Cities definitely harder to take in the early game.
2 era appropriate siege units + 2 melee take down an average city.
The hard part is getting in position to siege it, which is possible only if you wipe out all defenders. For the second consecutive game I had a feeling I was playing on marathon. The overall pace is sooo slow compared to what it used to be.
You also can't just expect the AI to fold. Taking cities is now more about a series of battles. In vanilla , you can hold back a little and wait for the AI to most of their forces to attack you, wipe them out, then march towards their cities and face almost no opposition.
The principle is the same, it only takes thrice the time.
And you get the good ol' cheesy peace offer. Now when diplo matters (well, sort of), in some cases if AI doesn't attack, human player won't attack either. Thus AI shouldn't DoW if it can't back it up with sufficient (in AI terms
) force. Tonight I played as Dutch, spawned between America and Songhai. Got DoWed twice by each. They ended up with one city, I ended up with 15k of gold and 8 puppets.
The irony is, I really planned to play nicely this time.
This is no longer possible. Though it's likely and possible the invading force will win the first battles before they reach the city, the AI hold substantial reserves back. This forces you to setup a proper seige while protecting your flanks from counter-attacks because the AI can and will hide massive armies in the fog. It will look like their city is undefended but they would well have substantial reserves a few tiles into the fog.
Heh, yep. AI's execution is still clumsy, but it's not boring at least. When I was sieging Gao no units showed up for several turns. So I bombarded it a little, pillaging and gaining XP, since I've assumed I had nothing to lose and Askia was a goner, and then all of a sudden 5 or 6 pikes/crossbows came out of nowhere and moved towards my crossbows and trebs. Not pleasant.
What I really like is that now you have to bring all kind of units with you, melee, range and siege. LS alone won't cut it anymore.