I donk like how rams works now.
They have bombard option to reduce defenses what is not accurate to that type of weapon because it is not ranged weapon. In reality rams was used to attack gates directly in mele combat.
When defenders looks that rams are going to gates they put all effort to destroy them.
SO in game terms
Rams line
1 should have mele subcombat class
2 bombard defenses option should be disabled for them
3 It should reduce defense only in direct attack (so in most cases they will die after defense reduction)
4 shoud ignore noentrylevel to be always able preform attack to reduce defenses.
For that we need two new tags:
ignorenoenrylevel - boolean
defenseReductionOnAttack - integer (percentage).
Thanks to that rams wil loften die during city siege like in reality it was so it will force player
to build new siege units to conquere another city.
For AI we must teach it to calculate how many rams it need to reduce defenses of city that it plan to attack.
Actually... this would proxy out my idea about attackable gates fairly nicely. I love it. Everything about it. Except giving them melee? Not sure it'd be necessary to change them from a siege. Particularly when we have siege subcategories planned that would take them into account. And they should upgrade along siege lines as well. But otherwise, I think this would be a lot more spot on. Let the unit be threatened by an actual battle as they come in but when they do come in they do damage to the defenses akin to as if it were a city bombard.
It would also prompt me to get the tag done that Hydro and I talked about for units such as, say, elephants, that can bust through defenses as they attack.
But they don't. They have City Bombard NOT Ranged Bombard. If you look at a Catapult vs a Ram the Catapult can bombard units anywhere, however a Ram can only bombard next to a city. Note that Rams are defend only while Catapult are, but that is actually separate from the City Bombard vs Ranged Bombard. Also Catapults get City Bombard too. Basiclly its like ...
Rams
City Bombard: Yes
Ranged Bombard: No
Attack: No
Catapults
City Bombard: Yes
Ranged Bombard: Yes
Attack: Yes
This is why I like rams the way they are because they are non-ranged siege units.
And I do not think they should get a melee subcombat class at all. If anything they should provide defense for those units, not be one themselves.
He makes a good point though that since they aren't ranged they wouldn't be immune to counterattack... just sitting back and popping off at the walls without risk as they currently do. So as we are trying to model them as non-ranged siege units, the model doesn't seem quite appropriate that they don't have to enter an actual battle to reduce the defenses. These tags would be useful in other applications, as mentioned above relating to your previous elephant suggestion, so with your consent I'd like to add that to my list.
@Taxman and Koshling: I always figured we'd eventually have a siege engineer unit that may construct siege weapon units onsite where there are the right features (forest, jungle, etc) on the plot.
Would take some time for him to build them but we'd make siege units such as Cats extraordinarily slow - slow enough to counteract any kind of move speed bonuses (by a % modifier) so that they can really never move more than one space.
Therefore a faster army, traveling on roads etc... would prefer to get there and build the siege on site. We could even make a siege weapon's move take rounds to recover from so that it may move again as suggested, making them quite simply far too painfully slow to bring along.
But then the Siege Engineer would need to impart his own experience onto the created unit perhaps... If not, the frustration involved in generating horribly untrained siege units would be pretty severe.
Nice idea on the bee bomb as well. Would also make a good siege promotion set that gives repel to the siege weapon... Could be an equipment handed out by the building you're also suggesting.
