@aman9415 Even though i am a Fighting Game Fan and a Real-Time Strategy Game Noob, i start to appriciate the Fact, that both punish their Players for poor Resource Management.
"The Art of War" or "how to get basic strategy and tactics ideas in the head of stupid, pretentious, noblemen who got into their position of power through inheritance by dressing it up as philosophy" with great wisdoms like "dont overextend your supply lines, it will drain your nation and its citizens" "forage for food too" "it takes some time to build all the stuff you need to wage war" "dont rush B like in CS:GO"
All wisdom are based on platitudes. At least he does not encourage you to congregate your forces in one battle and engage in an war of attrition like Battle of Verdun which is why the Art of War rose to popularity after the tragedy that was the first world war. Also, the Art of War was written by a new professional class, not for the nobles of whose interest of upholding the aristocratic clan society would go contrary to the shi which Sunzi belonged. The old warfare of China was based on ritual warfare with a strict code of chivalry among nobles to be followed, of which strategy was non-existent. Indeed it was synonymous with deception and trickery, vices that would put your character and thus power in question.
Once you understand some of the concepts, they do seem very "basic" in retrospect, but war is not that intuitive, specially when it stops being just some sporadic skirmishing and goes to nation/kingdom scale.
I agree with most of what you said, but the "countdown to sally battle" approach actually IS logical: what it simulates is the supplies of the city dwindling until the garrison is force into a do or die sally to break the siege. If they are defeated, they surrender because they do not have the supplies to weather the siege anymore
Yes, it can be that or simply the civilian population becoming too willing to surrender depending on the setting; it's not uncommon in history for local governors deciding that they were not going to suffer a siege for longer; this puts the defending army in an untenable position where their only hope to victory is breaking the siege entirely.
In Shogun: Total War, I never do sieges because I don't know how to do an offensive siege and instead wait out the seasons until the castle falls. All of my battles have been outside of castles and that is it. No siege battles, just open field combat.
That is how most sieges in real life tended to go actually. troops just waiting outside of the starving fortress or city waiting for its occupants to give up.
have you done many campaigns or playing on legendary? If you want a quick tip on how to do offensive sieges just try this: Have the same ammount of dudes or more than the garrison+army that's inside the castle unless you have some overwhelming range advantage (Bow warrior monks), split your units around the castle to surround it and place useless units such as cav close to walls that you don't plan to climb to attract the AI towards over there, and, finaly use your ranged units on gaps that aren't covered by the enemy archers and try to shoot them on their flanks, once the enemy archers are depleted enough use your ashigaru units to burn down the gates and storm the place, the enemy will rush towards your men going though the doors giving you an opportunity to climb the surrounding walls, use the guys that just climbed to flank and you'll win with ok casualties. Another tip, once the ranged dudes have been dealt with, get your deneral directly close to the walls and use stand and fight, he'll give great buffs to your units and will not be shot since he'll be too close to the walls for the enemies to get a proper angle. Any other questions you have can be answered in the viking general siege videos, RIP that guy's channel, too bad he doesn't post much anymore.
@@irredeemablelover7608 When I first played the original, I didn't even know you COULD assault castles. I wondered why there were castle maps in the custom battle lists. Then a friend showed me that I could drag my army onto the enemy castle in my province, and fight a castle assault. If you do this, I recommend lots of archers. Treat it similarly to a bridge battle.
I definitely agree with a lot of your points! I *do* like the Three Kingdoms minor settlement battles though (not a walled city) - both sides have a good amount of troops and can adapt to strategy, with clear chokepoints. I do like Three Kingdoms Romance mode, but that's because I like dipping into fantasy (especially Asian fantasy and I'm not sure why).
Regarding the deception. Not being able to tell the exact number of enemy units on the map. Only an estimate (spy networks and generals stats could make the estimates better) and even when a battle starts the units arent all revealed. This would make deception and Napoleons corps tatcics more possible. Fog of war similar to total war arena would make light skirmishers and light cavalry useful. As well as hills and structures. Adding small structures to some rural maps would spice it up. I like to think soething like roman farms in north africa being semi fortified, watch towers/light towers. Or stone buildings in empire. Splitting your army into corps would greatly help with efficient taking over provinces as you mentioned, the province system from shogun 2. Maybe even splitting each unit card card into two for greater micro, or combining for easier use. 13:30 sometimes
While i agree with many of this, removing sieges is a bad idea if you really want to make it better, make sieging cites like sieging rome in rome 2 in rise of the republic (along with the escalation from attila), where you actually have to work for it and make the possibility of enemy reinforcements much harder if you're going to be sieging the city for multiple turns
What was said in the video about the "passive nature of sieges" is could not be more wrong, and admitting what you feel what ck2 sieges are well depicted is a straight-up heresy. Sieges were actually labour intensive for the besiegers due to the constant fortifying, artillery bombardment, forage, logistical effort, assault attempts etc (tho waiting was also part of the process ofc)
I feel like getting rid of siege battles altogether is a step too far. Also giving the defender advantages on a field battle (especially the flat stat increases) feels a little too inorganic. As a defender in a siege you inherently have better ground. Older total war games put a better emphasis on terrain, so it melds with the mechanics, those walls aren’t just a stat increase or another source of damage your opponents need to look out for. Personally, I'd make sieges a lot more rare, but also more grand in scale. Like sieges aren't for each and every settlement, they're for the big dog cities that the AI really don't want to lose and that you really want in your hands. I'd also make the sieges take place in stages rather than an all or nothing assault. Escalate a bit with maybe a few skirmishes outaide the walls in order to whittle down the opponent to massive pushes fir sections of a city. Yeah I said sections, it would help with scale and put in that time commitment to sieges. I feel like this way, you can't just speedeun sieges in a single battle, they actually slow you down and it makes circumnavigating a fortified city an option you'd want to take in order deal with other threats first.
Mongols would hard disagree with Sun Tzu and they repeatedly proved a point that you can besiege and take cities sometimes in a matter of days rather then months or years.
Yeah, but that's not a product of their acumen for sieges as much as it is their terror tactics. Many cities folded as quickly as they did because the Mongols just *didn't* hold back with their tactics. Part of why they were so terrifying was because they were willing to do things other parties wouldn't, like flinging foetid, rotting corpses into the city, forcing peasants into the city to overburden it, etc.
I like the idea of Siege Battles being entirely optional. You can wait it out and thus be bogged down, attempt to take it quickly and thus while the threat's eliminated you lost parts of your army, or you could just go around but now there's an enemy force behind you. Forcing them at the end just sort of defeats the point of waiting it out
I remember a time I was playing total war Warhammer, despite being out numbered by the enemy, I managed to completely decimate their troops with minimal casualties.... Then their legendary lord single handedly wiped out my entire army. It was a frustrating experience.
imo just because sieges aren't realistic in TW they shouln't just be removed, if you make a mistake, you don't just forget about it but improve upon it. Total war is an amazing title overall which offers so much nobody can match. Besides it's a game we play for fun, it's absurd to remove sieges and the mods offer a lot, you can even make your own maps.
I think a partial fix for sieges would be to divide them into multiple maps. Essentially you need to fight the defender three (or so) times to simulate trying to take control of the city. You start at the walls, then the city streets and then, if the defender still has not given up, you turn to pillage the inner city while the defender tries to stop you. The Idea would be that if the defender wins, the attacker is pushed back to the previous map as well as taking hige penalties to morale. This would then be the alternative to just waiting the defender out and making sure they dont somehow get supplies while maintaining your own sieges supply lines to avoid attrition. On that note actually, armies should honestly devestate provinces in terms of supply and larger forces should require some form of logistical backbone to not starve half way there.
I feel like that’s a cool concept, however I really don’t think fixing sieges involves fighting ~3 battles per city. Could be cool if it could be settled by a cinematic duel.
@@heitorpedrodegodoi5646 my thinking was to have three maps for the same city, it could be based on the same map visually so you don't break continuity but you'd only have a set area each time to fight over. This would allow the devs to at least try to show the real scale of cities and how much of an undertaking it is to try and beseige one.
I fully agree with the problem wrt General-led TWs, I think they also act as part of a cycle in which the garrisons (particularly late-game ones) are balanced around the assumption that you should have a 20-stack army, so the garrisons need to be large enough to provide at least some challenge, so now you're motivated to always be marching with a 20-stack army. In earlier games, I am frequently sending out smaller armies that are big enough to do the job bc the rest of the army is replenishing/I don't need 20 units to kill a 2 unit army/it would be unwise to leave the city undefended. Smaller armies can even take a city if it has barely anyone defending it, so there's more variety in the scale of battles. As for your argument to transfer things from cities to provinces, I think that is the intention behind the changes to provinces in Empire onwards, and their eventual expansion into provinces with only a single walled capital & a few smaller unwalled towns. It also has the nice added side effect of reducing the amount of walled siege battles, bc while I don't agree with getting rid of sieges entirely, I don't think they should be every fucking city. My problem with the province/region system, and maybe yours too based on how you're drawing borders on the map, is how sparse these new regions are. The provinces don't feel as an expansion of cities (except maybe when compared to Empire depicting France as a single province controlled by Paris lol), they feel like an area bundling in a couple cities, but now with none of the smaller towns we used to see dotting the landscape outside of cities. Adding some density within regions would probs help a lot to also just make the maps look like more is existing between the cities other than empty land. Maybe Thrones of Britannia got closest to the transition of city to province by making the minor settlements have no garrisons, it's genuinely possible to bleed your enemy by raiding/taking the surrounding regions & forcing them to fight you in the field. The smaller scope also meant that the areas between towns don't feel absurdly large to the same extent as they do in other games. It probably helps with the raiding/swift changeover of land that the factions are comparatively homogenous. I don't think that system would work anywhere near as well in Warhammer, where a change in ownership generally also means a completely different race taking over with substantially different building trees.
There is alot of improvement needed to make sieges feel like actual sieges, but removing them would be unhistorical and nonsensesical, removing an essential piece of historical warfare bc "bugs" or bc a renowned general said it was a bad idea even tho the mongols have proved that wrong several times
The problem is most sieges weren't battles, they were sitting around a city for weeks to years thinking of prank-level schemes to make the people on the other side of the wall hate their lives. Flooding the streets so grain and bones rot, siege artillery didn't break down walls they were meant to hit buildings inside the walls, they cut off food to starve people out, cultivated sickness, robbed each others camps, etc. if sieges were realistic you'd have 1 or 2 siege battles per game, the rest would just be boring waiting games
@@christophernoneya4635well, alternative to waiting for defenders to starve/surrender is to either bribe them off, use Mongol way, aka intimidate the hell out of everyone or go for assault - will assault be more cost-efficient? Hell no. Is it fast? Yes. So while yeah, storming the heavily defended should be set up in a way that attacker fails 90% of the time, it may be much easier when encountering barely developed place, though in such situation it's more likely to have it flip by intimidating, as it spares time, lives and infrastructure. Though one idea how to make sieges less boring could be to have skirmishes/defenders trying to sally out, where both defenders and attackers use only a fraction of their available units with specific set of goals, such as destroy siege engines or supply depot instead of regular "break their will to fight and kill when they're routing"
I can see the logic in no siege battles in *some* games, but it was say, a classical era game? That wouldn’t make much sense, when some of the most famous sieges occurred during that era, where they did assault cities and forts with their troops. I’d rather they not naval battles the sieges (just remove them because they can’t be arsed) and fix them and make them impressive and good
Hey, you should check out the Combat Mission series of hardcore war games. They are pretty much top-of-the line military simulators with shitty graphics but absurdly complex simulations (fully modeled formations down to the single infantryman’s ammunition count or the vehicle’s different optics and subsystems (and their state, as they can be individually degraded and destroyed), from modern Russian BTG’s to Wehrmacht Panzergrenadier battalions) and a hefty price tag. The recommended manuals from the community are literally just IRL field manuals for the chosen armies. The games are sometimes unbalanced as hell, but that is absolutely realistic in those cases (for example, Italians would heavily struggle against Shermans in frontal engagements (they had FT-17 copies deployed in Sicily, for goodness sake) and Syrian armoured corps would get torn to shreds against Abrams and Bradleys, with their superior optics (aka they have actual thermals, while old T-55s and T-72M’s don’t), while the few and elite modern antitank teams such as Kornet and Vampir would be rare and precious hidden aces to keep in reserve against NATO armour.) Basically, it has an absurd amount of detail, an absurd attention to detail, and an absurd disregard to community opinion (except when they “accidentally” predicted the Russo-Ukraine war with their CM:Black Sea game, making them bin any future modules (funnily enough, this is the second game they “predicted” modern conflicts with, CM:Shock Force being the first, depicting a war in Syria) and customer convenience.
There is a reason why I main Kairos Fateweaver. "Hey, look at all of those soldiers packed into a small location, what if I... *INFERNAL GATEWAY*" True apotheosis comes when I can doom stack the birds, or soul grinders
Just found your channel, gonna add you to the list of smart genuine people I'm gonna call when I build my Media Avengers Team among the likes of The Templin Institute and Schnee, the team having the express goal of fixing and perfecting everything bonkers with media these days. You're an inspiration man!
Sieges are definitely worse than others, and you correctly identify a number of ways in which they just don't work as well as they should. Having said that defensive sieges the main thing that keep me playing Total War games, and have been for the past 20 years. I actually rather like when the fighting devolves into a blobby scrum in chokepoints. I adore slugging it out and grinding down numerically superior armies because my troops are just better than theirs and they can't just outmaneuver me. Amd more than anything, i appreciate the opportunity to park the camera in the thick of the action and enjoy the actual combat playing put instead of having to fly all around the map every 5 seconds and do my best impression of an autoclicker to micro for maximum efficiency.
I hope they get their act together since the total slog that was Pharaoh. I think Creative Assembly needs good competition to evolve Total War beyond its current state. Also, in Three Kingdoms, garrisons degrade over time and need to be replenished after a siege, which wasn't too bad. Another point related to Three Kingdoms: being able to trade provinces was really, really good. I also feel like diplomacy based around entire entities, for example, always negotiating with the faction leader, is a bit too simplistic. We should be able to negotiate with the cities, the generals, and the important people themselves. Flipping cities/people by giving them better work/living conditions or playing into their vices could spice up the whole gameplay.
I must be in the small minority that has always loved sieges, frankly I wouldn't want to play what you describe. (For reference to what I would like to contribute I have played Rome, Medieval 2, Empire and Warhammer with Rome and Warhammer 2 being potentially my most played, I wish I could say for certain, but Rome was mainly spent on a cd for my childhood and adolescence). Rome's sieges worked pretty well with the 80 man infantry units (forgot the unit scale), i do completely agree on the towers and city design though. Especially in medieval 2 where placing a unit in a way can look possible but the game won't let it happen, don't get me started on Warhammer or Empire's walls, they are not satisfying compared to Rome's. I feel to some extent though that an olive branch I can offer is to expand on how huge cities should be. Streets widened, have progressive capturing of various maps (ie outskirts, outer layer, several districts and the central area). Bring back the raging inferno's that incendiary ammunition for catapults from Rome and watch as the fires spread consuming units in the inferno. For tighter streets have the ability to split unit formations. Similar to Empire Total War where the dragoons could mount and dismount. I also have enjoyed warhammer 2's sieges but will concede that as a defender they are frustrating with the emphasis on the central square especially with the rest of the city behind the units, granted of course that the proposed system would just be massive tedium in warhammer with the single entities being more dangerous (and magic especially) with streets rather than open fields. I think making cities into grand fortresses that are rarer than minor settlements or provinces might help to balance this out, similar to empire where assaulting cities without forts led to a field battle with maybe a handful of buildings to occupy. I'll always love watching the wall fall to sappers, the sight of soldiers falling from high, watching the action close as occasionally a grunt survives fighting enemies 3 on 1 for the reinforcements to climb the ladders and relieve him, playing the English and feeling sorry for the mongolian horses in castle sieges, hoping that my ragtag force pulls a miracle victory. I will agree completely that auto garrisons and making generals super units (and mandatory) doesn't gell well, especially in the miracle victory department. Lastly love your videos and I appreciate the chance to digest an opposing viewpoint, thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts and have a lovely day!
okay so, some points about sieges: 1. older towns really weren't that big, a large city in the early modern periode had a population of 50-100k people and they were very dense a small fortified town could almost consist more of walls than town and the length of a largetown/city is a couple of kilometers most of the time. 2. you are not suppose to have fun being the attacker? the fun is in being a defender, for that alone they should stay. its bizarre to me to argue against sieges because they are hard for the attacker, they are suppose to be, the most fun battles in total war is defensive sieges esp in Attila and shogun 2. yes they are a mess in warhammer but frankly so are all battles.
1. Exactly - I live in a city where up to 1870, you literally could walk from one side of city wall to another in about 10 minutes. And while sure, a lot of medieval/early modern cities had a lot of stuff outside the city walls, in the event of siege, those buildings were torn down or put to fire beforehand, in order to deny attacker any kind of cover, so while on map you could see it as having buildings within and outside city walls, siege maps will likely have a quite a wide belt of preprepared open field
Respectfully I disagree I personally love Medieval 2 and Shogun 2’s siege battles Especially Fall of the Samurais siege battles. Medieval and shogun have gate opening options. Medieval has nice castles to account for how they can account for towns to help with scale. Shogun 2 is the same Shogun 2 is my favorite especially Fots since Fall of the samurai gives tons of options. Kisho ninja can be effective and fun artillery is great naval bombardment yari kachi or shogutai rush, sharp shooter pick off. The war hammer games though are the worst because they lack variety flexibility in how you siege imo.
This video starts well, but then it just turns personal anti-siege hate speech. I agree that game would be better if not focusing to build stack of dooms, and then play cat&mouse with enemy's stack of doom. I also would prefer to have better economy in game. And more depth in role playing. Deleting sieges is not something what I see as improvement of the game. But CA should get some kind of focus, what they think they want to see as city battles (or even idea, that there is variety what they could be). For example one type of "siege battle" could be, when defending side lost already their defence tower, tops of their walls cannot carry any more archers (or number of archers are already very thin), so sieging side decide to start main attack (against gates), and battle will happen mainly near gates and inside of the city. Other kind of could be siege weapon battle, where sieging side tries to disable defender's ranged ability, and defender tries to make pretty similar, and damage siege weapons. Third type could be infiltration attack in night time. Or how about battle what happens in night time, attacker managed get gates open and in deployment face attacker can start with armies next to gate(s) and gates are open (and cannot be closed any more) while defender is not prepared for attack at all, but units are in different parts of city.. What Sun Tzu meant, is that walls give so much protection for defending side, that it is not good option to attack against enemy who has walls. Seek better options, if possible. If you just wait enemy to starve, that is possible only if you have so much wealth, that you can upkeep months or years that army (get them food, salary, and suffer from them not having part of your economy). But that may not be always possibility. Then you need seek other ways of to undo enemy's advantage against you. What I think is, that garrison troops should not be in Total Warhammer 3 "free units", nor units to be only for garrison porpoise. Giving possibilities to increase and decrease size of garrison based on what you think what is needed in this or that place, but also give opportunity to move elite troops in important defence point while your army is away. And also, I wish there would be less information about things, and more need for scouting (and have scouts and spies). I mean for example "there is rumours that region x has quite large army, but we do not know exactly where, how large or even who's army (but we know if it is friendly or not for local region). More knowledge, and you may hear more accurately what direction that army should be, and maybe more information about it. "There is lot of berserker units". Or so. Better fog of war could make more possible to play with weaker faction who focus on hit-and-run type of warfare. ...but that all would actually make game very different.
Legend of the Five Rings has the best combat system I've experienced in TTRPGs. It's all about stances and stress and lots of samurai flavour, it has entire dedicated duel system that's short enough that it can be VERY tense for your players, and avoids the pitfalls you mentioned. But if one's table is married to D&D, as many tables are, the best option is 4e, fight me. Now your positioning matters enough the amount of time dedicated to it is proportional, spell slots are gone (but still no mana system), garunteed damage is mostly gone, and martials can actually do cool stuff. Unfortunately it was also balanced the worst out of any edition, so it's errata to fix that is like 170 full pages and you should ignore any published monster from before the 3rd manual (or just use the 'essentials' monster vault, but don't use the essentials for anything else). 4e was a victim of a lot of things but what it definitely didn't deserve is its current reputation. One day I'm going to lose my mind and compile a single tome for modern play of 4e after gathering it's scattered and corrected remnants from across the web so people can more easily play the best version of it for themselves. Anyway taking sieges out of Total War is fine and all but there's nothing quite like mounting a defence on the walls, gradually falling back, and beating or at least significantly bloodying a much much stronger force. Defensive sieges are the sources of some of my best stories from playing these games, and I'd like to preserve those somehow. But for that to be the case you'd need to remove the auto-garrisons and replenishment because otherwise why would I be attached to my guys? They're ephemeral and losses don't matter. Knowing it's the veterans from the campaign that got us here and that they're the battered and broken remnants from the offensive means I'm way more liable to be attached to them - and not just because of their unit experience.
Haven't played DnD but I have read every rule book for 3.5e, 4e and 5e as well as a lot of homebrew. When I read 4e it seemed to me to be the best out of the 3 so I couldn't understand my everyone hated it.
The best sieges I ever had was in DAC total war and all they did is just added balista projectiles to towers which completely changed the way sieges work. The projectile can even sometimes destroy ladder! The walls went from garbage to extremely important layer of defense. It isn't perfect but I worked on settlement modding and I think there's great ways to fix and rework sieges in rome 1 and med 2 into perfection! Heck, I know modder who added working draw bridges into medieval total war 2 ! How cool is that?! In DAC mod I ethier carefully get army out of settlement to fight them on open field or if i have to siege it I send weak units first because I do not want to lose elite ones to defenses. And when theyre weakened then I send elite units. The catapults went from unessecary unit that slows down army to extremely important siege equipment as that can take down towers and other defenses that would kill many of my men. And sometimes I just have to really starve them out if they have a big stack of elite units in settlement. A feature I did not had to ever use beforehand. Lastly. Here's my fun defense experience. Attacker had bit more units than me and they were elite. Meanwhile I had just peasant tier archers and soldiers with only handful elite units. I felt comfortable as they'll die under my wall but then i noticed 2 capault units so i sent small force to take care of them and break them.. It did not succeed and then they tore down my walls and defenses. I had to manouver my archers to avoid loses and soon after the walls were torn down I sent my archers back up and had to face massive assault of elite units into settlement. I managed to hold out as I had only like 1 tower working with archer support.. but damn that was quite hard siege defense and most fun one I ever had.
Your video changed my perspective on game design aspects for stragety games (Total war) Your video reminded me a problem one time i had one time. I made up a game to play with my friends and I had to decide what they would be able to do (Based off of hoi4). (It was the city situation where cities were considered cities not provinces tldr it bogged down the game) REAL TLDR I ENJOYED YOUR VIDEO.
I feel like sort of system with a hierarchy of cities would suit total war. Where you only need to take over a province or country capital to take over the entire region (either directly or through unrest). Kind of like empire total war.
I’d say keep the sieges for those idiots who can’t help but do them (and or the geniuses who can pull them off) As you said “the rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can be at all avoided” “At all avoided” Meaning There are some rare instances where sieging a walled city might not be avoidable. So keep the siege battles but have tactical options to avoid them, or undermine them. But change them a bit. Like maybe multiple separate engagements across multiple in-town maps? Maybe a choice of which side of the town you want to attack from, and the actual map would be half outside the walls, half inside, and not even encompassing a 10th of the town. Multiple battles to capture 1 town or city. Than a choice of to stop and continue the siege and (encamp) from your now position and or continue on to capture the next strategic sector of the town/city, ending at a main defensive government building at a key point in town. Maybe a system where the defenders can counter attack to try and reclaim those sectors of their town/city.
In most total war games I don’t send everyone to attack the walls. And I don’t often lose even a third of my troops to their defenses. I hold my main force off, out side of engagement range only sending my best troops to secure the way into the city. Than I use the narrow streets to my advantage as choke points where it only takes a squad or two to hold the enemy back and use my archers to whittle down their back lines, advancing when possible and safe to do so. Then I in circle their capture point with a shield wall and my archers annihilate them all! The core of my tactics revolve around my archers/basic ranged units, my hand to hand units are mainly used to protect my archers. But that’s not my only strategy. I have up to 38 contingencies.
Total War battles operate on pitched battle logic, which decently approximates field battles, but is inadequate for sieges. Simple dynamic siege attrition system, based on attacker and defender stances, larger garissons consuming more suplies etc. would solve the problem of sieges being boring sitting game. Alternatively sieges could be redesigned as series of attrition battles.
to be honest I do prefer the current way armies and generals revolve around each other, makes for more unique fighting forces and general's bonuses more consistent and clear, but not the way one can't exist without the other
I remember playing a mobile version of a turn based shogun, it was alright but the game had exactly what you're asking for, no sieges. Well okay there were some but so few that I can only remember one big siege battle which surprise surprise I lost.
Siege attrition actually exists in all Total War games (from what I remember... it's possible Empire doesn't have it). In Shogun 1 and Medieval 1, it tells you exactly how many of the defenders have died due to attrition during a turn. Attrition is mostly negligible in Rome 1 and Medieval 2, which is why it's hard to notice it exists at all. But it can be useful in weakening the garrison's strongest units before an assault. Rome 2 and Attila for some reason made it so defender attrition doesn't kick in until after a few turns. Which would be fine.. if they didn't make the nonsensical decision to make besiegers instantly suffer attrition after laying siege.
Siege battles should be 1:1 scale of the cities, and should take many many battles of Brutal Urban Warfare. This way, people will all go outside due to the sheer suffering they will experience.
improvement idea to the general/army first mechanic; vexillations. small detachments broken off from the main army for garrisoning, scouting, raiding , ambushing etc. The penalty cost for too many armies is just stupid. As to sieges; the is a expansion to Mount and Blade set in viking times that has something like this, that game also has lots of sieges. There are a multitude of choices you make as the besieger to whittle down the fort, and regular sallies. To gamify this there should be a number of different mission types you can engage in as the besieger or besieged, with various in-game factors opening more options for you; you can find numerous examples of different ways that siege warfare evolved over time.
Generals were by đemselves,never attached to any troops and they were also made to lead armies.No army existed wiþout general. It would be self-defeating to program generals like an average unit.Who would lead the army? Would it be as strong as generaless? Also,it wouldn't make sense eiþer to implement đe "province" system (it's a settlement by itself) šogun (pronounced sh) 2 had,nor other games like it.Instead,I would like more like how đey did it in pharao:every settlement in a province would have outposts.þe former is ahistorical needle-searching inside a haystack. Þe latter is far more practical and historical. Finally,victory conditions are đe *end* of the campaign.What will you do after the ampaigns' end?Total war serie doesn't have the claims mechanic historical paradox games have
(Since it sē[ee]ms twitter is influenciŋ youtube)Sieges are meant to be hard and čalleŋiŋ(ng) to boþ đe player and þe ai. þe crowding makes sense.Whilst fightiŋ,soldiers sēk hysterophimy(post-deaþ perception of individuals) and prestige amoŋst đemselves,đeir superiors and đeir oþer close circles,searčiŋ for meaniŋ even in sabbiŋ and fire,demolition
I don't mind single entity units in the total warhammer games since that reflexs the table top and there big super people, and I don't mind sieges that much, but I do agree they are too common and the garrisons are either to small win or could easily autoresolve wins. I believe sieges (for TWH at least) should be reduced how frequent they occur, but make them more involved, by introducing actions and make anythings currently automatic actually needing manpower to do, like encirclement requires certain amount of people to do so depending an the type of settlement and location, for example Altdorf, the capital of the Empire and a port town, would be very difficult to encircle, requiring a large army with units good at enticements, skirmisher or cavalry, and siege attrition also doesn't happen automatically etc. additionally each side can try and direct their efforts on gather supplies, siege preparations, which either mean constructing extra defenses and barricades, or for attackers making siege specific units, like ladder carriers, field improvised siege weapons etc instead of just rams and siege towers etc etc. also attackers can fortify their siege camp for extra defenses in an counter attack. Additionally, when an attacker declares an attack on an settlement they must pick an goal, raid, conquer, or raze, (and a potential 4th option for some factions), this effects what kind of battle is fought. Many of the settlement fights, siege counterattacks, and certain camping stand fights, are done on entrenched maps. Those maps are somewhat modular to swap out different defense elements based on how fortified the defender is, and based on faction, khorne armies will have very different defenses to dwarfs, even if for some it is a aesthetic difference
I know Offensive siege battles are a pain, but I wouldn’t want siege battles to be removed, I’ve always found defensive Siege battles to be the best part of total war games…
Of all the TW's I played, Shogun 2 does "siege battles" the best by far imo; the larger maps (which are sadly quite uncommon to get to play on in the campaingn) with the multi-layered defenses are actually retty nice and give the player a lot of room to move around; is archer range had stil depended on altitude like in RTW/M2 Those sieges would have been awesome; (also, being able to deploy your men outside the walls is a pretty big deal) the biggest problems are the AI just not being very good at defending, and, as you said, being almost forced to g into a siege in order to take any settlement. In battle the games should be doing more with deployable defenses (stakes, bamboo walls, earthworks etc.) and include natural cover (small walls that act as low cover; like the ones we see in RotS early game castles) that doesn't restrict movment. ETW had all of this stuff years ago, it just never managed to make good use of it. On the campaign map, we really need to look at ways to make sieges optional; attackers should be going after the infrastructure outside of the capital instead of alays bee-lining to the settlement capial in order to take over a province; as an example: Take ETW-Shogun 2 style regions where every province has multiple points of inteest: 1xcapital/fort and 3x small town and/resource node/farm (ETW style) If you attack the capital, you get a siege, defenders have a garrisson and can surrender (all of this was already available in ETW) If you attack any of the other points of interest, instead of just "damaging" the building (causing a tiny public order penalty in the capital) you can genuinely capture these points; the more of these minor points are captured the bigger the problems in the capital become: let's say for simplicity's sake, let's say the capital can last 6 turns in a siege, every of the 3 minor settlement I take from the enemy will shave 2 turns off that time; (what this represents is the civilian population not having the will to resist my army when it already controls the entire province; they want to surrender) the army stationed in the settlement can still choose to fight the attacker, but it would be a field battle. You can add to this all kinds of negative effects in the capital based on howw much of the province you do not own (essentially representing the loss of control over the land, being cut off from supplies and having a large civilian population who no longer have full access too food and other resources s trade dies down more and more. (this would be things like public order loss(civil discontent), loss of garrison forces (loss of support for the cause), the destruction of buildings (violent rioting) attrition to local occupying armies (rebellion) and could all culminate in the "classic" TW style rebellion where the locals muster an army to fight off their occupiers. It's all relatively simple changes; all the major aspects were already in ETW (taking over minor towns/resource points, demanding towns to surrender etc. were all already in ETW, they just need to be expanded on to have a proper impact on gameplay) and it would still allow armies to quickly conquer enemy lands by just straight up taking the capital (if you have overwheming force of arms) but it would create more of a feeling of "fighting for control of the land" in regions where both the player and their enemy control an army of somehat similar size (in this case a direct assault on the enemy capital would be too difficult)
I think you should be able to fight siege battles and battles with extensive defences but you should rather attack single sections of the cities or field fortifications but in exchange taking a hole city should be much more influencial on negotiarions
Realistically, war used to be mostly sieges. Rarely did a monarch take full control of the equiping of a regiment, let alone a garrison. Realism doesn't make total war more fun, it makes it boring with brief bouts of brutal and imbalanced combat.
Sorry but i heavily disagree. I love settlement battles in TWW3, even modded them back like they were on release, constant field battles would just be repetetive and boring to me, and even with mod i still have fair and balanced amount of both to not stay bored. I wish absolutely opposite, make more focus on city battles to have what was teased in R2 and never expanded, more varied environment, more siege options with more noticable effects and racially different(like it was made in AoW4 for example), but lower time to sit out the siege, it being over 3-4 turns is too much.
I feel like shogun 2 is the only game in which siege battles are actually somewhat enjoyable. I still don't like how often I'm forced into them, but it doesn't make me contemplate quitting out of the game to go do something else like it does with every other game.
I agree with the overall points you made, but a few corrections for engagement: - I believe TWW3 removed supply lines (the % upkeep increase for each general you have) at some point. This makes it more viable to have smaller armies roaming around the place, but doesn't change the overall point. - Siege attrition is a thing in at least TWW2 and 3, it just takes ages to set in and once it does it halves the health of the defending army each turn, so they typically sally out and die. The obsession with superpowered lords is at its worst in TWW2/3 with Snikch. In lore, the ratman is the best(?) assassin. In game he leads armies, can't assassinate (his faction has a special assassinate ability, but as far as I remember it doesn't take him out of his army and can target factions on the other side of the world, so it's clearly not him doing it) and is incidentally a great monster-slayer because the stats you need to kill lords are the exact same as the stats needed to kill monsters. Oh, and he actually isn't even very good at killing lords in battle because he can't keep up with most of them and by midgame most of them will be flying. Oh, and of course he can tank cannonballs to the face, because he's a single-entity unit. Instead of re-evaluating the mold to fit the characters they're trying to fit into it, they butcher the character to fit the mold. I'd be happy to see city sieges die. Have battles centred on crucial production and infrastructure within a province until the city eventually surrenders (or, as others have suggested, have a multi-stage push into the city if you want to do it quickly with an overwhelming force). Building walls could instead be replaced with castles in eras when this would be appropriate - defensible locations within the province where armies could sit in relative safety. This may end up being the same problem with a different name, but ultimately, a castle does nothing for the province (unlike walls, which you must overcome to take a province), the only threat it provides is the armies it houses so you can just ignore it and accept the damage those armies may inflict while you focus on taking the province.
Tww3 maintains some supply lines, but some factions don't have supply lines due to lore reasons (bretonnia has the lords leading privately funded and armed armies being one reason) Siege attrition in TWW1 was a thing. After a set number of turns (which you can boost by having a higher tier settlement and garrison buildings) they begin taking heavy losses, which remained in TWW2 TWW3 has a different system. The turns where the defending city has supplies to last out the siege or encirclement is lower, and the time for their garrison to die out from the attrition is longer, but it takes away a small portion every turn (I think like 6.25% at base) And with the point of overpowered lords, that's a thing that started in thw Warhammer games, and has contextual reasons behind it, that being it's presence as a fantasy game where great people can turn the tide of a battle singlehandedly. And regarding Snikch, he is removed entirely from the campaign map for a number of turns when you send him on a mission, and if he's heading an army you'll need to have another leader take his place. You can have other lesser assassins, or even master assassins, do these jobs, but only Snikch can do the big ones like plunging an entire faction into anarchy. And even then, on the tabletop (which the game takes from) Snikch was available as an army leader. If Snikch shouldn't be leading an army because he's an assassin, then Karl Franz shouldn't be leading an army because he's a statesman who's busy running the empire, or that Oxyotl shouldn't be leading an army because he does the bidding of the old ones to eliminate key chaos targets. All of them would take to the field of battle personally to take down their target when they're at their most vulnerable, and we know Snikch isn't doing it of his own volition. He's leading the armies he does by order of the nightlord of clan Eshin
@@sev1120 I stand corrected about Snikch's assassinations, though I still find it silly that his only method of assassination is through special faction actions. I stand by the point that he and by extension Oxyotl shouldn't be leading armies (probably a few others too), they should be legendary heroes instead of lords. I don't know enough about the lore of Karl Franz to comment on him specifically. Overall this kind of highlights the shortcomings of the lord/hero archetypes, there are plenty of characters who are primarily X but would lead an army in a pinch and that niche is simply unavailable in the games as they currently exist. Even on tabletop, the distinction between lords and heroes was a lot looser and heroes could lead armies in lower-point games (barring certain faction restrictions). It feeds into a wider point about how some factions just aren't suited to be Total War factions (lead armies, paint the map, etc.) and to CA's credit they somewhat solved that with the Wood Elves. Regarding the overpowered lords and the trappings of fantasy: there are a lot of small decisions in the TWW games specifically that feel like they're primarily meant as quality of life but have drastically swung the balance and flow of battles. I'm talking things like unit mass being a constant balance mess, all ranks of ranged units firing at once, everything having a smidge of AP damage, everything about AoE spells, the accuracy of ranged units, etc. In totality, this has led to characters blowing way past 'turning the tide of battles' and into the realms of tedious slog of a damage sponge - all this while still riding a bizarre knife-edge where a bad volley from some ranged infantry could ruin their day. Characters are simply the most emblematic of the bad core decisions that have led to such stat bloat. There should be some middle-ground between "this man is a regular man in a fancy hat" and "this man can fight elite infantry all day (but be careful of those peasant archers)", but it just doesn't really exist in TWW. The baseline stat requirements for a character to be functional also render them a superhero because the balance is so wonky. Most noticeable when trying to run down a fleeing character. I'm hyperbolising somewhat. I had fun with the games, but their flaws make them exhausting and frustrating after a while. And man, TWW3 is not 100GB+ of enjoyable. Those load times too, yeesh.
Oh, look! Another obscure, gay YT critic and analyst of niche subjects that I think about once a year. (I will subscribe to their channel and forget that they exist in about a month.)
thats why Shogun is still my favorite game. Mediavel 2 is nice but a little too aged. Empire would've been my absolute favorite but its sooooo buggy its not even funny.
5:21 Wrong. The besieged do lose troops over time. In Medieval 2 Total War at least. 8:00 Remove sieges is not historical. Most medieval battle were sieges.
Im triggered by your portrayal of Sun Tzu as a samurai. Hes chinese. Not all asian warriors are samurai. Otherrwise, i agree with a lot of your points. The siege battles are stupid and sieging should bw reworked from the ground up.
I understand where your arguments are coming from, but your solution for sieges is beyond mad. Sieges being poorly implemented is not at all a reasonable justification for their removal, that's how we ended with the new general system. I agree siedging need to become more dynamic and interactive, maybe making it so sieged troops degrade as time goes on, being able to mess with a settlement's food reserve with agents, the capture of secondary provincial settlements like ports or farms and whatnots contrivuting to something, or even the ratio of your cavalry and light infantry units in comparison to the besieged ones altering siege time by simulating the ability of the besieged force to sally forth in skrimishes in search of supply and the such, many things can be done other than just removing things.
You got some basic facts about Warhammer incorrect. For example, suggesting that the splash attacks from generals make them OP and able to stunlock enemy soldiers. Splash attacks have a max target number which means most of the units being visually hit when a general swings their weapon aren't actually taking any damage. Splash attacks also have a max target size meaning if you're hitting large targets or single entities, you're not damaging any infantry you also happen to visually hit with that attack. I had typed out a whole list as I watched the video before I got to the end, but hearing that you hate the series I don't really see the point in posting it. It's unfortunate that you have your mind made up on this, given a few of your other videos I've seen (for example talking about why guns should be in fantasy) I think you'd really enjoy the Warhammer Fantasy setting.
i haven't touched any total war game past three kingdoms and hearing what you had to say about WH3 really solidified my beliefs that anything past 3k is just dogwater 😭 ah well. time to dust off ol' shogun 2 again
People please I preach to you out of love belive on the lord jesus christ and trust in him for you salvation and not in yourself christ came to die for our sin we have all sinned and deserve hell but god is so merciful and jesus died on the cross to take our punishment so that who ever belive on him will not perish but have eternal life john 3:16 romans 10:9 if we confess with our mouth jesus is lord and belive in our heart that god rose him from the dead we will be saved we can not earn salvation it is the free gift from god❤❤❤❤
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There's actually a secret shortcut in Warhammer 3 that helps you skip sieges if they are taking too long. Alt + F4
@aman9415
Even though i am a Fighting Game Fan and a Real-Time Strategy Game Noob, i start to appriciate the Fact, that both punish their Players for poor Resource Management.
Start war with 3 factions, then hold feast in your castle
- Sun Tzu
The swadian way of war.
"F1, F3" -Sun Tzu
"all warfere is based"
-sun tzu
"Based? Based on what?"
-jerma
@@EnRandomSten "based on deception"
-sun tzu
"A deceptive Quote - I like it!" - Carl v. Klausewitz
"The Art of War" or "how to get basic strategy and tactics ideas in the head of stupid, pretentious, noblemen who got into their position of power through inheritance by dressing it up as philosophy"
with great wisdoms like
"dont overextend your supply lines, it will drain your nation and its citizens"
"forage for food too"
"it takes some time to build all the stuff you need to wage war"
"dont rush B like in CS:GO"
To be fair Art of War is a victim of its own success
through inheritance? try through sale of office.
All wisdom are based on platitudes.
At least he does not encourage you to congregate your forces in one battle and engage in an war of attrition like Battle of Verdun which is why the Art of War rose to popularity after the tragedy that was the first world war.
Also, the Art of War was written by a new professional class, not for the nobles of whose interest of upholding the aristocratic clan society would go contrary to the shi which Sunzi belonged. The old warfare of China was based on ritual warfare with a strict code of chivalry among nobles to be followed, of which strategy was non-existent. Indeed it was synonymous with deception and trickery, vices that would put your character and thus power in question.
''by dressing it up as philosophy" thats just how they spoke and thought back then. Different time, different culture, different language.
Once you understand some of the concepts, they do seem very "basic" in retrospect, but war is not that intuitive, specially when it stops being just some sporadic skirmishing and goes to nation/kingdom scale.
I agree with most of what you said, but the "countdown to sally battle" approach actually IS logical: what it simulates is the supplies of the city dwindling until the garrison is force into a do or die sally to break the siege. If they are defeated, they surrender because they do not have the supplies to weather the siege anymore
Yes, it can be that or simply the civilian population becoming too willing to surrender depending on the setting; it's not uncommon in history for local governors deciding that they were not going to suffer a siege for longer; this puts the defending army in an untenable position where their only hope to victory is breaking the siege entirely.
In Shogun: Total War, I never do sieges because I don't know how to do an offensive siege and instead wait out the seasons until the castle falls. All of my battles have been outside of castles and that is it. No siege battles, just open field combat.
That is how most sieges in real life tended to go actually. troops just waiting outside of the starving fortress or city waiting for its occupants to give up.
have you done many campaigns or playing on legendary? If you want a quick tip on how to do offensive sieges just try this:
Have the same ammount of dudes or more than the garrison+army that's inside the castle unless you have some overwhelming range advantage (Bow warrior monks), split your units around the castle to surround it and place useless units such as cav close to walls that you don't plan to climb to attract the AI towards over there, and, finaly use your ranged units on gaps that aren't covered by the enemy archers and try to shoot them on their flanks, once the enemy archers are depleted enough use your ashigaru units to burn down the gates and storm the place, the enemy will rush towards your men going though the doors giving you an opportunity to climb the surrounding walls, use the guys that just climbed to flank and you'll win with ok casualties.
Another tip, once the ranged dudes have been dealt with, get your deneral directly close to the walls and use stand and fight, he'll give great buffs to your units and will not be shot since he'll be too close to the walls for the enemies to get a proper angle. Any other questions you have can be answered in the viking general siege videos, RIP that guy's channel, too bad he doesn't post much anymore.
@@Kydino I'm talking about the original Shogun Total War.
@@irredeemablelover7608 When I first played the original, I didn't even know you COULD assault castles. I wondered why there were castle maps in the custom battle lists. Then a friend showed me that I could drag my army onto the enemy castle in my province, and fight a castle assault. If you do this, I recommend lots of archers. Treat it similarly to a bridge battle.
samurai sun tzu made me cry
Same dude. I cringed when I saw that.
I definitely agree with a lot of your points! I *do* like the Three Kingdoms minor settlement battles though (not a walled city) - both sides have a good amount of troops and can adapt to strategy, with clear chokepoints. I do like Three Kingdoms Romance mode, but that's because I like dipping into fantasy (especially Asian fantasy and I'm not sure why).
Regarding the deception. Not being able to tell the exact number of enemy units on the map. Only an estimate (spy networks and generals stats could make the estimates better) and even when a battle starts the units arent all revealed. This would make deception and Napoleons corps tatcics more possible.
Fog of war similar to total war arena would make light skirmishers and light cavalry useful. As well as hills and structures.
Adding small structures to some rural maps would spice it up. I like to think soething like roman farms in north africa being semi fortified, watch towers/light towers. Or stone buildings in empire.
Splitting your army into corps would greatly help with efficient taking over provinces as you mentioned, the province system from shogun 2. Maybe even splitting each unit card card into two for greater micro, or combining for easier use.
13:30 sometimes
While i agree with many of this, removing sieges is a bad idea
if you really want to make it better, make sieging cites like sieging rome in rome 2 in rise of the republic (along with the escalation from attila), where you actually have to work for it and make the possibility of enemy reinforcements much harder if you're going to be sieging the city for multiple turns
What was said in the video about the "passive nature of sieges" is could not be more wrong, and admitting what you feel what ck2 sieges are well depicted is a straight-up heresy. Sieges were actually labour intensive for the besiegers due to the constant fortifying, artillery bombardment, forage, logistical effort, assault attempts etc (tho waiting was also part of the process ofc)
True, sieges were a lot more dynamic than they seem at face value. Both for the besiegers and defenders.
I feel like getting rid of siege battles altogether is a step too far. Also giving the defender advantages on a field battle (especially the flat stat increases) feels a little too inorganic. As a defender in a siege you inherently have better ground. Older total war games put a better emphasis on terrain, so it melds with the mechanics, those walls aren’t just a stat increase or another source of damage your opponents need to look out for.
Personally, I'd make sieges a lot more rare, but also more grand in scale. Like sieges aren't for each and every settlement, they're for the big dog cities that the AI really don't want to lose and that you really want in your hands. I'd also make the sieges take place in stages rather than an all or nothing assault. Escalate a bit with maybe a few skirmishes outaide the walls in order to whittle down the opponent to massive pushes fir sections of a city. Yeah I said sections, it would help with scale and put in that time commitment to sieges. I feel like this way, you can't just speedeun sieges in a single battle, they actually slow you down and it makes circumnavigating a fortified city an option you'd want to take in order deal with other threats first.
Sieges are why I like empire. Empire just turns sieges into field battles.
Mongols would hard disagree with Sun Tzu and they repeatedly proved a point that you can besiege and take cities sometimes in a matter of days rather then months or years.
Yeah, but that's not a product of their acumen for sieges as much as it is their terror tactics.
Many cities folded as quickly as they did because the Mongols just *didn't* hold back with their tactics. Part of why they were so terrifying was because they were willing to do things other parties wouldn't, like flinging foetid, rotting corpses into the city, forcing peasants into the city to overburden it, etc.
Sun Tzu foolishly did not predict 2000 years of evolving tactics and siege engines 😢
Among other things, Sun Tzu didn't have access to gunpowder artillery. The Mongols did.
I like the idea of Siege Battles being entirely optional. You can wait it out and thus be bogged down, attempt to take it quickly and thus while the threat's eliminated you lost parts of your army, or you could just go around but now there's an enemy force behind you. Forcing them at the end just sort of defeats the point of waiting it out
I remember a time I was playing total war Warhammer, despite being out numbered by the enemy, I managed to completely decimate their troops with minimal casualties.... Then their legendary lord single handedly wiped out my entire army. It was a frustrating experience.
Accurate to Warhammer in general.
imo just because sieges aren't realistic in TW they shouln't just be removed, if you make a mistake, you don't just forget about it but improve upon it.
Total war is an amazing title overall which offers so much nobody can match.
Besides it's a game we play for fun, it's absurd to remove sieges and the mods offer a lot, you can even make your own maps.
I think a partial fix for sieges would be to divide them into multiple maps. Essentially you need to fight the defender three (or so) times to simulate trying to take control of the city. You start at the walls, then the city streets and then, if the defender still has not given up, you turn to pillage the inner city while the defender tries to stop you. The Idea would be that if the defender wins, the attacker is pushed back to the previous map as well as taking hige penalties to morale.
This would then be the alternative to just waiting the defender out and making sure they dont somehow get supplies while maintaining your own sieges supply lines to avoid attrition.
On that note actually, armies should honestly devestate provinces in terms of supply and larger forces should require some form of logistical backbone to not starve half way there.
I feel like that’s a cool concept, however I really don’t think fixing sieges involves fighting ~3 battles per city.
Could be cool if it could be settled by a cinematic duel.
This would make worse. The map would be too limited, and fighting over and over again would just drag things out
@@heitorpedrodegodoi5646 my thinking was to have three maps for the same city, it could be based on the same map visually so you don't break continuity but you'd only have a set area each time to fight over.
This would allow the devs to at least try to show the real scale of cities and how much of an undertaking it is to try and beseige one.
I fully agree with the problem wrt General-led TWs, I think they also act as part of a cycle in which the garrisons (particularly late-game ones) are balanced around the assumption that you should have a 20-stack army, so the garrisons need to be large enough to provide at least some challenge, so now you're motivated to always be marching with a 20-stack army.
In earlier games, I am frequently sending out smaller armies that are big enough to do the job bc the rest of the army is replenishing/I don't need 20 units to kill a 2 unit army/it would be unwise to leave the city undefended. Smaller armies can even take a city if it has barely anyone defending it, so there's more variety in the scale of battles.
As for your argument to transfer things from cities to provinces, I think that is the intention behind the changes to provinces in Empire onwards, and their eventual expansion into provinces with only a single walled capital & a few smaller unwalled towns. It also has the nice added side effect of reducing the amount of walled siege battles, bc while I don't agree with getting rid of sieges entirely, I don't think they should be every fucking city.
My problem with the province/region system, and maybe yours too based on how you're drawing borders on the map, is how sparse these new regions are. The provinces don't feel as an expansion of cities (except maybe when compared to Empire depicting France as a single province controlled by Paris lol), they feel like an area bundling in a couple cities, but now with none of the smaller towns we used to see dotting the landscape outside of cities. Adding some density within regions would probs help a lot to also just make the maps look like more is existing between the cities other than empty land.
Maybe Thrones of Britannia got closest to the transition of city to province by making the minor settlements have no garrisons, it's genuinely possible to bleed your enemy by raiding/taking the surrounding regions & forcing them to fight you in the field. The smaller scope also meant that the areas between towns don't feel absurdly large to the same extent as they do in other games. It probably helps with the raiding/swift changeover of land that the factions are comparatively homogenous. I don't think that system would work anywhere near as well in Warhammer, where a change in ownership generally also means a completely different race taking over with substantially different building trees.
There is alot of improvement needed to make sieges feel like actual sieges, but removing them would be unhistorical and nonsensesical, removing an essential piece of historical warfare bc "bugs" or bc a renowned general said it was a bad idea even tho the mongols have proved that wrong several times
The problem is most sieges weren't battles, they were sitting around a city for weeks to years thinking of prank-level schemes to make the people on the other side of the wall hate their lives.
Flooding the streets so grain and bones rot, siege artillery didn't break down walls they were meant to hit buildings inside the walls, they cut off food to starve people out, cultivated sickness, robbed each others camps, etc. if sieges were realistic you'd have 1 or 2 siege battles per game, the rest would just be boring waiting games
@@christophernoneya4635well, alternative to waiting for defenders to starve/surrender is to either bribe them off, use Mongol way, aka intimidate the hell out of everyone or go for assault - will assault be more cost-efficient? Hell no. Is it fast? Yes.
So while yeah, storming the heavily defended should be set up in a way that attacker fails 90% of the time, it may be much easier when encountering barely developed place, though in such situation it's more likely to have it flip by intimidating, as it spares time, lives and infrastructure.
Though one idea how to make sieges less boring could be to have skirmishes/defenders trying to sally out, where both defenders and attackers use only a fraction of their available units with specific set of goals, such as destroy siege engines or supply depot instead of regular "break their will to fight and kill when they're routing"
I can see the logic in no siege battles in *some* games, but it was say, a classical era game? That wouldn’t make much sense, when some of the most famous sieges occurred during that era, where they did assault cities and forts with their troops.
I’d rather they not naval battles the sieges (just remove them because they can’t be arsed) and fix them and make them impressive and good
Hey, you should check out the Combat Mission series of hardcore war games. They are pretty much top-of-the line military simulators with shitty graphics but absurdly complex simulations (fully modeled formations down to the single infantryman’s ammunition count or the vehicle’s different optics and subsystems (and their state, as they can be individually degraded and destroyed), from modern Russian BTG’s to Wehrmacht Panzergrenadier battalions) and a hefty price tag. The recommended manuals from the community are literally just IRL field manuals for the chosen armies. The games are sometimes unbalanced as hell, but that is absolutely realistic in those cases (for example, Italians would heavily struggle against Shermans in frontal engagements (they had FT-17 copies deployed in Sicily, for goodness sake) and Syrian armoured corps would get torn to shreds against Abrams and Bradleys, with their superior optics (aka they have actual thermals, while old T-55s and T-72M’s don’t), while the few and elite modern antitank teams such as Kornet and Vampir would be rare and precious hidden aces to keep in reserve against NATO armour.) Basically, it has an absurd amount of detail, an absurd attention to detail, and an absurd disregard to community opinion (except when they “accidentally” predicted the Russo-Ukraine war with their CM:Black Sea game, making them bin any future modules (funnily enough, this is the second game they “predicted” modern conflicts with, CM:Shock Force being the first, depicting a war in Syria) and customer convenience.
There is a reason why I main Kairos Fateweaver. "Hey, look at all of those soldiers packed into a small location, what if I... *INFERNAL GATEWAY*" True apotheosis comes when I can doom stack the birds, or soul grinders
Just found your channel, gonna add you to the list of smart genuine people I'm gonna call when I build my Media Avengers Team among the likes of The Templin Institute and Schnee, the team having the express goal of fixing and perfecting everything bonkers with media these days. You're an inspiration man!
another one of Sun Tzu's legendary quotes is "Prank him Jiao."
The problem you have with the generals boils down to Warhammer being more about heroic characters.
Sieges are definitely worse than others, and you correctly identify a number of ways in which they just don't work as well as they should. Having said that defensive sieges the main thing that keep me playing Total War games, and have been for the past 20 years.
I actually rather like when the fighting devolves into a blobby scrum in chokepoints. I adore slugging it out and grinding down numerically superior armies because my troops are just better than theirs and they can't just outmaneuver me. Amd more than anything, i appreciate the opportunity to park the camera in the thick of the action and enjoy the actual combat playing put instead of having to fly all around the map every 5 seconds and do my best impression of an autoclicker to micro for maximum efficiency.
I hope they get their act together since the total slog that was Pharaoh. I think Creative Assembly needs good competition to evolve Total War beyond its current state. Also, in Three Kingdoms, garrisons degrade over time and need to be replenished after a siege, which wasn't too bad.
Another point related to Three Kingdoms: being able to trade provinces was really, really good. I also feel like diplomacy based around entire entities, for example, always negotiating with the faction leader, is a bit too simplistic. We should be able to negotiate with the cities, the generals, and the important people themselves. Flipping cities/people by giving them better work/living conditions or playing into their vices could spice up the whole gameplay.
I must be in the small minority that has always loved sieges, frankly I wouldn't want to play what you describe.
(For reference to what I would like to contribute I have played Rome, Medieval 2, Empire and Warhammer with Rome and Warhammer 2 being potentially my most played, I wish I could say for certain, but Rome was mainly spent on a cd for my childhood and adolescence).
Rome's sieges worked pretty well with the 80 man infantry units (forgot the unit scale), i do completely agree on the towers and city design though.
Especially in medieval 2 where placing a unit in a way can look possible but the game won't let it happen, don't get me started on Warhammer or Empire's walls, they are not satisfying compared to Rome's.
I feel to some extent though that an olive branch I can offer is to expand on how huge cities should be. Streets widened, have progressive capturing of various maps (ie outskirts, outer layer, several districts and the central area). Bring back the raging inferno's that incendiary ammunition for catapults from Rome and watch as the fires spread consuming units in the inferno.
For tighter streets have the ability to split unit formations. Similar to Empire Total War where the dragoons could mount and dismount.
I also have enjoyed warhammer 2's sieges but will concede that as a defender they are frustrating with the emphasis on the central square especially with the rest of the city behind the units, granted of course that the proposed system would just be massive tedium in warhammer with the single entities being more dangerous (and magic especially) with streets rather than open fields.
I think making cities into grand fortresses that are rarer than minor settlements or provinces might help to balance this out, similar to empire where assaulting cities without forts led to a field battle with maybe a handful of buildings to occupy.
I'll always love watching the wall fall to sappers, the sight of soldiers falling from high, watching the action close as occasionally a grunt survives fighting enemies 3 on 1 for the reinforcements to climb the ladders and relieve him, playing the English and feeling sorry for the mongolian horses in castle sieges, hoping that my ragtag force pulls a miracle victory.
I will agree completely that auto garrisons and making generals super units (and mandatory) doesn't gell well, especially in the miracle victory department.
Lastly love your videos and I appreciate the chance to digest an opposing viewpoint, thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts and have a lovely day!
okay so, some points about sieges:
1. older towns really weren't that big, a large city in the early modern periode had a population of 50-100k people and they were very dense a small fortified town could almost consist more of walls than town and the length of a largetown/city is a couple of kilometers most of the time.
2. you are not suppose to have fun being the attacker? the fun is in being a defender, for that alone they should stay. its bizarre to me to argue against sieges because they are hard for the attacker, they are suppose to be, the most fun battles in total war is defensive sieges esp in Attila and shogun 2. yes they are a mess in warhammer but frankly so are all battles.
1. Exactly - I live in a city where up to 1870, you literally could walk from one side of city wall to another in about 10 minutes.
And while sure, a lot of medieval/early modern cities had a lot of stuff outside the city walls, in the event of siege, those buildings were torn down or put to fire beforehand, in order to deny attacker any kind of cover, so while on map you could see it as having buildings within and outside city walls, siege maps will likely have a quite a wide belt of preprepared open field
Respectfully I disagree I personally love Medieval 2 and Shogun 2’s siege battles Especially Fall of the Samurais siege battles. Medieval and shogun have gate opening options. Medieval has nice castles to account for how they can account for towns to help with scale. Shogun 2 is the same Shogun 2 is my favorite especially Fots since Fall of the samurai gives tons of options. Kisho ninja can be effective and fun artillery is great naval bombardment yari kachi or shogutai rush, sharp shooter pick off. The war hammer games though are the worst because they lack variety flexibility in how you siege imo.
This video starts well, but then it just turns personal anti-siege hate speech. I agree that game would be better if not focusing to build stack of dooms, and then play cat&mouse with enemy's stack of doom. I also would prefer to have better economy in game. And more depth in role playing.
Deleting sieges is not something what I see as improvement of the game. But CA should get some kind of focus, what they think they want to see as city battles (or even idea, that there is variety what they could be). For example one type of "siege battle" could be, when defending side lost already their defence tower, tops of their walls cannot carry any more archers (or number of archers are already very thin), so sieging side decide to start main attack (against gates), and battle will happen mainly near gates and inside of the city. Other kind of could be siege weapon battle, where sieging side tries to disable defender's ranged ability, and defender tries to make pretty similar, and damage siege weapons. Third type could be infiltration attack in night time. Or how about battle what happens in night time, attacker managed get gates open and in deployment face attacker can start with armies next to gate(s) and gates are open (and cannot be closed any more) while defender is not prepared for attack at all, but units are in different parts of city..
What Sun Tzu meant, is that walls give so much protection for defending side, that it is not good option to attack against enemy who has walls. Seek better options, if possible. If you just wait enemy to starve, that is possible only if you have so much wealth, that you can upkeep months or years that army (get them food, salary, and suffer from them not having part of your economy). But that may not be always possibility. Then you need seek other ways of to undo enemy's advantage against you.
What I think is, that garrison troops should not be in Total Warhammer 3 "free units", nor units to be only for garrison porpoise. Giving possibilities to increase and decrease size of garrison based on what you think what is needed in this or that place, but also give opportunity to move elite troops in important defence point while your army is away. And also, I wish there would be less information about things, and more need for scouting (and have scouts and spies). I mean for example "there is rumours that region x has quite large army, but we do not know exactly where, how large or even who's army (but we know if it is friendly or not for local region). More knowledge, and you may hear more accurately what direction that army should be, and maybe more information about it. "There is lot of berserker units". Or so. Better fog of war could make more possible to play with weaker faction who focus on hit-and-run type of warfare. ...but that all would actually make game very different.
Legend of the Five Rings has the best combat system I've experienced in TTRPGs. It's all about stances and stress and lots of samurai flavour, it has entire dedicated duel system that's short enough that it can be VERY tense for your players, and avoids the pitfalls you mentioned.
But if one's table is married to D&D, as many tables are, the best option is 4e, fight me. Now your positioning matters enough the amount of time dedicated to it is proportional, spell slots are gone (but still no mana system), garunteed damage is mostly gone, and martials can actually do cool stuff. Unfortunately it was also balanced the worst out of any edition, so it's errata to fix that is like 170 full pages and you should ignore any published monster from before the 3rd manual (or just use the 'essentials' monster vault, but don't use the essentials for anything else). 4e was a victim of a lot of things but what it definitely didn't deserve is its current reputation. One day I'm going to lose my mind and compile a single tome for modern play of 4e after gathering it's scattered and corrected remnants from across the web so people can more easily play the best version of it for themselves.
Anyway taking sieges out of Total War is fine and all but there's nothing quite like mounting a defence on the walls, gradually falling back, and beating or at least significantly bloodying a much much stronger force. Defensive sieges are the sources of some of my best stories from playing these games, and I'd like to preserve those somehow. But for that to be the case you'd need to remove the auto-garrisons and replenishment because otherwise why would I be attached to my guys? They're ephemeral and losses don't matter. Knowing it's the veterans from the campaign that got us here and that they're the battered and broken remnants from the offensive means I'm way more liable to be attached to them - and not just because of their unit experience.
Please, I beg of you, when you make that inform people. I've been wanting that for a long time.
Haven't played DnD but I have read every rule book for 3.5e, 4e and 5e as well as a lot of homebrew. When I read 4e it seemed to me to be the best out of the 3 so I couldn't understand my everyone hated it.
I usually like sieges so i think that they should get reworked but not removed
The best sieges I ever had was in DAC total war
and all they did is just added balista projectiles to towers which completely changed the way sieges work.
The projectile can even sometimes destroy ladder! The walls went from garbage to extremely important layer of defense.
It isn't perfect but I worked on settlement modding and I think there's great ways to fix and rework sieges in rome 1 and med 2 into perfection!
Heck, I know modder who added working draw bridges into medieval total war 2 ! How cool is that?!
In DAC mod I ethier carefully get army out of settlement to fight them on open field or if i have to siege it I send weak units first because I do not want to lose elite ones to defenses. And when theyre weakened then I send elite units. The catapults went from unessecary unit that slows down army to extremely important siege equipment as that can take down towers and other defenses that would kill many of my men.
And sometimes I just have to really starve them out if they have a big stack of elite units in settlement. A feature I did not had to ever use beforehand.
Lastly.
Here's my fun defense experience. Attacker had bit more units than me and they were elite. Meanwhile I had just peasant tier archers and soldiers with only handful elite units.
I felt comfortable as they'll die under my wall but then i noticed 2 capault units so i sent small force to take care of them and break them.. It did not succeed and then they tore down my walls and defenses. I had to manouver my archers to avoid loses and soon after the walls were torn down I sent my archers back up and had to face massive assault of elite units into settlement. I managed to hold out as I had only like 1 tower working with archer support.. but damn that was quite hard siege defense and most fun one I ever had.
Your video changed my perspective on game design aspects for stragety games (Total war) Your video reminded me a problem one time i had one time. I made up a game to play with my friends and I had to decide what they would be able to do (Based off of hoi4). (It was the city situation where cities were considered cities not provinces tldr it bogged down the game) REAL TLDR I ENJOYED YOUR VIDEO.
im glad to hear it :>
I feel like sort of system with a hierarchy of cities would suit total war. Where you only need to take over a province or country capital to take over the entire region (either directly or through unrest). Kind of like empire total war.
I’d say keep the sieges for those idiots who can’t help but do them (and or the geniuses who can pull them off)
As you said “the rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can be at all avoided”
“At all avoided”
Meaning There are some rare instances where sieging a walled city might not be avoidable.
So keep the siege battles but have tactical options to avoid them, or undermine them.
But change them a bit. Like maybe multiple separate engagements across multiple in-town maps? Maybe a choice of which side of the town you want to attack from, and the actual map would be half outside the walls, half inside, and not even encompassing a 10th of the town.
Multiple battles to capture 1 town or city. Than a choice of to stop and continue the siege and (encamp) from your now position and or continue on to capture the next strategic sector of the town/city, ending at a main defensive government building at a key point in town.
Maybe a system where the defenders can counter attack to try and reclaim those sectors of their town/city.
In most total war games I don’t send everyone to attack the walls. And I don’t often lose even a third of my troops to their defenses.
I hold my main force off, out side of engagement range only sending my best troops to secure the way into the city. Than I use the narrow streets to my advantage as choke points where it only takes a squad or two to hold the enemy back and use my archers to whittle down their back lines, advancing when possible and safe to do so. Then I in circle their capture point with a shield wall and my archers annihilate them all!
The core of my tactics revolve around my archers/basic ranged units, my hand to hand units are mainly used to protect my archers.
But that’s not my only strategy. I have up to 38 contingencies.
Total War battles operate on pitched battle logic, which decently approximates field battles, but is inadequate for sieges.
Simple dynamic siege attrition system, based on attacker and defender stances, larger garissons consuming more suplies etc. would solve the problem of sieges being boring sitting game.
Alternatively sieges could be redesigned as series of attrition battles.
Now try Von Clausewitz: on war
due to the last section i'm now interested on what your ideal rpg tabletop combat would look like
everyone loads up mordhau and fights each other in a private server whenever combat comes up
to be honest I do prefer the current way armies and generals revolve around each other, makes for more unique fighting forces and general's bonuses more consistent and clear, but not the way one can't exist without the other
I remember playing a mobile version of a turn based shogun, it was alright but the game had exactly what you're asking for, no sieges. Well okay there were some but so few that I can only remember one big siege battle which surprise surprise I lost.
Siege attrition actually exists in all Total War games (from what I remember... it's possible Empire doesn't have it). In Shogun 1 and Medieval 1, it tells you exactly how many of the defenders have died due to attrition during a turn. Attrition is mostly negligible in Rome 1 and Medieval 2, which is why it's hard to notice it exists at all. But it can be useful in weakening the garrison's strongest units before an assault. Rome 2 and Attila for some reason made it so defender attrition doesn't kick in until after a few turns. Which would be fine.. if they didn't make the nonsensical decision to make besiegers instantly suffer attrition after laying siege.
Siege battles should be 1:1 scale of the cities, and should take many many battles of Brutal Urban Warfare.
This way, people will all go outside due to the sheer suffering they will experience.
I'm changing my mind this should have been my take
@@cassius_scrungoman You weren't joking when you said youtubers actually check comments
@@aldgate correct
improvement idea to the general/army first mechanic; vexillations. small detachments broken off from the main army for garrisoning, scouting, raiding , ambushing etc. The penalty cost for too many armies is just stupid.
As to sieges; the is a expansion to Mount and Blade set in viking times that has something like this, that game also has lots of sieges. There are a multitude of choices you make as the besieger to whittle down the fort, and regular sallies. To gamify this there should be a number of different mission types you can engage in as the besieger or besieged, with various in-game factors opening more options for you; you can find numerous examples of different ways that siege warfare evolved over time.
Generals were by đemselves,never attached to any troops and they were also made to lead armies.No army existed wiþout general.
It would be self-defeating to program generals like an average unit.Who would lead the army? Would it be as strong as generaless?
Also,it wouldn't make sense eiþer to implement đe "province" system (it's a settlement by itself) šogun (pronounced sh) 2 had,nor other games like it.Instead,I would like more like how đey did it in pharao:every settlement in a province would have outposts.þe former is ahistorical needle-searching inside a haystack.
Þe latter is far more practical and historical.
Finally,victory conditions are đe *end* of the campaign.What will you do after the ampaigns' end?Total war serie doesn't have the claims mechanic historical paradox games have
(Since it sē[ee]ms twitter is influenciŋ youtube)Sieges are meant to be hard and čalleŋiŋ(ng) to boþ đe player and þe ai.
þe crowding makes sense.Whilst fightiŋ,soldiers sēk hysterophimy(post-deaþ perception of individuals) and prestige amoŋst đemselves,đeir superiors and đeir oþer close circles,searčiŋ for meaniŋ even in sabbiŋ and fire,demolition
"When in doubt-question. Use more Doom Rocket, yes-yes!" - Ikit Tzu, Art of Warcrime.
Cassius reviews Von Clausewitz's On War and TRADOC Pamphlet 600-4 next.
I don't mind single entity units in the total warhammer games since that reflexs the table top and there big super people, and I don't mind sieges that much, but I do agree they are too common and the garrisons are either to small win or could easily autoresolve wins.
I believe sieges (for TWH at least) should be reduced how frequent they occur, but make them more involved, by introducing actions and make anythings currently automatic actually needing manpower to do, like encirclement requires certain amount of people to do so depending an the type of settlement and location, for example Altdorf, the capital of the Empire and a port town, would be very difficult to encircle, requiring a large army with units good at enticements, skirmisher or cavalry, and siege attrition also doesn't happen automatically etc. additionally each side can try and direct their efforts on gather supplies, siege preparations, which either mean constructing extra defenses and barricades, or for attackers making siege specific units, like ladder carriers, field improvised siege weapons etc instead of just rams and siege towers etc etc. also attackers can fortify their siege camp for extra defenses in an counter attack.
Additionally, when an attacker declares an attack on an settlement they must pick an goal, raid, conquer, or raze, (and a potential 4th option for some factions), this effects what kind of battle is fought.
Many of the settlement fights, siege counterattacks, and certain camping stand fights, are done on entrenched maps. Those maps are somewhat modular to swap out different defense elements based on how fortified the defender is, and based on faction, khorne armies will have very different defenses to dwarfs, even if for some it is a aesthetic difference
-Follow up Video about: "Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings"?-
I know Offensive siege battles are a pain, but I wouldn’t want siege battles to be removed, I’ve always found defensive Siege battles to be the best part of total war games…
Comment for the Psy-op!
Of all the TW's I played, Shogun 2 does "siege battles" the best by far imo; the larger maps (which are sadly quite uncommon to get to play on in the campaingn) with the multi-layered defenses are actually retty nice and give the player a lot of room to move around; is archer range had stil depended on altitude like in RTW/M2 Those sieges would have been awesome; (also, being able to deploy your men outside the walls is a pretty big deal) the biggest problems are the AI just not being very good at defending, and, as you said, being almost forced to g into a siege in order to take any settlement.
In battle the games should be doing more with deployable defenses (stakes, bamboo walls, earthworks etc.) and include natural cover (small walls that act as low cover; like the ones we see in RotS early game castles) that doesn't restrict movment. ETW had all of this stuff years ago, it just never managed to make good use of it.
On the campaign map, we really need to look at ways to make sieges optional; attackers should be going after the infrastructure outside of the capital instead of alays bee-lining to the settlement capial in order to take over a province; as an example:
Take ETW-Shogun 2 style regions where every province has multiple points of inteest: 1xcapital/fort and 3x small town and/resource node/farm (ETW style)
If you attack the capital, you get a siege, defenders have a garrisson and can surrender (all of this was already available in ETW)
If you attack any of the other points of interest, instead of just "damaging" the building (causing a tiny public order penalty in the capital) you can genuinely capture these points; the more of these minor points are captured the bigger the problems in the capital become: let's say for simplicity's sake, let's say the capital can last 6 turns in a siege, every of the 3 minor settlement I take from the enemy will shave 2 turns off that time; (what this represents is the civilian population not having the will to resist my army when it already controls the entire province; they want to surrender) the army stationed in the settlement can still choose to fight the attacker, but it would be a field battle.
You can add to this all kinds of negative effects in the capital based on howw much of the province you do not own (essentially representing the loss of control over the land, being cut off from supplies and having a large civilian population who no longer have full access too food and other resources s trade dies down more and more. (this would be things like public order loss(civil discontent), loss of garrison forces (loss of support for the cause), the destruction of buildings (violent rioting) attrition to local occupying armies (rebellion) and could all culminate in the "classic" TW style rebellion where the locals muster an army to fight off their occupiers.
It's all relatively simple changes; all the major aspects were already in ETW (taking over minor towns/resource points, demanding towns to surrender etc. were all already in ETW, they just need to be expanded on to have a proper impact on gameplay) and it would still allow armies to quickly conquer enemy lands by just straight up taking the capital (if you have overwheming force of arms) but it would create more of a feeling of "fighting for control of the land" in regions where both the player and their enemy control an army of somehat similar size (in this case a direct assault on the enemy capital would be too difficult)
No sieges? fuck yea! A game without sieges is a game without me desiring to paint a wall with my brain matter
I think you should be able to fight siege battles and battles with extensive defences but you should rather attack single sections of the cities or field fortifications but in exchange taking a hole city should be much more influencial on negotiarions
Realistically, war used to be mostly sieges. Rarely did a monarch take full control of the equiping of a regiment, let alone a garrison. Realism doesn't make total war more fun, it makes it boring with brief bouts of brutal and imbalanced combat.
Oh boy the fax machine uploaded
Sorry but i heavily disagree.
I love settlement battles in TWW3, even modded them back like they were on release, constant field battles would just be repetetive and boring to me, and even with mod i still have fair and balanced amount of both to not stay bored.
I wish absolutely opposite, make more focus on city battles to have what was teased in R2 and never expanded, more varied environment, more siege options with more noticable effects and racially different(like it was made in AoW4 for example), but lower time to sit out the siege, it being over 3-4 turns is too much.
I feel like shogun 2 is the only game in which siege battles are actually somewhat enjoyable. I still don't like how often I'm forced into them, but it doesn't make me contemplate quitting out of the game to go do something else like it does with every other game.
I agree with the overall points you made, but a few corrections for engagement:
- I believe TWW3 removed supply lines (the % upkeep increase for each general you have) at some point. This makes it more viable to have smaller armies roaming around the place, but doesn't change the overall point.
- Siege attrition is a thing in at least TWW2 and 3, it just takes ages to set in and once it does it halves the health of the defending army each turn, so they typically sally out and die.
The obsession with superpowered lords is at its worst in TWW2/3 with Snikch. In lore, the ratman is the best(?) assassin. In game he leads armies, can't assassinate (his faction has a special assassinate ability, but as far as I remember it doesn't take him out of his army and can target factions on the other side of the world, so it's clearly not him doing it) and is incidentally a great monster-slayer because the stats you need to kill lords are the exact same as the stats needed to kill monsters. Oh, and he actually isn't even very good at killing lords in battle because he can't keep up with most of them and by midgame most of them will be flying. Oh, and of course he can tank cannonballs to the face, because he's a single-entity unit. Instead of re-evaluating the mold to fit the characters they're trying to fit into it, they butcher the character to fit the mold.
I'd be happy to see city sieges die. Have battles centred on crucial production and infrastructure within a province until the city eventually surrenders (or, as others have suggested, have a multi-stage push into the city if you want to do it quickly with an overwhelming force). Building walls could instead be replaced with castles in eras when this would be appropriate - defensible locations within the province where armies could sit in relative safety. This may end up being the same problem with a different name, but ultimately, a castle does nothing for the province (unlike walls, which you must overcome to take a province), the only threat it provides is the armies it houses so you can just ignore it and accept the damage those armies may inflict while you focus on taking the province.
Tww3 maintains some supply lines, but some factions don't have supply lines due to lore reasons (bretonnia has the lords leading privately funded and armed armies being one reason)
Siege attrition in TWW1 was a thing. After a set number of turns (which you can boost by having a higher tier settlement and garrison buildings) they begin taking heavy losses, which remained in TWW2
TWW3 has a different system. The turns where the defending city has supplies to last out the siege or encirclement is lower, and the time for their garrison to die out from the attrition is longer, but it takes away a small portion every turn (I think like 6.25% at base)
And with the point of overpowered lords, that's a thing that started in thw Warhammer games, and has contextual reasons behind it, that being it's presence as a fantasy game where great people can turn the tide of a battle singlehandedly. And regarding Snikch, he is removed entirely from the campaign map for a number of turns when you send him on a mission, and if he's heading an army you'll need to have another leader take his place.
You can have other lesser assassins, or even master assassins, do these jobs, but only Snikch can do the big ones like plunging an entire faction into anarchy.
And even then, on the tabletop (which the game takes from) Snikch was available as an army leader.
If Snikch shouldn't be leading an army because he's an assassin, then Karl Franz shouldn't be leading an army because he's a statesman who's busy running the empire, or that Oxyotl shouldn't be leading an army because he does the bidding of the old ones to eliminate key chaos targets. All of them would take to the field of battle personally to take down their target when they're at their most vulnerable, and we know Snikch isn't doing it of his own volition. He's leading the armies he does by order of the nightlord of clan Eshin
@@sev1120 I stand corrected about Snikch's assassinations, though I still find it silly that his only method of assassination is through special faction actions. I stand by the point that he and by extension Oxyotl shouldn't be leading armies (probably a few others too), they should be legendary heroes instead of lords. I don't know enough about the lore of Karl Franz to comment on him specifically.
Overall this kind of highlights the shortcomings of the lord/hero archetypes, there are plenty of characters who are primarily X but would lead an army in a pinch and that niche is simply unavailable in the games as they currently exist.
Even on tabletop, the distinction between lords and heroes was a lot looser and heroes could lead armies in lower-point games (barring certain faction restrictions).
It feeds into a wider point about how some factions just aren't suited to be Total War factions (lead armies, paint the map, etc.) and to CA's credit they somewhat solved that with the Wood Elves.
Regarding the overpowered lords and the trappings of fantasy: there are a lot of small decisions in the TWW games specifically that feel like they're primarily meant as quality of life but have drastically swung the balance and flow of battles. I'm talking things like unit mass being a constant balance mess, all ranks of ranged units firing at once, everything having a smidge of AP damage, everything about AoE spells, the accuracy of ranged units, etc. In totality, this has led to characters blowing way past 'turning the tide of battles' and into the realms of tedious slog of a damage sponge - all this while still riding a bizarre knife-edge where a bad volley from some ranged infantry could ruin their day. Characters are simply the most emblematic of the bad core decisions that have led to such stat bloat.
There should be some middle-ground between "this man is a regular man in a fancy hat" and "this man can fight elite infantry all day (but be careful of those peasant archers)", but it just doesn't really exist in TWW. The baseline stat requirements for a character to be functional also render them a superhero because the balance is so wonky. Most noticeable when trying to run down a fleeing character.
I'm hyperbolising somewhat. I had fun with the games, but their flaws make them exhausting and frustrating after a while. And man, TWW3 is not 100GB+ of enjoyable. Those load times too, yeesh.
Did you play the original Shogun/Medieval? Pretty important question.
interesting take
Oh, look! Another obscure, gay YT critic and analyst of niche subjects that I think about once a year.
(I will subscribe to their channel and forget that they exist in about a month.)
Unpopular opinion but.. I think this are the best sieges we ever had in tw, and ppl are just bad at the game
thats why Shogun is still my favorite game. Mediavel 2 is nice but a little too aged. Empire would've been my absolute favorite but its sooooo buggy its not even funny.
i know im getting scammed, yet i will still comment
5:21 Wrong. The besieged do lose troops over time. In Medieval 2 Total War at least.
8:00 Remove sieges is not historical. Most medieval battle were sieges.
using mods sieges are far better for me, and sometimes i actually enjoy them quite a bit, cant say the same for anything past shogun 2 though
Please don't read my comment on your previous video, I'm beating a dead horse there >.
Im triggered by your portrayal of Sun Tzu as a samurai. Hes chinese. Not all asian warriors are samurai.
Otherrwise, i agree with a lot of your points. The siege battles are stupid and sieging should bw reworked from the ground up.
I understand where your arguments are coming from, but your solution for sieges is beyond mad. Sieges being poorly implemented is not at all a reasonable justification for their removal, that's how we ended with the new general system. I agree siedging need to become more dynamic and interactive, maybe making it so sieged troops degrade as time goes on, being able to mess with a settlement's food reserve with agents, the capture of secondary provincial settlements like ports or farms and whatnots contrivuting to something, or even the ratio of your cavalry and light infantry units in comparison to the besieged ones altering siege time by simulating the ability of the besieged force to sally forth in skrimishes in search of supply and the such, many things can be done other than just removing things.
You got some basic facts about Warhammer incorrect.
For example, suggesting that the splash attacks from generals make them OP and able to stunlock enemy soldiers. Splash attacks have a max target number which means most of the units being visually hit when a general swings their weapon aren't actually taking any damage. Splash attacks also have a max target size meaning if you're hitting large targets or single entities, you're not damaging any infantry you also happen to visually hit with that attack.
I had typed out a whole list as I watched the video before I got to the end, but hearing that you hate the series I don't really see the point in posting it.
It's unfortunate that you have your mind made up on this, given a few of your other videos I've seen (for example talking about why guns should be in fantasy) I think you'd really enjoy the Warhammer Fantasy setting.
Thats not your copy its art of war plus multiple other Chinese stuff
i haven't touched any total war game past three kingdoms and hearing what you had to say about WH3 really solidified my beliefs that anything past 3k is just dogwater 😭
ah well. time to dust off ol' shogun 2 again
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Also small settlements should not be able to house and feed full stacks. Feeding such an army should be a logistical concern. Which I’ve never felt.
I am glad I am not the only person who HATES sieges in Total War.
Engaged comment