I'm sick of the only type of warfare being siege warfare. Giant stack of units approaches a city, one side reinforces, whips/drafts units behind a walled city, and a bloodbath ensues. What's worse, is that in Beyond the Sword, the computer reinforces those cities from without like mad, and with the huge 'war weariness' factor, 2 cities into a conquest war, a population will either be starving based on unhappiness, of being decimated through the call to arms.
I acknowledge that warfare is a costly enterprise, but in conquest one shouldn't have to wait a 1000 years before one should reap the rewards of that venture while populations regrow, buildings are restored, and cultural unhappiness is thwarted. Besides, throughout history, most wars were decided on a battlefield, and not through the siege of a city.
So what I propose is that when an army of significant size [say, equal to or greater than the number of defenders within a city], fortifies outside the city, it creates a 'blockade' preventing defending units from reinforcing from outside the city. The concept is already present in trade blockades, but it's logical to assume that any army looking to wage a siege will do whatever it can to cut off that city from the rest of it's empire.
What this does is that it will force the approach to a city to be as speedy as possible. Scouting enemy movements become more important, to know where to reinforce, or when to 'skip over' a city to avoid a meat grinder, to feint an assault in one direction in order to split defenders to multiple fronts. It will force defenders to more often tackle an enemy stack in the field, turning terrain into an important factor, and choice of battleground to be more important as well. It'll mean more varied units more varied promotions, instead of the predominant 'city raider melee', 'collateral damage siege', of 'city defense archers' with a few stack protectors in for good measure.
Simply by forcing war out of the cities it opens up a whole new area of strategy, whether it be flanking a stack's supply lines for poorly defended reinforcements, or harassing a stack with appropriate counters on their approach to a city, to arriving at a city and finding out you don't have the force to blockade it and have to either tuck your tail and run, or switch over to pillaging, it would make for much more interesting war.
What do you think?
I acknowledge that warfare is a costly enterprise, but in conquest one shouldn't have to wait a 1000 years before one should reap the rewards of that venture while populations regrow, buildings are restored, and cultural unhappiness is thwarted. Besides, throughout history, most wars were decided on a battlefield, and not through the siege of a city.
So what I propose is that when an army of significant size [say, equal to or greater than the number of defenders within a city], fortifies outside the city, it creates a 'blockade' preventing defending units from reinforcing from outside the city. The concept is already present in trade blockades, but it's logical to assume that any army looking to wage a siege will do whatever it can to cut off that city from the rest of it's empire.
What this does is that it will force the approach to a city to be as speedy as possible. Scouting enemy movements become more important, to know where to reinforce, or when to 'skip over' a city to avoid a meat grinder, to feint an assault in one direction in order to split defenders to multiple fronts. It will force defenders to more often tackle an enemy stack in the field, turning terrain into an important factor, and choice of battleground to be more important as well. It'll mean more varied units more varied promotions, instead of the predominant 'city raider melee', 'collateral damage siege', of 'city defense archers' with a few stack protectors in for good measure.
Simply by forcing war out of the cities it opens up a whole new area of strategy, whether it be flanking a stack's supply lines for poorly defended reinforcements, or harassing a stack with appropriate counters on their approach to a city, to arriving at a city and finding out you don't have the force to blockade it and have to either tuck your tail and run, or switch over to pillaging, it would make for much more interesting war.
What do you think?