Construction researched but no siege workshop

[iamjooish]

Tier 4 (units) looks like the cure for all the elven offensive ills. tier 3 divine spells are particularly nasty for sieging cities... like earthquake, for example.


Actually, I never use(d) chariot or Catapults to begin with. Siege stuff is WAY too slow for me, so I normally go with melee. I think people really under-estimate how general-purpose and versatile a melee unit is when it's raked in a lot of experience... melees that are on parity with the enemy's tech and weapon types can STEAMROLL a city with many fortifications (as if it weren't even there) with the both City Raiders promos, and at least one unit type specific promo. Enchanted blade (or poisoned blade for the assassin units), followed by bless, flaming arrows, (possibly) mutation, and shield of faith only add to that advantage.

Although, at higher difficulties, you may have specialize your rolls a bit as the AI civs will have better toys to use.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Giving Treants good siege abilities seems like a very good idea. I'm not a fan of the sappers concept.

 

[Rex rgis of Ter]

Giving a unique elven nature 2 spell (equivalent to the dwarven enchantment spell) that would allow a small sapping of city defense would be fine with me.

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

I always build a body node for haste. Some level 1 spells are very useful. Adapts are useful without being upgraded to mages.

I don't like the Ljosalfar for the same reason, despite their ridiculous synergy with FoL. Flavour-wise, it just seems so awkward that FoL, wood elves and fire magic are like bread, peanut butter, jelly, although I really haven't had any success with them if I don't use fireballs to remove the enemy's cultural defenses.

 

[Scott Alexander]

Speaking of things you can't build, I'm Khazad, I've got the Runes holy city, mithril (metal casting AND mithril working), the Golem Mastery tech, and I can't build the Mithril Golem. Any idea why?

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I'd probably guess that the AC isn't high enough, assuming you have mithril, and a golem workshop in the RoK Holy City. The Mithril Golem Requires a minimum AC of 75.

 

[Calavente]

checking at boosting elves siege craft I found amusing that vitalise was sorcery related while entangle was divine (in the wiki)... I would have thought the reverse.
If reverse, I would have proposed that 'entangle', casted on a city, can reduce city defense as well as immobilize units.
Thus I can really imagine elves sieging cities with the help of their druids and archmages, (or high priests of leaves...) using nature's wrath to entangle people and distroy walls and buildings. instead of having them cast meteors and fireballs..

the principle of not having siege units is that elves are considered non-mechanists and are suppose to compensate by better mobility in forest and focus on magic.

having tier IV nature units being able to reduce city defense in place of siege would play a nice role while not overwhelmingly change the penalty. tierIV units come way later than catapults, there are few of them available for a civ and it would provide another solution than having FoL going strait for fire nodes in order to conquer the world in late game.

 

[zxcvbnm]

And the nature sappers could require some nature to work, ie bad on desert, ice and hell, powerful in forest and jungle, mediocre in grass and plain.
So elves can effectively extend their domain only in it's natural environment.

Fire magic causes forest fires and no elf is suicidal enough to burn their sacred ancient forests, if they survive the flames and starvation, the fellowship will execute them

 

[smurven]

Pretty sure ancient forests are immune to fire, which is the point of sylvanllewelyn's comment about FoL synergy i believe. (You wouldnt use fire mages unless your forests were ancient).

 

[White Elk]

It seems to me that the Elves don't have Catapults because of game flavor not game balance. Sure the Elven Archers get metal upgrades, but they don't have Melee and Gunpowder units. I don't see any Elven specialties that require a lack of siegecraft to balance. And using Fireballs to blast down walls just feels wrong. I think nature based siege warfare would fit them well and I don't see any balance reasons to deny them this. Of course I could be missing something...?

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Ancient Forests couldn't burn down in .23 (or most the earlier versions), but from what I've heard they can burn in BtS.

(Either way, they are destroyed when their tiles enter hell. not even burnt forests remain then, so they aren't coming back without the use of both sanctify and bloom, plus plenty of time)

 

[zxcvbnm]

Pretty sure ancient forests are immune to fire, which is the point of sylvanllewelyn's comment about FoL synergy i believe. (You wouldnt use fire mages unless your forests were ancient).

And ain't that unrealistic. Blasting walls with balls of fire with trees everywhere, almost certain to catch fire. Besides in Amelanchier's 'pedia entry the forests do burn from unnatural fire. So the best weapon for forest folk is the bane of forests...
I definitely agree with sylvanllewelyn about ljosalfar fireballs.

 

[zxcvbnm]

The elves are supposed to use a war of attrition to win but if they can't take even forest cities...

 

[Thonnas]

Is it possible for them to ignore cultural bonuses? Kind of the opposite of gunpowder units. Might help with making walls and castles more worth while.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

Giving Treants good siege abilities seems like a very good idea.

I like the idea of Treants having bombard like the hill giants do.

 

[zxcvbnm]

If they also had some extra nature affinity, -50% in hell, -25% in desert or something like that if would also balance their bombard and restrict elven sieges to forested areas

 

[Randolph]

Adding bombardment to Treants definitely sounds like a good idea. Elves are plently powerful without siege weapons (They're amazing defensively), but it's SO fitting to see Treants throwing bolders and logs, and it's hard to see how it would be overpowering to add bombardment to such a late game unit.

 

[Niveras]

I've always found it easier to use archmages with Earth III to take cities rather than whittling down the walls with meteors. Sure you have to wait longer, but with Extension II, a single archmage can pretty much bring an entire stack of defenders down to 10% before he even gets next to the city. I guess the same could be said of meteors, but I would argue bringing the target's base strength down to the point where defense modifiers hardly make a difference is better than lowering the defense modifiers themselves.

 

[Demus]

obviously, for large stacks crush is preferable to meteors because of the exp gain, but meteors are much more usefull when dealing with several small bands of foes.

back on-topic: i figured since hill-giants have bombardment, and treeants are generally larger than hill-giants, they should get at least the same bonus (more could be a bit unbalanced). Since it's the same mechanism (physically) as a catapult, the same bombard rules should apply, and i can't see what the difference between a rock in a forest and a rock in the desert would be bombard-wise. the additional nature-affinity could be possible, but that's kinda impleted with them being able to be summoned only in forests.

 

[Blakmane]

elves have no direct city bombardment unit for a reason- it's to balance their obscene defence abilities.

Remember, civs are balanced as a whole not in terms of individual units. If you want to play a strongly aggressive military game I suggest a different race, such as the bannor or clan.