infantry to do it, and they are fairly weak. ...the problem is, you may love the idea of what I suggested, and there is a very good chance sieges at some point looked like that, but when they playtested it, it wasn't well liked. So they had to iterate until they found an option everyone was at least OK with, otherwise siege battles would be an even bigger chore than they are now. Personally, I think siege battles should be a lot less frequent. Instead, we can have town maps that are just regular battle maps, but the defender sets up in the town to take advantage of the terrain.
A few simple things: 1) adjust the deployables and tie the tiers of towers available and number of supplies to the town level and garrison level 2) get rid of ass ladders, make ladders available on some infantry types, like swordsmen, but they have to carry them and be slowed by them 3) can’t attack a gate if it does not have a siege attacker or wall breaker trait 4) have some more room outside of the tower range, however towers should outrange most of the field guns, should be 500 range? 5) a few more plazas could be fine although if you look at cities, they are rarely anything else than streets and buildings so cities should be expected to be more chokepointy and maneuver dependand (feints, pulls, funnels, etc.) 6) some city types should be multilayered in terms of walls, like dwarf Karaks 7) artilery should be something that you can mount on the walls 8) walls should be scalable only in certain areas, like ramps or staircases as in previous titles
The funniest thing about sieges is that the 10m tall stone walls hinder the attacker less than a hastily built 2m tall wooden barricade.
Yeah, ladders should not be auto included
@@Passonator11 they should make them climb like shogun or make you biuld the latter
The other problem with Ass Ladders is that it removes the possibility of giving certain units a special "can climb walls": spider units, gutter runners, chameleon skinks, et al. Heck, you could even have Vampire Coast monsters disgorging little dudes who are riding on their shoulders....
Mark of Chaos actually did this and it was great
I like how Shogun 2 did it. Any unit can climb walls, but unless they're experts at it expect some of them to fall.
could have them climb at 2-3x speed?
You could have them getting over as a unit, since the major negative of ladders is having your soldiers take a minute or two to climb while getting slaugthered, so if spiders could all get up there as a single group in 10 seconds it would be good, avoiding that time where the first to arrive are fighting 150vs5
Ohhh that's something i can see, those towering creatures could be battling the units on the wall without stepping on them, some of those could climb and do slighty mostly flavor damage (5%?) because of their height just for fun and maybe flank some of the units that are trying to stop infantary from climbing down the walls
What still infuriates me the most is attackers routing INTO your city
And then capping your victory points
Or defenders routing outside.
I think my biggest gripe is how the towers you build are identical. They're the same between factions and even the same between tiers! Well actually I don't know if it's my biggest gripe, I seem to have a lot around that level with this game!
They just didn't improve anything with WH3 like enemy units routing into your city, the gate bug, and the stupid walls...
Also miss the old days were your units would fight to the death in the city centre instead of routing.
Or their reinforcements spawning IN the city, which is something I had happen in one game recently. Forgot which city it was, but it was one around Nagarythe's starting point. The entry point for their reinforcements was literally behind one of the capture points inside the city. XD
I think the fundamental thing im looking in sieges is that it's primarily about keeping the enemy out. The walls should be your main defense, not just a very temporary hurdle for the enemy to pass right over/through... Helms deep is epic because the enemy breaking through is such a major development.. It's our heroes starting to lose hope.. In Warhammer the attackers get past the walls in every single siege.
Lets face it. It's a moba with lots of micro management, not a strategy. They want us to micro on the streets, not let us attack frontally. There used to long be cinematic battles.
Walls? You mean that line that doesnt slow the attacker down while I wait with all my troops in the far back corner of the keep?
What siege battles lack is tactical diversity. Even with the new map layouts, most siege battles end up feeling the same anyway. Because most factions are given the same approach in both defense and offense.
Skaven, spiders, and ethereal units shouldn’t have to use ladders to bypass walls. A Karak siege shouldn’t play the same as a Bretonnia siege. Every siege equipment, tower and defensive fortification has the same function with a different coat of paint. Sieges needs to be mechanically different to complement their visual difference.
thats what i love about rome 1, you have a lot of different siege equipments to atack the towers/walls, it was so fucking fun back then
Maybe Warhammer 4 will have decent sieges /s
I also hate that walls are useless since every units have a ladder. I also hate that defensive equipment can only be placed in predetermined (bad as fuck) locations.
@@Jixxor there wont be one
Imagine ethereal units going through walls, or spiders climbing them, so cool😳😳
Definitely the walls being pretty much useless is one of the most frustrating things and also the deployed towers rather than pre-built ones
Honestly my biggest gripe is that sieges are where uniqueness goes to die.
Most of the problems I have could be overlooked because I would be having more fun if ghosts could walk through walls, Skaven could sap, huge monsters could clamber over, zombies could WWZ their way over, Dwarves could add cannons to walls, keep the pop-up towers but only for Orks etc etc.
Greenskins and maybe the skaven/lizardmen IMO
All sieges being "ass ladders and gate-breaking doggos/infantry" as an attacker and "pop-up towers and maybe walls" as a defender in the exact same 5 layouts is like having a Dwarfs vs Skaven battle where slayers rout because the dwarf chariots charged into a unit of skavenslaves with slings and lost, so the dwarf wizard casts the "Buff" Spell from the "Magic" lore of magic (the only one) on the dwarf wolves fighting the Skaven furies, who can be attacked in melee while flying because the AI doesn't understand what a flying unit is.
There's a mod I was looking at that made the pop up towers pre battle only and compensated the amount of supplies so you could build a fair amount that i liked the idea of, other than something along those lines I have to say magic pop up towers every minute or 2 during battle just has to go they are a dumb arcade idea that's ruining sieges and just drag them out, placing them before hand then having the system disabled worked well tho.
I always felt the Dwarf/Ork and Skaven where a massive missed opportunity where you have have some very unique underground map designs what have smaller caves and sections that flying units were unable to get in to or were forced to land before they could enter.
@@zaleost I still wish the underway was an actual second map layer that connected settlements with tunnels.
The way it is now is just super lazy and lacks any strategy.
Great point about the defenders being able to walk through the barricades and prevent the attackers from destroying them. That has really frustrated me. And when a barricade pops up suddenly your units forget where they were walking to.
Maybe a good update would be to make the unit automatically attack barricades if its on his way rather than trying to find another way. Because they are so easely destroyed anyway…
There was just one building in Shogun 2 because you were attacking the castle, not the city.
Facts
Thats not exactly how medieval or shogun Era castles worked. They often did have essentially a villages worth of people to actually keep the castle running with food wood, etc. But it is true they didn't need a whole city around them
Nice copium
@@misomaniac3907 The big ones, like Kyoto, do have settlements inside.
Um, NO. If you know history you know what you just said is bullshite.
One point on Shogun 2 sieges: the reason the inside of the castle is so empty is that you're not fighting in the actual town, Shogun 2 provinces had a separate building chain and slots for the town and a separate building chain and slots for the castle. You win control of a province by controlling the castle, so the siege battle takes place there. You don't actually ever see the farms houses shops etc in a siege battle because that's not where the fight is happening at.
that is just the keep; castles have many support structures in the castle. It wouldn't make sense to have the barracks outside the castle
@@phillipharrison886 Samurai did not live in the castle. They reside in their own houses in the outside, in the town or villages. The lord would rally them when needed, else they are not in the castle. Not like in movies.
except real armies did fight inside of towns and cities, and castles had more than just walls and a keep in the middle.
shogun 2 siege battles are, by and large, kind of cheap in their overall construct.
@@boarfaceswinejaw4516 in sengoku era japan? Why? What's in random towns that's worth fighting over? If you're the defender you want to hole up in your purpose built castle when available, or ambush the army on it's way to besiege it. That's not gonna happen in some town in the middle of nowhere. If you're the attacker why do you care about taking random towns, your goal is to control the administrative center for the area of land you are looking to take, and/or get rid of the military aristocrats on the opposing side of the conflict. Conveniently both things are happening at the local castle most of the time.
@@TheWujuStyle
"whats in random towns worth fighting over"
outside of the fact that towns are defensible and that they are full of things such as food and loot, as well as most of the population. Idk, you tell me why the fuck someone would defend the thing that makes their goddamn province worth a damn.
Europeans loved their goddamn castles but even they understood that sometimes you have to fight in or near a town or city, whether to gain defensive advantage, defend your territory, or because going around the town takes more time than marching through it, lest we forget that most settlements were surrounded by farmland which is less than apt to march through for an army, thus making the path along developed roads to a place where you can extort food and loot from locals more worthwhile.
Why the fuck do you think so many japanese towns and cities, especially old ones, still have walls if there was never intent to use it defensively against would-be attackers?
War is all about attrition and leaving your food sources to be gobbled up by a marching enemy army is beyond stupid.
Which is without mentioning how most castles were generally attached to a city, town or at least hamlet since lords, oddly enough, wanted to have direct control of their immediate fiefs.
your argument is legit befuddling. the city of Kyoto was all but annihiliated during the years of fighting in and around the city, yet the concept of a battle occuring in an inhabited area is apparently alien.
i get that people love shogun 2, but stop trying to defend lazy design.
Important thing to note about Shogun 2 walls is that a certain number of the unit models would fall to their death based on how high the wall is. I think that would really help to balance ass ladders in Warhammer.
Reminder while Rome 2 do have Burnable Iron Gates, getting through a Gate in Rome 2 is super dangerous due to Boiling Oil which can literally melt any unit, making it important to use a disposable unit to neutralize the gates first by going through the gates.
Medieval 2 had that too aswell, the towers were much more powerful aswell compared to warhammer
that happen in even Rome 1 as I remember correctly and people could fall off from walls -_- that feature was removed. it was so epic to see that in 2004
"Boiling oil" isn't historically accurate, way too valuable to just pour on people.
They'd just use boiling water in real life.
@@Stop_Gooning And rocks. They are cheap and hurt people. It is great.
@@tigervv6437 Truly, one of the all time greats. Rocks rock.... lmao
For me the main huge issue with chokepoints and barricades is that they completely break unit pathfinding. Units will break up or chage routes or just get stuckin narrow corridors so you have to micro every single one of them all the time.
it worked fine in Atilla
@@FilipMoncrief That's because cities in Attila had larger pathways, specially near the walls. There was usually enough space for two units to fight side. WH 3 siege system is very reminiscent of Attila but it manages to be worse than it.
@@khankhomrad8855 idk, never noticed that in Attila. Maps in that game seem way more believable and liveable, while also being more playable
With IE they added a lot of siege maps where most towers are very obstructed and can't shoot anything.
The one point I disagree with you on, are the chokepoints, since forcing the attacker to fight in tight corridors is exactly the whole point of any fortifications throughout history. It’s supposed to take away your advantages and ability to move around. If anything, maps in TW III are more forgiving than they should be, since even relatively small castles in history would have multiple sets of walls and gates, to trap the invading forces between them. I’d expect a tier V city to be able to fight off 20unit doomstack with just it’s garrison, because that’s basically what cities were built for: holding off assholes who want to kill your people and take your stuff.
This is a very important point many don't bring up, you put it very well together. The attacker is supposed to have a disadvantage
The thing is some factions in HW, unlike historical ones, are particularly terrible at choke point battles like Bretonia and Slanesh. Why would you build your defense in a way that actively hurts yourself?
I agree with this. Chokepoints and corridors are good thematically, and I think they suit the gameplay. I also agree that CA made a lot of effort actually to open op the maps, like most corridors are huge, and the streets are incredibly wide, so moving units aroung is not an issue. I actually think some of the maps look more like Hot-Wheels tracks because of this.
They just neet to get rid of the supply system, keep the victory objectives, in plazas and such, for units to fall back to and hold. Just remove the buildable towers. The towers should be there statically around the map always, and then let us build the barricades in the deployment phase.
Edit: I support the idea of both having narrow corridors and wider open areas, the Rome 2 sieges like the one showed were pretty darn great. Just do something with the god damn copy paste walls in WH... And well also the siege equipment, I think the siege towers and rams look awful and stupid, especially the dwarf ones...
@@bz6587 Regardless of your faction, it's always advantegous to force your opponent to lose time and stamina zigzaking around your defences in tight corridors, while you shoot at them from above. Any race specific traits are just a cherry on top; with Slaanesh or Bretonnia you can just hide the cavalry outside and strike from the rear, when your opponent is nicely packed inside your walls, with no way to escape your cycles of charging. Doesn't make having multiple chokepoint a bad idea.
Anything more sophisticated than historical data would require a really good imagination and effort, since developers would have to consult military experts to figure out how medieval cities could protect themselves against dragons/magic/monsters. However that is asking way too much out of Creative Assembly, since they're rather uncreative, despite their name.
Agreed. Shogun 2 was following historical precedent, based on how armies fought sieges during the Sengoku Period, in which the walls were never meant to completely halt an attack but give your troops the ability to shoot and stab at attackers, and tiring them out before you engaged with their forces at various designated areas within the fortress. A lot of this was brought about by the Bushido culture the Samurai class enforced onto the peasant soldiers/ashigaru, which encouraged soldiers to fight hand to hand and one on one. This is why Nobunaga was such a prominent figure, he disregarded the strategy and tactics that were common, utilizing gunpowder weapons and formations, mixed unit tactics, for his levy forces. As a result they see him as cowardly by his opponents, as he scoffed at the impractical nature of the Bushido spirit when it came to tactical fighting.
Most of the rest of the world, especially the West, instead built walls designed to hold off attackers for months or even years, and often built more layered defenses within the fortresses and or cities and towns, including a keep/castle that would be the ultimate holding point if they breached the outer defenses. As said in this thread, many would build death traps (Barbicans for example) for invading forces, forcing them to fight between gates/walls/barricade structures, with fortifications that would let them attack from higher/safe points. All the while, on the ground of barbicans, some castles would have actual booby traps, such as spikes, caltrops, floor/wall blades, etc. this isn’t event to mention more common anti siege defenses like outer wall and keep wall moats.
They could legitimately design maps based on different factions fighting styles, and mechanics related to that if they wanted to but they won’t do it. It’s the kind of thing I wish wasn’t hard coded, so modders could give us more realistic sieges that give attackers real disadvantages in a non-gamey way like we have with wall tower ranges and defensively supply system/barricades/inner tower mechanics.
one aspect that I think is a big issue is just the amount of them, 80%+ of battles in a campaign are sieges, even if they were almost perfect that 'almost' would wear on anyone very quickly when its battle after battle after battle.
That is related with the AI at the moment. They simply dont move enough, they sit there in their settlements waiting for you to come and once they are besieged they will rarely sally out.
Ai is just a coward which hides in their settlement or going for overkills to ensure the win. I had a skaven which sieged an empire t3 settlement without garrison and an half stack army inside with 4 army stacks of mid tier units.
A solution could be to only have walls on minor settlements when they reach tier 3. Makes them rarer, almost unheard of in the early game, and at least a bit less common in contested areas towards the late game.
Yes, this has been my frustration as well.
Battles on the field seem few an far between -- and when a campaign gets going I'm either taking or losing a settlement every turn.
@@Kimbie good, create mod that does it pls
My main problem is that siege maps are nto tailored to each race's strengths: This is specially obvioys for races like the Skaven and the VC who would rely on powerful magics, devious contraptions and a good amount cannon fodder to whittle down the attackers as they advance. Imagine that the skaven would have something along the lines of explosive Skavenslaves with different payloads: Acid for Armor, Sharpnel for maximum damage, HE for AOE, some cataclismic Warp bomb as the ace in the whole. All of of this with warp mines and temporary Rat Ogre Summons to represent the chained defence-beasts.
For the VC imagine that each fresh kill adds to their "supply, and they rely on unit summons to represent the rising of the dead attackers, having progressively powerful summons to represent the winds of death getting stronger as the carnage goes on. From hordes of zombies to powerful Hex Wraiths, Wraths, crypt horrors,graveguard, etc
God this. I dream of sieging a Dwarf settlement that is actually designed around the quirks of the race.
Huge gates which are far more of an engineering feat compared to the greatest structures built by Man. Multi-layered walls with those chokepoints to complement the strengths and weaknesses of Dwarfs. A couple of raised areas for artillery. Special paths that maybe Miners can only take? Would make them really cool as a flank unit during sieges.
I detest the tower + barricade building, sure it's useful for any faction but I just kinda wish that every faction had their own form of defenses during a siege. Akin to your ideas with units.
Have you fought in a wood elf tree, the entire front area is a barely defensible kill zone that the AI deploys all of their troops in outside of the firing range of all of their towers, there are no good places to put archers that is protected in any appreciable way, and if you bring arty they just stand around and die.
I feel this since I play a lot of tomb kings. Their garrisons are already awful, and the siege mechanics don’t help very much since their towers also aren’t that good compared to other races.
I think that it all comes to the issue of balancing and pacing. Honestly, with a large number of settlements and too many different factions in warhammer, a mechanically complex siege battle will drag the game on forever. And unlike historical TW where humans fight each other, there are so many races, and faction mechanics for the player to learn. Putting too much stuff in and forcing a beginner to learn all of those is a bad user experience design. Game is supposed to be enjoyed, not a real war simulation. I myself find the current game content to be quite overwhelming, and don't need it to be more difficult to learn.
If people are looking for a more complicated and enhanced experiment, I suggest installing mods. Mods that allow more different siege equipment and defense weapons. With the current WH3, it is possible for the modders to execute more interesting ideas and perhaps, someone is able to make a siege battle overhaul mod.
Or, hell, having areas that periodically summon units that gradually become higher tier as the battle progresses. Starting with zombies and skeletons, working their way up to grave guard and black knights.
Lizardmen should have a similar thing to your skaven idea and another commentors dwarf idea. Massive multi-layered defenses making usage of walls and bridge chokepoints, with periodic summons of dinosaurs and more saurus to defend the city.
12:41 Could you imagine how great it would be to see the city's populace trying to resist and fight against the invaders? Example, you have a Skaven settlement and random skaven slaves are popping up to defend in a hasty panic, or how about seeing Sigmar Priests defending an Empire settlement as they come rushing out of the temples in a religious zeal. That'd be awesome to see and help make them more entertaining.
Unique racial pre battle deployables would be boss. And ya multitiered defenses are very cool. One of my favs from WH are the empire super forts on the mountain ranges that have a secondary raised wall to fall back to.
Fingers crossed we see dome of these great ideas made for WH in future updates.
My wishlist for better WH3 sieges that's feels like it's not too much to ask:
* No placeable towers, possibly create some fixed (not shit-looking) towers inside the settlement with defense buildings
* Realm of Chaos battles can keep the current towers
* Barricades behave realistically and are not destroyed by any unit within seconds
* Similar with gates - only siege attackers or battering rams take those down quickly
I feel like the WH3 devs were looking to capture that multi-layer cake defense that Shogun 2 had, and it would be nearly there if not for the failings of the build-a-base mechanic. Fix the most glaring problems and it gets much better.
And of course, the paper-mache gates of the Warhammer World have felt ridiculous ever since you figured out how quickly Empire Swordsmen take them down. I fail to understand why that is still a thing.
Funny thing is that many major settlements actually have towers built into the maps, but they are useless. They are thematic, bigger, nicer and more sensical than the pop-up towers but they are just decoration.
And just place the barricades wherever you want to... I like the idea of layered defences, but also that it would be difficult to take settlements and would even require specialized armies.
Honestly I wish they'd make the sieges more difficult, as in the defenders have a huge advantage, but also have options to bribe the defenders to open the gates so that you start some kind of "ambush" battle against the defenders or similar options. That way you have more difficult sieges but also slightly more variety and options to work around them.
Paper gates and butt ladders are a thing because the AI is incapable of playing the game.
@@ivanlagrossemoule They had almost this exact thing in Medieval 2, where your spy could open the gates and the battle started without giving defenders time to set up.
@@brianlevor6295 heroes can damage walls (ie create breaches) in the Warhammer games. The Witch hunter can at least, and I'd imagine the equivalent for other factions could.
I think the comparison to Shogun 2 sieges was really spot on. As some who played WH1 & WH2 before playing shogun 2 I vastly preferred Shogun's sieges over Warhammer's for all the reason's stated. Well Said!
i think it has a lot to do with HOW they scale the walls, while i myself prefer rome 1 and medieval 2 system, i can tolerate shogun 2 just fine because they scale the walls SLOOOOOOOOWLY, and if the wall they are scaleing is rly tall (there are some maps where you can scale directly to the 3rd level from the ground) if you put range units there the units that are scaleing the walls would rarely make it to the top, another thing is the map itself, and i am surprised that zerk did not mention it, the map OUTSIDE the town is to SMALL, what all the previews total war had was a BIG outside part, imo the tower range is fine AS LONG AS we get a bigger, A MUCH BIGGER outside area where we can move shit around, not just for the attacker but for the defender as well, you see, in the previews games having 2-3 units of cav as the defender was absolutly phenomenal, because i could harass the enamy, or go after there arty, or intentionaly pull back from the first layer of defences, setting up a strong defensive pozition much forther in, and than w8 a bit, after the enamy moves in the cav goes after the arty (if possible) or just SLAM into there rear (witch was ussualy the archers) and in thous games there was no such BS as in WH where archers win battles vs cav, nope, you made a mistake and cav got into the archers line? THEY GONE DIE, like it should be!
@@Sigrid_Von_Sincluster Yeah, in Med II there could be a field battle going on between reinforcements during the siege.
damn, Rome sieges look fun!
I grew up with games like Battle for Middleearth so im used to nearly indistructable, nearly unclimable walls and doors than can hold for quite a bit. Walls are ment to be scary to attack imo
Sieges are hard to balance. They're exhilarating when you hold off an overwhelming force with a shit garrison but when the tables flip, you don't wanna have your main army bled dry as the attacker. Stuff like chokepoints everywhere and the supplies are skewing this to the defenders direction, which is why so many peoples cheesed sieges since WH1. It's not fun waiting days for replenishment after every major settlement.
They also show the breadth of preferences in the community that's hard to cater to. Like when I heard people clamoring for bigger, 360 sieges for WH3 I was scared CA would actually deliver since that sounded like a micromanagement nightmare to me. The only siege battles I actually enjoyed were the Empire forts - one access point, logical chokes, good firing platforms. A solid, focused Helm's Deep experience. All I'd want was more and more tiers of chokes and platforms as you upgraded them and to rework factions capitals into them. Sieges really shouldn't be nearly as prominent in WH as other TW games. Siege logic just doesn't bring that much to a game where doomstacks like full flying cavalry or full SEM exist. Sieges without infantry just don't work and so many races just don't really field infantry in numbers warranting a siege focus.
Yes, this exactly captures the problem. Sieges need to offer major advantages to the defender so it's possible for human players to (try to) defend with just a garrison, but NOT offer major advantages to the defender so human players don't get bored and annoyed by their army getting trashed every time they dare to expand their empire. And sieges need to be huge and expansive to give a sense of drama and spectacle and make you feel like you're fighting over a massive city, but NOT huge and expansive to be manageable to play and for choke points and desperate last stands to be meaningful. Inherently difficult problems.
Well you could solve the problem by giving the attacke a big bones to refill hus troops after he conquered a major city. Our you can provide some cannon fodder units in the siege options who disappear after the fight
Solution: make the AI have severely reduced siege hold out time. Then have the ai sally out after suffering a certain amount of attrition. This is how it worked in Shogun 2, you really only had to fight offensive sieges if a relief army was on its way and you needed the castle for a defensive siege.
I agree with this people don't realize you can't balance it one way or the other at least not easily. I've enjoyed both methods from TWW 1/2 and TWW 3
Game programmer here.
Your not asking for to much from “implementable” side but from design side with monsters, flying units, and crazy lords making a balanced and fun system with above mechanics would need much effort but doable. With many creatures in warhammer they could come up with many things such as certain Skaven digging below walls, beast men that can jump off walls and so on.
That said Rome 2 should have been used as a base.
I do like the idea of using your supplies for defenses, but after the battle begins the defenses are fixed. The Rome 2 push ladders also made a lot of sense. Also, for each settlement battle the city or settlement should gain experience, resulting in more supply points. And armies garrisoned can allow for additional supplies, which could be boosted by the general's or hero's skill tree.
Thoughts?
Maybe allow changing/upgrading things you've built with new supplies gained during battle, but like everyone says, you can't build a whole tower in 30 seconds, or even during the longest battle.
While it is somewhat CA's fault for not explaining it very well or making it obvious, there is a reason to capture the various points during a siege battle in TW:WH3 other than the supply system. There is a "momentum" mechanic for attackers which increases for each point they capture and grants them charge bonus and melee attack (iirc). The momentum mechanic goes up 5 tiers of increasing effect (1 for each point), and can have it's effects decreased or denied if the defender retakes captured points.
The lack of weapon teams on the walls really gets to me.
The worst is when part of your city defence is a cannon. Absolutely useless. Why can't I start it on the wall?
Yeah, I shouldn't be able to move it up and down mid battle, but let me start the thing up there.
There is a mod to allow Skaven weapon teams on walls, but it should absolutely be possible for everyone to deploy siege units on special parts of the walls
one thing that I'm really want to see is formation and mustering, I hear many people calling Shogun 2 or Three Kingdoms unit are all the same and lack diversity but in those game because your unit are the same as your enemy the one that make a difference is how well you use those you could have two spearman going at each other but if one in turtle formation the other one would get exhausted first while the one in turtle formation is still fresh and pretty much less damage then you break formation and counter charge the exhausted opponent, in warhammer I feels like all I'm doing is getting an OP unit of your race then just point them at enemy then repeat and occasionally cast magic and when unit damaged I'll just disband or merge then recruit fresh one in one turn meanwhile in 3K if you lost half of a unit you'll gonna want to redo it cause it'll took 4-5 turn just to replenish or recruit them in Shogun 2 you can quick recruit but you can't merge unit plus most unit other than ashigaru need at least 2 turn and recruiting slot is also low since you wanna invest in select region for a castle so either wait another turn or just push on
In WH3 I have been been using a mod which disables all siege building during battles. So all towers, blockers, etc have to be put down before the beginning of the battle. Then when they are gone, they are gone. Also that drives me crazy when the AI runs through their own barriers.
What I would want is to remove walled sieges completely and instead using the mod you mention to replace walled sieges with minor settlement battles. Sieging is just poorly designed in this franchise, it's just not fun and lacks tactical variety for each faction.
I disagree on the chokepoint issue. The problem is that there are too few genuine chokepoints, not too many. Settlement battles ought to be easy for the defender and very hard for the attacker - instead, in TWWH you have no true chokepoints because there are ten roads leading to every capture point. If you use a unit to block a street, it doesn't matter - the enemy doesn't need to fight it. It can just turn a corner into another street and have a straight shot at your back lines. That's the worst aspect of the siege design in TWWH 3 in my opinion: you need more units to defend a settlement than you need to attack it. In every fortification design in history, it was the other way around: fortifications are designed to allow few men to defend against many. This really needs to change. And for those who say "this doesn't translate well into gameplay", I say you're thinking too narrowly. There could be specific units and buildable siege equipment for each race that would allow the destruction, or bypassing, of certain defenses. Artillery could play a role. These things should have their economy costs balanced so that capturing major settlements would be more expensive/time-intensive than minor settlements. There could even be another tier for certain significant settlements: Want to take Altdorf? Well, you're going to need money & time, because with those you could construct a few queen bess type cannons to kill part of the walls, or mine them, or prepare a spell to destroy them etc depending on your faction. Without it, you'll stand no chance, with it, it's doable, with plenty of artillery, it might work but no guarantees. What do you guys think?
7 months late, but I absolutely agree with you. Even with a fully upgraded garrison and a reinforcing 20 stack, you do not have NEARLY enough men to man the walls, and certainly not the 800 chokepoints in the streets. The maps are simply way too damn big. Realistically, a city of that size would have a garrison of THOUSANDS already there. Not 3 units of Dwarf Miners.
It blows my mind that they had this shit figured out in 2006. Because you didn't have these problems in Medieval 2. The mechanics were very simple: [For Defenders] Hold the town square, or die trying. [For Attackers] Take the town square, or kill the defenders. And sieges were great.
Other things Zerk mentioned like 360 degree settlements were also a thing. You attacked from whatever angle you wanted.
@@cmasonw 7 months ain't too late :) and I absolutely agree. Sieges in Medieval 2 were great, and I see no reason why they should be any different in Warhammer 3. Hopefully they will fix it in Pharaoh, I've no hope for them fixing it in WH3 at this stage.
MSB and new sieges are literally the definition of “careful what you wish for” I think it would’ve been so much better without any of the buildings and just the maps lol
So true. The new systems somehow encouraged design decisions which just made sieges even worse
msb?
@@Stephendsilva1 Minor Settlement Battles
@@Tsaroff21 thankyou
In Napoleon TW, you could chill back and use artillery to level walls and open city gates to open up some space; that would be impossible for WH3 as artillery ammo is too low for that
what city gates in NTW?
@@RamonesFan201 NTW and ETW had a range of 'artillery forts' of different sizes and for the European, Middle Eastern and Indian cultural groups. The layouts were all fairly same-y however.
Possible solution to artillery ammo? Have a new siege equipment that is just an ammo dump placable. It's static but has a replenishment range and value to resupply ranged units? Can't be moved inside or anything but allows slow siege, also gives a target to Sally out and try to destroy to prevent the slow whittle down. Maybe explodes when HP reaches zero or something?
@@brijekavervix7340 TBH, I don’t think I’ve EVER fought a fort battle in NTW. Definitely in ETW.. too expensive for what it was.
@@RamonesFan201 yeah nah they weren't very good and the AI hardly knew how to use them either
Wow, I started playing Total War with Warhammer 2, so I wasn't aware of all the cool features that some previous games had. Uh... huh. Some of those sieges in earlier games look really fun.
I think that's what CA has recently been counting on - that Warhammer players have no prior experiences with older games, and won't realize how bare bones it is when compared with them. Not to demonize them - previous TWs had a tenth of the factions and mechanics Warhammer has, but they went deep to compensate, and that depth is really missing now.
the blissful ignorance
In Three Kingdoms, you could use fire to your advantage, setting a whole city ablaze to demoralise the enemy and more importantly, take out their towers and barricades. Unfortunately, it seems buildings are fireproof in Warhammer. Would be nice to set the Oak of Ages on fire.
Haven't played shogun but damn during that sync kill I could hear somber music from a movie playing in my head. He even reached for his weapon at the end when he fell the ground. Got some real Boromir vibes from it. Too bad they keep removing features people love.
stop buying warhammer and they will think to return it
While I overall agree with pretty much everything you're mentioning here my absolute biggest gripes with sieges atm are two things, the gates and the lack of stairs to the walls. I'm pretty new to the Total War series, Warhammer II was the first one I played, but since then I have also played Total War Troy, and while that game is by no means perfect I got a taste of proper wall defence in that, positioning my troops strategically not over the entire walls but around the stairs to block them. And then if I had to leave the doors I could camp outside the stairs on the ground and wait for the enemy to try and leave. Just that makes fighting on/with walls a lot more fun and engaging. And then yeah same about any unit being able to break gates. I understand large monsters like giants or dragons but bloody warhounds should not be able to knaw through castle fortifications, but maybe that's just me.
What makes me not to fight siege map is how big the city are, like i have to manage on a lot of fronts and its annoying to control your camera. Like your troops gonna get crushed the moment you change your angle trying to manage other units, but i do play siege map and put whatever units i want on custom games just for the entertainment
I know it wasn't popular, but Three Kingdoms had some of the best settlement battles I can recall in Total War. Being able to MANUALLY place my defenses was huge for me.
Three Kingdoms was great
05:07 actually it is considered normal for a castle to have many choke points and as few open areas as possible. You want to be able to defend a fortress against a potentially overwhelming amount of enemys, so you dont want to give them a chance to play there cards. So I think, rationally, the amount of choke-points is justified. Even if you want to argue, that it is more of a settlement, than a fortress, there have never been major settlements with huge open areas all over the place. To use your given area effectivly for building housing, choke-points will accure.
might just be me but it feels like units mix up less while in combat and rather queue up during fights
I noticed that for sure
EXACTLY! As much as I can understand the challenges of the implementation. If it could be done so many years ago with older titles, I see no reason why it shouldn't be implemented now... It's not like they didn't make most of money on this game anyways... It's insane how they fail to realise that the siege battles and faster than ever steam-rolling campaign is what is killing this game and making people bored of the game within few weeks. It's INSANE for me tbh...
1) Look at the size of the maps, the actual size. Previous TW games had WAAAY larger maps, entire background seems gigantic in TWW yet actual fighting space is tiny, in some cases You can barely squeeze 1 unit through, while in previous games You could place 2-3 units next to one another and that was A CHOKE POINT! in TWW maps are completely immobilizing troops, are ridiculously tight even if they're huge, they're just badly designed. While most of the spaces like some markets or seemingly open little squares, turning out to be invisible walls just because there's a fence there, which can't be crossed, there's so much unused space on most of the maps, it's actually ridiculous.
2) MORE OPEN SPACES! RE-DO THE SIEGE MAPS!
3) Ladders are beyond MAGIC! Even daemons using them! lol xD But on a serious note, pushed, wheeled ladders were rather rare occurrence in the historical battles. They were usually carried by soldiers. BUT that being said this should still be the case, and a unit like that should be slower and suffer heavy vigour penalties, that would also give the chance to limit the number of ladders and assign them even in the battlefield to the units, just like towers or rams are.
4) MORE OPEN SPACES!! RE-DO THE SIEGE MAPS!!
5) Damage to gates, yes. It's absolutely dumb that normal units can attack and damage Gates. Still we have large units in TWW, monsters, but even they should have some type of penalties in damaging the gates. Unless they are single entities which could have no penalties and actually could take gates down equally to lets say rams. Even in LotR, trolls couldn't do that much to the main front gates of lets say Minas Tirith, they were only useful in attacking smaller gates in the inner city. Same should be here.
6) Quality of sieges, walls damage, traps etc is significantly decreased in comparison to titles like Rome or even friggin Medieval in which sieges were actually one of my favourite types of battle... While in TWW i literally HATE them... I don't get that... So much potential gone to waste.
7) MORE OPEN SPACES!!! RE-DO THE SIEGE MAPS GOD DARN IT!!!
8) YES! Maps were way more interactive, more immersive.
9) Ropes only for light infantry for fast climbing, ladders for heavy and others. Etc. Changes like that might not be essential but would give a lot of tactical flavour and could be simple to implement.
10) Sieges are actually making attackers stronger vs AI... AI just sits and wait, while scattered all over the city so You can pick them up one by one. This is stupid af. It's easier to defeat 10-1 army as attacker than as defender... Because of how badly AI operates in those trillions of tiny, tight choke-pointy streets, in ROME or Medieval, You had streets as well, but there was few of them, so AI didn't get lost that easily, everything was larger and not so cramped up. I think ALL Siege maps needs a do-over, and even just that simple change, would help a TON, it's not so hard and doesn't require any changes in the programming, JUST RE-DO THE MAPS!!!
Ima come back and read this someday
In the older titles i dont like seiges cus the ai gets buggy on my units
They are hard to control and command on the wall and somehow my seige monster got thru the gates without breaking it leaving it alone attacked and unable to attack the gates to get the rest of my armies support
Remember the civilians you had in cities in Attila? That was a nice touch
My main thing is just that I wish there were more LAND battles. I miss the land battles. It seems like in my campaigns in tww3 its hard to draw the AI into land battles, all fights take place in settlements unless the AI has overwhelming numbers and are willing to attack you.
there are mods that force minor settlement battles to be land battles, but yeah I agree.
@@TheTankbus Yeah, I will probably start using it, but I wish there was vanilla mechanics for it.
@@ross.metcalf ...speak of the devil, the new patch attempts to address this. Low level minor settlements will be land battles now. If you wanted to avoid them altogether you would still need a mod however.
@@TheTankbus Yeah, I was happy to see the change notes. Think its finally in a state where I want to get the guys together for a big simul campaign! :D
I'm coming to Total War from 4X world, so I'm having quite a lot of fun with campaign map part of game. Battles I mostly auto resolve (not playing on higher difficulties yet). Recently I tried to challenge myself to play Immortal Empires campaign with fighting manually all battles. It went OK for a while, even had some fun while doing it. Eventually I failed with that challenge though. Settlement/siege battles were too much of a chore for me and I can't stand them.
Indeed I mainly agree with "not enough space"/"choke-fest" arguments. Those maps are boring compared to open battlefields battles. It's just putting units against each other in choke points and waiting to see which one will survive this. Magically reappearing towers that I just destroyed also not helping in liking this part of game.
Don't worry, most people fail at that challenge as sieges are always a huge chore, and honestly for me even normal battles becomes a chore when it's 40v40
I used to play Total War for the battles.
In Medieval 2 and Rome Total war I never Auto-Resolved.
But with the advent of Total War Rome 2 battles have become so garbage that I auto-resolve everything I can and just play it like a Turn based Grand-Strategy. Which is why Attila is my favourite TW game
The biggest problem with sieges in my opinion is that there are just too many of them.
I can see why CA implemented a bunch of these simplistic changes into the Warhammer games, such as the ass ladders and magic elevators. Flying units, Monster units, (and flying Monster units), units which could logically go over or through the walls with little effort. These changes keep infantry units competitive in sieges when compared with this second rate shaboingery.
Although I agree that the Rome 2 way of setting up traps and barricades is far better than the Fortnite style supply system we have currently. Also having the objective points give army wide leadership penalties/buffs like you said sounds really good.
Sieges in TWWH 2 were less involved but the path finding was so much better. In TWWH 3 My problem with all those choke points is my units will take a terrible path unless I go with single entities so I find myself avoiding cavalry and infantry as I know they will get wrecked in sieges but my monsters and heroes will find their way fine.
Everything you said is spot on. The seige rework for this game is so bad it made wh3 almost unplayable for me. It wasn't perfect in 2 either of course, but i'd take wh2's seiges anyway over this mess.
Wh2 sieges were objectively worse, I'm glad they at least made an attempt. Sieges within the warhammer setting are just hard tbh, and I'm not sure they'd feel good however they did them, people don't like using units and sieges are supposed to be super duper easy so, I think CA is just gonna make people unhappy regardless of what they do with sieges.
@@fidelcashflow4940 They're both bad. Even Age of Wonders 3 had more fun siege battles, and those tend to slow down the gameplay to a crawl. Tactical variety for each faction is severely missing. I'd rather they remove walled sieges and replace those with minor settlement battles.
this was all really obvious long before the game even released. they were actually quite transparent for once and showed that this was going to be how the game worked. they made videos describing and showing this stuff and uploaded it as part of the marketing.
Fantastic video, you finally summarized all of the doubts and frustrations of a tactically minded player who don't want to win (or lose) his/her sieges in TW Warhammer easy.
I completely agree on all the points you discussed, besides the one on the chokepoints, where i'd like to have a few open space areas in the settlement but not the whole town/city (with the exception of Bretonnian settlements, which would definitely be better as you illustrated).
At the moment, the superficiality of the sieges holds me back from investing in buying TW 2 and 3 and the related dlcs. It must feel empowering for younger players to conquer three settlements in a hour of campaign gameplay, but if you're a tad older and can afford less time for pc games, it's definitely more rewarding having to develop an actual tactic and take a hour or more to win a settlement battle well (as in suffering few casualties).
Thanks for the effort, always precious.
You mention Helms Deep and Minas Tirith as example of cinematic sieges, those aren't 360, and that's exactly what makes them cinematic, they're not as empty. One of the main gripes I had with previous TW games was exactly this, there's no way you can cover the whole city no matter how many units you have, they can just go around and climb walls, I'm super happy it's not 360.
Regarding tower ranges, they're perfect, you have spaces on the map where you can avoid them, you're placing units if that's what you want you can go there. If there was easy room to just move around, it would absolutely invalidate them, they're already not as effective as they should be TBH.
Regarding building things inside the cities, I think it's a huge improvement over before, it makes you able to actually fight not just get overrun, I agree it's not great implemented, maybe instead of towers have buildable platforms for ranged/artilery, with some special solutions for non range factions.
Also regarding choke points, that's the whole point of the sieges, attacker is supposed to be at a HUGE disadvantage, if anything I feel like it's not enough tbh, you should need a huge army to take even a base garrison and probably a super elite army with a LL to take a fully upgraded lvl 5 settlement with max walls, if not 2 armies. That's kinda the whole point, I never got why you're so against the current thing, it's not perfectly implemented, but it's by far my favourite thing about the warhammer 3, I thought it was crazy that before you would just have generic mini land battle with no advantage.
All that being said, I absolutely agree with all your suggestions, sieges felt WAY more fun in rome 2 and other games, but tbh I have no idea how it would all be implemented with magic/monsters/flying, I mean... you plan your spikes and oil and fire archers and stuff and Manfred flies in masacres arches spams spells and its all gone. But here's hoping for the future.
Those sieges for Shogun 2 were so good. And it was so simple, just some walls, a few levels, and open space. I want a mod that just ports these maps to Warhammer 3 and see how it feels.
I mean my only real issue is the new tower defense mechanic. I don't see the issue with choke points, sieges are supposed to be battles of attrition. Some more open areas may be nice bit I think it should still be like 80-90% chokepoints
It really sucks to play the choke point game as eg Bretonnia, who is pretty bad at it. Why would their defenses hinder their own units?
My biggest (personal) problem is I don’t like how cities can be captured with the main point still being under your control. Some of the main points are really defendable and it’s a shame that whilst outnumbered you have to spread your army out so thin and you’re unable to use the really cool areas. I wish all points had to be taken and there was just a leadership debuff for losing supply points.
One of the main problems with each new Total War release is that they strip out mechanics and replace them with half-baked gimmicks. If they struggle to make something work the first time around, maybe they'll use it again, but more often then not they'll just remove it since why even bother trying to fix
efine something when you can just dumb it down and strip it out.
I think one of the big problems with TW Warhammer is scale. Since the first game the maps have been descaled to make it look more spectacular. However, this has caused units and battles to lose focus. Dragons look like flies walking the streets of some cities. This is also seen in the walls, many times they seem simple barricades compared to the rest of the city, when they should be the most remarkable elements in a siege. The design of the cities has improved but some seem illogical, lifeless, they are just elements that generate strange spaces. Where are the houses? What are those huge endless wells?
I also think that the walls need a rework, as they are not very organic elements that do not go well with the rest of the city.
I think part of the problem no one really talks about is how the addition of SEMs reduces the size of the army by replacing the 120 men you’d have in other games with… a guy.
I scrolled looking for this comment. Yeah I think alot of the stated problems come from the introduction of single unit entities aka monsters. They kind of ruined the old balance of missile units versus infantry versus cavalry. They had to make everything tankier just to make the action more manegable. And Shogun 2 sieges would not have been so great if your gunline infantry shot down maybe five guys total before abandoning the wall. Also you can't give rush factions access to gate-busting monsters unless everyone can bust open gates, because that would further disadvantage range-heavy armies who are already having a harder time getting over the wall anyway.
That’s definitely fair, but also a huge draw to a warhammer game. I couldn’t imagine it if they took out all the giant units lol
God bless the mod "minor settlement sieges become land battles"
...no that is it's actual name, just look it up on the workshop.
Best mod. Minor settlement battles are a total slog. I’ve quit campaigns after 5 turns because of them
@@Calebyeeepp sadly the mod doesn't work on port-settlements but hey 🤷🏻♂️
@@Grauer1510 There's actually a different mod that does the same thing but works with port settlements. It's called "Minor Settlement Battle Remover", just found it the other day :)
I think one thing you missed is how the enemy AI would rather defeat you by attrition than fighting even the garrison. In Warhammer 3 the Great Bastion was a letdown since the Kurgan forces would rather whittle you down than fight, and when I do have an army sitting at the great bastion, I'd end up sallying out for a field battle. It makes settlement battles absolute trash. Back in Warhammer 2 I would often pull clutches against a full stack with just a fully upgraded settlement garrison with walls. In Warhammer 3 the AI would siege until your garrison until half health; I get that it gives time for your forces to come in, but at that point what point is the garrison beside being a counter of how long I have to intercept.
My biggest problem with sieges are docked units.
It takes away 90% of choice on how to defend the walls.
yeah, you cant put units to face other units on the walls, if an enemy is on the wall, you should be able to e.g. position your gunners in a line 90° turned to shoot at them
@@randomredshirt5274 not only that but even just telling your units to fight those units breaks them.
@@generalharness8266 that too, but thats a general pathfinding problem in settlements i believe(if you mean e.g. a unit only attacking with a few models while the rest stands in a square 5m away) but i think i always have this near dockable points, so if its that i assume you get this on walls even more frequent
@@randomredshirt5274 Yea I had a game in 3 where I saw enemy running at my archers I tell them to pull back and my melee inf to charge. Not this distance would have been about a quarter of crossbow range (don't know how else to describe the distance). My infantry decides to run away from them instead and my archers get wrecked.
Also wall have advantage for the attacker! The main penalty you may suffer in a fatigue penalty. Once you reach it it can't affect more. Meanwhile for the defenders the guy on a wall always have their back secured + you are not able to shoot them! So in the field battle you can use you cavalry to strike on the back, you have archers that can shoot or you can flank them. On the wall you have none of that!
The Best Sieges were in Total war Attila. Large Maps, Gates and Walls were much stronger ->A big disadvantage for the attacker. Also you could combine your attack with your Navy.
I use a simple mod that makes it so you start with a lot more supplies for barricaded towers etc, but you don’t gain any during the battle. And the capture points give buffs for the side that holds them. Made sieges way more fun for me
What is the name of the mod?
16:00 that's what made me a total war fan aside from the campaign map. The Matched combat and Sync kills were epic. A Samurai fight, a Roman Shieldwall or a Hoplite phalanx were amazing to watch due to animations. Now they keep hiting the air and having a heard attack
I agree with a lot of points you bring here. What i would love instead of the supply points would be a more strategic approach. why not place an armory, a church or temple, a hospital or such on various points of the map that give buffs to the faction that is control of them. so instead of running over walls that are no obstacle straight to the victory point, you could split forces to take the armory and gather a for example 10% buff to weapon damage and armor. create multiple points of interest on the maps so they feel filled, not just look big.
I'm happy they got rid of the partial walls in big sieges and brought back the whole city thing, where you can place units all around a city though
Yeah , I like the new siege overall but I agree that it often feel too cramped. Some map are okay but some have obstruction everywhere. For the gate problem, maybe only unit with the siege trait should be able to attack gate.
I disagree about the tower range. The wall tower one, not the deployables. It's a change I welcome from game 2, where all towers on all maps essentially had infinite range. In game 3, most (If not all) maps have spots where the towers won't get you. And, if you want to create more of those, so you can use your artillery, well, you can use it on the towers first.
Yes too cramped up, can’t position armies
I mean the biggest thing, by MILES AND MILES AND MILES, the number one unforgiveable sin this game commits.... Walls. The walls.... THE GOD DAMNED WALLS!!!!! They need to mean something, they need to be better and they need to actually make your ranged units useful, they need to be more defendable, they need to provide bonuses and they need to be something there 2 units can share a wall section to allow both melee and ranged units to defend against those scaling them.
You hut the nail on the head with this video awesome work... only if we could get the bosses to see this and agree I think when they made it "more appealing for a wider audience" they assumed that non total war players are a little dumb they should have never changed from there old gameplay loop that's what mad total war so different and appealing
"Designed for a faster pace, to be streamlined, dumbed down, etc" While this is true, the sieges in this are such a chore that I'd rather just play open map battles in 100% of cases, which would be a further stream-line but would still be better (and I'm one of the people who used to LOVE long sieges in Medieval 2 and have some of my fondest memories of TW being about winning ridiculously long sieges, and especially watching the AI cavalry charge into my longbow stakes that were set up just behind the gate!). I think minor siege battles are one of the biggest issues; scrap them entirely, and bring back a few really nice big siege maps for the capitals. The one issue in the past was that the way provinces were made up you could potentially have lore inaccuracies, but seeing as they have added Praag and Kislev as their own single-city province, they should just do that with the rest. Make Moussillion (sp?) its own province too, and probably a few others, and its fine.
I do definitely miss formations actually affecting gameplay more.
come on! the Bretonnian have Charge Formation! ... what do you mean it's worse at Charges than normal formation?
21:00 respectfully, I disagree about the unit abilities you have to select. in Rome2 it was just a silly amount, every unit seemed to have a selectable ability, so I spent tons of time cycle clicking all the unit cards and popping abilities rather than looking at the actual battle. Even TW3 it gets overwhelming at times with all the hero abilities and magic CD's
Most "improvements" were made to make the ai have a fighting chance, but it makes the player have to use the same tactics as the ai, such as rushing and deploying all over.
This! Everything in Warhammer 3 feels like "We're gonna punish you for not playing Warhammer 2 how we wanted you to play them."
@@divout6688 This is genuinely how some of the people on the team think about the game. Instead of providing fun mechanics/units and then allowing players to break them as they wish (cheesing/exploits in a single player game doesn't hurt anyone, lol) they are more concerned with exactly how people are playing and patching out fun units/abilities because they are too powerful. That and the whole game is patched based on what mutiplayer weirdos are up to, and that's a small fraction of the playerbase.
Minor Settlement Battles should be a close-copy of the Domination multiplayer game mode. It's a fun game mode that a large portion of the Total War Warhammer 3 community don't interact with since they don't play multiplayer. Moreover, CA wouldn't have to create anything new and instead just scrap the settlement battle maps and adjust some numbers when balancing for campaign. This would be the best solution with the least amount of work since everything already exists.
Scrap the wacky and buggy settlement maps (that both the AI and your units can't path for shit through) for simpler, flatter Domination maps (the current Line of Sight bugs for gunpowder units would be less noticeable too!). Adjust the defensive buildings (walls, garrisons, etc) in the campaign map to give even more supply so that you can spawn units (in addition to your initial garrison) at the start of the mode as a sort of choose-your-own garrison. If you want to go one further: have some heroes with a "add supplies in region/province when defending" blue line; this way you can still be rewarded for having heroes out on the campaign map (especially those heroes that have terrible campaign effects/were heavily nerfed from Warhammer 2 to 3).
Fuck knows what they need to do about Siege Battles though. Siege Battles will need a total overhaul so I don't expect to see siege changes for quite a long time.
I'd really like to see boiling oil or faction specific versions pouring down on enemies as they pass through the gate. Pretty sure this was in medieval 2 and Rome 2.
Pretty sure something like that was even in Rome 1
Ít was there in Rome 1 and Medieval 2. It was in fact so powerful and so difficult to avoid ( because you would need to use ladders or siege towers to capture the gatehouse, and somehow, sometimes, it would still pour boiling oil killing everything) that I just ended up avoiding sieges altogether or blasting through a wall instead. Fun fact: it was not used at all. There is no historical evidence of it ever being used, and it is purely a Hollywoodesque idea. As historian Roel Konijnendijk says, it is needlessly elaborate. You can through boiling water and it achieves the same, without having to burn things for no reason, or just throw rocks, plenty of them available without any need for too much unnecessary preparation.
Possibly although the uses of hot sand being poured over attackers exist, regardless rock's etc were dropped onto the heads of assaulting forces from murder holes. This being a fantasy setting I think a few poetic licences can be taken, could definitely see dwarves and skaven shooting fire down on attackers and other races having their own faction specific variant.
Lost me with chokepoint rant. Urban maps are always going to be cramped, that's to be expected - huge open spaces in the middle of a city (outside of the occasional city square) are not particularly realistic. (Edit: those Shogun II castles are pretty silly; I've been to the real thing and while they do have open courtyards, they're mostly a series of chokepoints and you can't just climb up anywhere.)
Otherwise I agree with most of your points, and would add that siege equipment needs a serious overhaul. It's too hard to build rams and siege towers, and they're too slow compared to ladders and simply attacking a gate. Siege towers and Rams need to move and build faster. Gates should be much tougher to crack without a ram, either being immune to infantry damage or preferably to have boiling oil to drop on attacking infantry. There needs to be a greater penalty for using ladders. Multilevel siege maps are a must as well, and defenders should have pre-battle deployables in both sieges and encampment battles.
The issue with sieges is that they don't fit well into the rest of the game, at all.
Sieges are supposed to be narrow fighting and choke points, it's a city.
If walls and gates were more of an obstacle, if barricades worked better and could block of all streets, sieges would take hours to play, and as they are already bad as is why would we want them to take longer?
TW: WH is a game about movement, units and tactics, strategy and battlefield maneuvers.
Sieges are about choke points, restriction of movement, slowing down, attrition.
They are at complete odds, which is fine IF sieges were rare. Like a strange spice, something different.
But they are not rare, they are constant.
The issue with sieges is frequency.
I sometimes get the feeling that people don't like attacking in sieges because (if they don't play the capture the point with stealth) it means you lose units... people want victories with minimal losses.
Sieges will get your units killed, you have to ram your units over wall, into barricades its the price you pay for attacking a defensive fortification.
I do agree with many of the points in this video though
All great points. I hope the modders use this as a blueprint.
CA is like Bethesda now, its games have to be fixed by modders to be enjoyable >_>
I respectfully disagree. I think there are a lot of things that can be improved, but I wouldn't lose sight of how fantastic this game and this series is. Mods improve on a flawed but already-excellent game.
@@kianqalashahar I could agree with that statement for WH2 where I have only a few minor mods installed. But vanilla WH3 is such a slog with its endless minor settlement battles and cowardly AI that I honestly can't enjoy it without modding it to hell.
My personal preference if I could have everything I want:
Lots of emphasis on defending the walls. We love Helm's Deep for a reason.
Minor Settlements: You have medium walls, nothing else. Enemy wins if they take a (single) point in the center of town or your army is routed.
Sieges: You have huge walls, possibly two rows of walls, and a large bastion of support fire/towers and artillery behind you. As well as a few major abilities unique to the settlement/race that give the defender a big advantage. You can disable those abilities by sabotage or taking points beyond the wall. Just a straightforward, difficult slog for the attacker without turning the map into a giant checkerboard of nonsense. Keep the maps really scenic and iconic but lock most of the decorative stuff outside the boundaries of the actual fighting.
In Warhammer I'd want them to keep the medieval stuff streamlined while emphasizing all the fantasy stuff. Siege giants snatching men off the walls and shit like that. Right now sieges look really pretty but, as was noted, strangely empty and lifeless.
I do think the choke point gripe is kinda weird. For gameplay sure but when building cities in times of war yea they are going to be built with as many choke points as possible to slow an invading force.
This is Warhammer where like a zillion factions aren't designed around chokepoint grind at all.
@@whoruslupercal1891 Read what I said
If I have time, I always siege until auto-resolve won't kill my units rather than playing siege battle.
Something I think that could be cool or immersive with the whole choke point thing is make abit of the city destructible or building that you have in the settlement be actual buildings you can see in the battle as well.
The less buildings in the settlement the more room in the battle map.
An make those buildings on the map distructable to the amount of damage the building takes dictates how much campaign map damage it has taken
The sad thing: they had exactly that system in Rome 1 Total war.......and that was ages ago
We've had this in previous total war games.
Particularly the siege escalation system from Attila where longer overmap siege resulted in a very battered settlement whenever you actually engage the battle.
The fact that (in 2 at least, don't think I've tried in 3) you could just plant one hero/lord on foot slightly closer to a tower than your artillery/archers and render it more or less useless while you shred the defenders always struck me as a bit silly.
WH3 is a game where the devs got so wrapped in doing new stuff that they forgot that it was supposed to be fun first and foremost. I doubt they will but I definitely wish they would add a check box that would allow for WH2 settlement sieges or even 100% land battles.
Get the “more land battles” mod if that’s what you’re after in the meantime mate
I love how they have put effort into siege improvements, especially with the new maps and minor settlement maps. In concept it's great versus what we had before - one-wall maps everywhere.
But in practice, there are a lot of flaws with the system. Some of the flaws can be fixed however - if they actually wanted to.
Flaw 1: Minor settlement battles are often going to be 20v20 battles or more due to the fact that the AI and players alike have every incentive to camp on minor settlements with a full stack army to defend them. Yet minor settlement maps are extremely tiny and don't have room to reasonably fight with so many troops - so you almost never get an interesting battle (maybe 10 units vs 10 units).
Flaw 2: Poorly balanced and lacking supply system. I think that the supply system is actually a good idea overall - some people hate it, but I think the idea of being able to customize your defenses is a good thing. But they should change it to either be done entirely before a battle - not "during" a battle - or they should make things like barricades able to be placed more freely and make them take longer to build, but make them stronger and don't let units just walk through things.
Flaw 3: This has been a problem since TWW1 and TWW2 - inability to use magic near or around walls. It's incredibly stupid that I cannot cast spells against defenders on a wall, and they need to change that so that spells are actually useful in sieges as the attacker. Give units on the wall magic resist, and encourage the AI and players to not put all of their units on the wall at once.
Actually the walls are just flawed overall, as you mentioned. They need to introduce proper stairs for them rather than having units teleport on and off of them.
There are other flaws too, of course. They need to change the supply system to be more similar to what we had in Rome 2 - that system was ideal, and I think that system in fact should also be adapted to some extent for defensive battles in the field to represent the defenders probably not encamping in place without defenses (at least allow some defenses in encamp stance).
The thing I don't understand is that we *told* them we hated the buildable towers as soon as they were revealed. They had over six months to do something with them; and it's not like you can't do anything as modders have fixed it. Somebody influential at CA must just be really wedded to the idea, cuz otherwise I just don't see why it ever made it into the game.
My experience with every single total war since Medieval 2 has been that the best strategy is always "Open space in the city? Just abandon it, retreat back to the next set of choke points" And I'm not sure it's worth adding big open spaces to the city when it's pointless space defensively.
Speaking of walls and gates I'm reminded of how it worked in Shogun 2 where gates and walls could also be taken out by any unit but the penalties in melee for doing so made it somewhat of an interesting choice.
I feel like in every game where walls have been a serious challenge gameplay devolves into "never ever siege unless you've got three to five units of artillery and can flatten the whole town into a field battle."
Need to mention stalk units getting objectives for free as enemies can't see them even inside settlement.
Atleast in 3k there were civilians which could blow the cover
One of the things the could do to improve siege battles is give the defenders the ability to reinforce the gates to make it much harder for the attackers to get in, even with a battering ram. Look at the Battle of Helms Deep and Minas Tirith as examples and the gates were being attacked, the defenders were bracing it with wood, metal and even soldiers leaning against the doors to keep them shut. It took the Orcs and Uruk Hai longer to breach the doors. In the case of Minas Tirith, the Orcs were constantly trying to breach the main gate with a standard battering ram, but the door wouldn't budge because it was made with iron and steel and the Orcs ended up bringing in Grond (A much BIGGER battering ram) to knock down the gate in four hits.
I love sieges. I'd like sieges. But walls and towers are made of paper mache so we dont have sieges. We simply have city fights.
I have enjoyed the mod that disables building during the battle. You just get increased supply at the start, and that is it. This actually lets you properly set up barricades since the AI won't destroy them if they are down before the battle starts. My tactics have changed a bit on offense, too. Pretty much every army has dedicated tower snipers now, and while the AI is pretty bad at allocating their supply it is still a more enjoyable experience overall.
I like the idea of supply points being used to buy traps and/or additional troops before the battle begins.
As a TW noob (only played WH2/3) I definitely feel like 3 has a weird "sameyness" even when compared to 2 in regards to its sieges. Maybe it's just how I'm making the AI play but if I'm attacking it's globs at the gates or first chokepoints and either the better glob wins or I sneak a stealth unit in to cap and win the settlement that way, and if I'm defending, well, they don't attack unless they have an overwhelming force so I either win via towers or get overwhelmed while trying to protect the entrances how I see happen to the AI when I'm attacking.
From WH2 I do have some stories where sieges went weird and unexpected things happened, I have yet to get much of that in 3, and I feel like that's pretty objectively a bad thing.
WH2 sieges were not better lol
The multi-layer walls is an amazing idea. I love the thought of strategically falling back to an inner wall, its also very cinematic (or movie-like)
I think the reason Shogun 2 feels more alive to you is, that the maps are significantly smaller but dont feel that way because they are so open. This is the perfect combo, and what we need is better designed maps, not bigger maps. The maps should have some real thought put into them like "route A is faster but has a chokepoint or two, and route B is slower, but there is a capture point on the way, its more open and less opportunities for enemy archers, route C (...)".
My point or ideal here is a map with real thought and design put into it, instead of a bunch of city blocks thrown into some random shape with some capture points sprinkled in.
Im also not saying all maps are like this, but a lot are - they feel soulless - and what Id prefer is something that feels alive. I love that a lot of Skaven maps have a very distinct feel, and the same applies to the empire, bet high elf maps? Dark elves? Tomb kings, lizardmen, cathay, kislev, etc - they all feel the same to some degree, and play out the same too. The different races' maps should be tailored to their lore AND playstyle. Dwarven fortresses should be strong, defensible bastions, and Bretonnian castles with their mounted knights should have unprecedented amounts of freedom
I also agree so much on the point about doors, rams, and walls. Why have a siege attacker trait if anyone can break down the gates? And why is siege attacker even required if any shitty skavenslave can just scale the wall with ladders? Its absurd, and its wayyy too easy to get past the walls. The only times its not easy is on those maps where the walls intersect to create an L shape, and youre constantly under fire - but those siges are difficult for the wrong reasons! Its the enemy units and the wall layout that makes it harder, not the mechanics of the game
I also liked your idea of more meaningful capture points, or at least more varied. I think an addition to that is also more varied and interesting terrain.
Shallow water that decreases stats, pits of nurgle-shit that damages you if you walk past it, and so on - these add challenges to the player and gives them both options and food for thought. Is it worth leaving your giants behind and bringing your army over the weak bridge? How about areas/terrain that give you buffs or provide you with a benefit, like a tunnel that allows you to silently go somewhere the enemy didnt expect? Or maybe the opposite, a vantage point that allow you to see all spottable units, or maybe increase the missile range of any unit in that area. Winds of magic buffs exist as well
I'm just spitballing, but the essence of the idea is pretty simple: a siege is more than chokepoints, simply killing the enemy and practically meaningless capture points
I will say they (perhaps involuntarily) did something right. I hate getting peppered by towers while fighting the AI, so I do actually make some concerted effort to capture the smaller points, despite my goal being the key/victory point
heres to hoping for improvements, a mod or just *something*
Ted talk over ~
Damn… haven’t played old total war titles but Rome’s siege fight looks so well designed!
Medieval 2 was absolute peak.
And they where, the AI as per usual was just not GOOD enough.
I really don't even want to play this game until this is fixed. I just booted up after winter sale, got ALL the DLC that I want, was STOKED to play. Was having an absolute blast for hours until I had to defend a settlement. It just sucks the will to play right out of you. I highly doubt CA fixes this though, and it's a big ask for modders, which depresses me thinking that this is just how it's gonna be.
Agree with everything you said. Most of the things you mentioned can also be changes relatively easy compared to massive reworks. Some battle changes to, battles are still way to fast.
Something else with Shogun 2 walls is that soldiers would slip, fall and die. Scaling a small wall was not much bother but try and scale a 2 or 3 story wall and a significant amount of the unit would be claimed by gravity. Combining this kind of mechanic with weather effects making rain more impactful (not entirely sure if Shogun 2 did this or not) would also be wicked.
There are some really interesting points you make here, but when it comes to game design specifically, a lot of the things you mentioned are gameplay concessions, such as units being able to hop down from the wall anywhere. It's a QoL change that doesn't really have a lot of tactical impact, but I can see why it's confusing from a realism perspective the game otherwise tries to create. Minus the dragons. :)
The unit ladders are tricky. I think it's a way to help prevent an unprepared player from sieging and getting their whole army smote because they didn't consider ladders. I think there can be a happy medium, though.
For example: they could make the initial sieges all about the gates. You need to break them, or take control of them in order to siege. To make that change, they could:
- Give walls and gates a special type of armor (building armor trait?) that has resistance to most damage sources, except explosive damage. Units can still break down the gates, but it will take them a long time if they just have axes and swords.
- Some units get the "siege damage" trait, which means they ignore building armor, such as dwarven canons or flaming attackers.
- Infantry can still set up and climb ladders, but they are fewer per wall segment, have a per-unit cooldown to when they can put up another one, and can be broken by defenders.
- When a ladder is broken, the entities on the ladder fall to the ground, and have to rebuild the ladder.
I think it would also be a nice change to see most defenses can only be set up at the beginning of a siege, like you suggested. Players can build up defensive resources through buildings, perks, etc. They can build refuse barricades through the fight, but it requires a unit of infantry to do it, and they are fairly weak.
...the problem is, you may love the idea of what I suggested, and there is a very good chance sieges at some point looked like that, but when they playtested it, it wasn't well liked. So they had to iterate until they found an option everyone was at least OK with, otherwise siege battles would be an even bigger chore than they are now.
Personally, I think siege battles should be a lot less frequent. Instead, we can have town maps that are just regular battle maps, but the defender sets up in the town to take advantage of the terrain.
A few simple things:
1) adjust the deployables and tie the tiers of towers available and number of supplies to the town level and garrison level
2) get rid of ass ladders, make ladders available on some infantry types, like swordsmen, but they have to carry them and be slowed by them
3) can’t attack a gate if it does not have a siege attacker or wall breaker trait
4) have some more room outside of the tower range, however towers should outrange most of the field guns, should be 500 range?
5) a few more plazas could be fine although if you look at cities, they are rarely anything else than streets and buildings so cities should be expected to be more chokepointy and maneuver dependand (feints, pulls, funnels, etc.)
6) some city types should be multilayered in terms of walls, like dwarf Karaks
7) artilery should be something that you can mount on the walls
8) walls should be scalable only in certain areas, like ramps or staircases as in previous titles