Siege Nerfed? I don't understand.

[Big J Money]

I'm a late-comer to BTS as I've been too busy to play PC games (let alone, Civ4) for a long while, but I just installed Warlords on my new PC to start playing again and I love everything I'm hearing about this new expansion! I am amazed!

What's the deal with nerfing siege weapons though? I read something about taking away collateral damage bonuses add in Warlords or something? Can anyone elaborate?

Why would they do this to people who paid good money for their Warlords expansion who got used to that gameplay? I feel very insulted, especially considering everything that was new in Warlords will now be given for free to people who buy BTS.

=$= Big J Money =$=

 

[Thedrin]

Big J Money:
I read something about taking away collateral damage bonuses add in Warlords or something?

What collateral was added in Warlords? Trebuchets are the only thing that comes to mind but Warlords also added the improved drill promotions which weakens the affects of collateral.

 

[Aztec_Snoopy]

Why would they do this to people who paid good money for their Warlords expansion who got used to that gameplay? I feel very insulted, especially considering everything that was new in Warlords will now be given for free to people who buy BTS.

actually, not everything is going into bts from warlords. for example, the scenarios... still, i didnt care for the scenarios so i didnt buy warlords nad is going to buy only bts.

 

[Chieftess]

Seige weapons were nerfed because they were too powerful. (still are to some extent). You can take maybe 5 catapults to a city, and conquer it with just those catapults.

 

[Big J Money]

What I don't understand is...if that's the case, why haven't they patched it into Warlords? What about someone who chooses not to purchase BTS?

=$=

 

[Rusty Edge]

What I don't understand is...if that's the case, why haven't they patched it into Warlords? What about someone who chooses not to purchase BTS?

=$=

If you're happy with Warlords as is, continue to enjoy it. It's a great game, it's meant to be fun.

They haven't worked on more patches for Warlords because they've been very busy with Beyond The Sword.


After warlords is released, and the exact tweaks to siege are known, some Modifier will likely be able to tell you how to change that part of the code to update that particular aspect of your game.

 

[Thedrin]

Lord Olleus:
a) Siege units are no longer protected from collateral damage

Wouldn't that make collateral stronger - not weaker? I was under the assumption that that siege unit intrinsic was introduced in Warlords so that the defending civ would have a better chance of being able to react to having just been on the wrong end of collateral. Prior to this change siege units would be able to reduce the collateral ability of enemy siege units to irrelevance so that who ever struck first in a battle of two stacks would be guaranteed the win.

 

[marioflag]

Perhaps collateral damage make less damage, it reduces a lot less the strenght of other units, it could be balanced IMO

 

[Infantry#14]

My guess is that either:

a) Siege units are no longer protected from collateral damage
or
b) The horse archer/cavalry +50% attack bonus vs Siege weapons gets extended to defence as well
or
c) Both of the above

For option A, siege unit do suffer collaterl, but i think the damage was less compare to non-siege.

For option B, this would be strange because horse archer becomes ideal in defending in city against siege unit.

Perhaps a soln is reduce the effectiveness of the collateral damage by half of catapults and trebuchets. Cannons and Artillery should stay the same. Also, this may increase the effectiveness of those barrage promotions.

 

[Badesumofu]

Seige units are in need of a nerfing. As at right now, there's no real way to counter them, short of having enough units in every city to take out an entire stack before the stack gets a chance to attack you. Perhaps they're going to make seiges take longer, so you have more time to re-enforce cities. Perhaps they'll make it so that cultural and physical defences reduce collateral damage by a large amount, and then increase the time it takes seige units to bombard that defence to zero. That way, you're almost always going to have a handful of turns to get more units to the beseiged city.

The problem with collateral, is that units taken to 75% HPs effectively fight at about 50% strength, so if you're willing to burn a few catas to weaken the defensive stack, taking the city then becomes a cake-walk for the rest of your offensive stack, you just make sure you have enough units to take the city on a single turn, and there's nothing the defenders can do, unless they happen to have offensive-stack-sized defences in every border city.

It's interesting, because most new players will say that attacking is way too hard, and complain about 'invincible longbows' and so forth; but once you get the hang of offensive war, it begins to seem way too easy as long as you bring lots and lots of seige equipment. If you happen to be playing as Korea, and have ivory nearby, then beelining to construction becomes a crazy OP tactic. Elephants have bonus VS mounted (so any horse-archers trying to kill your hwachas will fidn themselves destroyed by 'phants instead, and Hwachas have bonus vs Melee, so any pikes seeking to destroy your elephants will find themselves, instead, blown up by classical era RPGs.

I do love hwachas, though. I love everything about them, right down to the animation.

 

[mjs0]

Well said, Badesumofu.

Personally I would like to see three changes to the way siege units work and behave:

Firstly, Improve AI defensive use:
Ensure the AI knows when to use siege in a city to attack stacks that approach the city. Today siege units just sit there and die defending. A human player would use most if not all of the city's siege units to weaken the attacking stacks.

Secondly, Collateral Damage limits:
Impose a limit, say 10%, on the maximum damage to a unit from collateral during a single turn. This would leave siege as a very important part of any assault on a well defended position but would remove the overwhelming advantage they give. It would provide a defender the opportunity to attempt to lift the siege by bringing up defenders, or maybe force the decision to sally forth and engage the invader before the defenders are worn down.

Finally, Bombard Damage:
The ability to bombard all of a cities defences away should be nerfed. If a city has a wall and a castle, using a catapult/trebuchet to remove that fortification completely is neither realistic or fun. Even a city with badly damaged walls and buildings should still be a lot easier to defend than open grassland.

Basically, I would like to see it a LOT harder to take cities, well, not necessarily harder but definitely slower. It is way too easy to sweep away entire empires in a handful of turns with one or two large stacks made up of 50% or more siege units.

 

[Virulent]

I actually don't want to see siege nerfed. Trebuchets are needed to get past annoying Longbowman.

 

[Big J Money]

Okay I'm past my childish hissy fit, but I'm still perplexed at the wording of this change. It makes it sound like it's not only a balance change, but a reversal of something that was done in Warlords, though it seems nobody can figure out what that could possibly be.

If there needs to be a change, my suggestion would be to simply make it so that siege engines serve 1 of 2 purposes (but never both at the same time) and this would be easy to do:

1: They bombard - This only works against fortifications
2: They deal collateral - This only works in the field (ie. you can NEVER do collateral to units in forts/cities)

In this way there is no need to nerf the bombard ability (which is pointless anyway; people would just bring 2x as much siege because they'd have to).

=$=

 

[Industrial]

My guess is that either:

a) Siege units are no longer protected from collateral damage
or
b) The horse archer/cavalry +50% attack bonus vs Siege weapons gets extended to defence as well
or
c) Both of the above

Thats what im thinking as well.

 

[PimpyMicPimp]

They do need a nerf Enough Siege Weapons=ALL UR CITYZ R BELONG 2 ME

 

[civzombie]

Here is an easy rule tweak that would balance out combat with siege engines a little:

You can make a suicide attack for collatoral damage (like now), but lower any calculated colatoral damage by the cities remaining cultural defense. For example, if a city has 50% cultural defense at the instant you do a suicide attack the colatoral damage from your suicide attack would be halved. If this is how the secret calculations already work, thats news to me!

A more rigid implimentation of the above rule would not even let you make a suicide attack until after you bombard the cities cultural defense down to zero.

The effect of either version of the above rule would be to give the defender a little more time to get muster together some offensive troops to try to take down the sieger's stack. Either version of the above rule has some logic behind it; it is hard to damage troops fortified in a city until that cities defenses have been hammered down. Then you can finally reach the troops with your siege engines...

 

[futurehermit]

I'm glad siege is getting nerfed. It is currently too powerful and it's the collateral dmg that is the problem. So cutting down the collateral dmg by 25-50% would probably be the way to go here.

However, with nerfed siege and the cavalry beeline nerfed PLUS the new and improved AI...us warmongerers are going to have our work cut out for us

 

[Rusty Edge]

I liked it better when siege units couldn't capture on the attack, or for that matter move into an empty city.

I think it would work better if your siege units either fired or moved, so that if you counter-attacked from the safety of your city with catapults , they wouldn't go outside if they were too successful.

I always ask, is a unit too powerful, or is it too cheap?

I'm guessing that the disproportionate share of siege units means they're too cheap.

 

[Ricci]

Seige units are in need of a nerfing. As at right now, there's no real way to counter them, short of having enough units in every city to take out an entire stack before the stack gets a chance to attack you. Perhaps they're going to make seiges take longer, so you have more time to re-enforce cities. Perhaps they'll make it so that cultural and physical defences reduce collateral damage by a large amount, and then increase the time it takes seige units to bombard that defence to zero. That way, you're almost always going to have a handful of turns to get more units to the beseiged city.

The problem with collateral, is that units taken to 75% HPs effectively fight at about 50% strength, so if you're willing to burn a few catas to weaken the defensive stack, taking the city then becomes a cake-walk for the rest of your offensive stack, you just make sure you have enough units to take the city on a single turn, and there's nothing the defenders can do, unless they happen to have offensive-stack-sized defences in every border city.

It's interesting, because most new players will say that attacking is way too hard, and complain about 'invincible longbows' and so forth; but once you get the hang of offensive war, it begins to seem way too easy as long as you bring lots and lots of seige equipment. If you happen to be playing as Korea, and have ivory nearby, then beelining to construction becomes a crazy OP tactic. Elephants have bonus VS mounted (so any horse-archers trying to kill your hwachas will fidn themselves destroyed by 'phants instead, and Hwachas have bonus vs Melee, so any pikes seeking to destroy your elephants will find themselves, instead, blown up by classical era RPGs.

I do love hwachas, though. I love everything about them, right down to the animation.

Good talk, truly, nicely assessed the three, Badesumofu, mjs0, Big J Money. I surely enjoy reading guys who really know the game in depth.
I humbly believe though that there's almost always the same issue with these balance problems. Whether a human player takes advantage of some strategy or ability over an AI or a possible balancing for this makes it unbalanced in human vs human play.
Take this case, a HP perfectly knows how to use siege defensively , and he surely will make it damn hard to even move around his land for more than a couple of turns until he reorders his troops and siege to strike you down. Moreover, the road bonus and forts (which Mantzaris claims to have greatly improved in BTS) gives the defender already a broad edge in keeping his land and cities. So, if an attacker carries along 50% siege in a stack against a HP he takes a nice chance of loosing them defending with no defensive bonusses whatsoever.
Nevertheless, a moderate, but perhaps necessary, tweak for siege weapons would be to progressibly reduce the collateral damage they do along all the affected units. Say the second unit in the attacked stack receives collateral as it is now, the third 3/4, the forth 50% and so on. So that it would be less effective to collaterize a large stack (but still somehow meaningful) and powerful as it is to do so agains small, two or three units, stacks. And after many siege attacks the last units ( forth, fifth, sixth) that had been collaterized might stand a good fight.
Also, I must stand for mjs0 precept that it's no fun nor realistic to completely ruin a city defence (specially built up defences like walls and castles.. fortifications). Again, a nice go around this might be to keep the bombard reducing a percentage of the actual defences every time. So that the first bombard reduces 25%, second 25% of the remaining 75% (this would be like 18% of the original).. so on so forth. This system never allows to obliterate a cities defences.

 

[Ricci]

Seige units are in need of a nerfing. As at right now, there's no real way to counter them, short of having enough units in every city to take out an entire stack before the stack gets a chance to attack you. Perhaps they're going to make seiges take longer, so you have more time to re-enforce cities. Perhaps they'll make it so that cultural and physical defences reduce collateral damage by a large amount, and then increase the time it takes seige units to bombard that defence to zero. That way, you're almost always going to have a handful of turns to get more units to the beseiged city.

The problem with collateral, is that units taken to 75% HPs effectively fight at about 50% strength, so if you're willing to burn a few catas to weaken the defensive stack, taking the city then becomes a cake-walk for the rest of your offensive stack, you just make sure you have enough units to take the city on a single turn, and there's nothing the defenders can do, unless they happen to have offensive-stack-sized defences in every border city.

It's interesting, because most new players will say that attacking is way too hard, and complain about 'invincible longbows' and so forth; but once you get the hang of offensive war, it begins to seem way too easy as long as you bring lots and lots of seige equipment. If you happen to be playing as Korea, and have ivory nearby, then beelining to construction becomes a crazy OP tactic. Elephants have bonus VS mounted (so any horse-archers trying to kill your hwachas will fidn themselves destroyed by 'phants instead, and Hwachas have bonus vs Melee, so any pikes seeking to destroy your elephants will find themselves, instead, blown up by classical era RPGs.

I do love hwachas, though. I love everything about them, right down to the animation.

Good talk, truly, nicely assessed the three, Badesumofu, mjs0, Big J Money. I surely enjoy reading guys who really know the game in depth.
I humbly believe though that there's almost always the same issue with these balance problems. Whether a human player takes advantage of some strategy or ability over an AI or a possible balancing for this makes it unbalanced in human vs human play.
Take this case, a HP perfectly knows how to use siege defensively , and he surely will make it damn hard to even move around his land for more than a couple of turns until he reorders his troops and siege to strike you down. Moreover, the road bonus and forts (which Mantzaris claims to have greatly improved in BTS) gives the defender already a broad edge in keeping his land and cities. So, if an attacker carries along 50% siege in a stack against a HP he takes a nice chance of loosing them defending with no defensive bonusses whatsoever.
Nevertheless, a moderate, but perhaps necessary, tweak for siege weapons would be to progressibly reduce the collateral damage they do along all the affected units. Say the second unit in the attacked stack receives collateral as it is now, the third 3/4, the forth 50% and so on. So that it would be less effective to collaterize a large stack (but still somehow meaningful) and powerful as it is to do so agains small, two or three units, stacks. And after many siege attacks the last units ( forth, fifth, sixth) that had been collaterized might stand a good fight.
Also, I must stand for mjs0 precept that it's no fun nor realistic to completely ruin a city defence (specially built up defences like walls and castles.. fortifications). Again, a nice go around this might be to keep the bombard reducing a percentage of the actual defences every time. So that the first bombard reduces 25%, second 25% of the remaining 75% (this would be like 18% of the original).. so on so forth. This system never allows to obliterate a cities defences.