Fabius

Definitely agree.

A sensible player would work with that and try to channel the opponent into crossfire and other disadvantageous situations. If you want to encourage players to think beyond P3 = Ram= victory then you need to give them more options and better ones. That is reasonable

A fair point, but towers are only ever as useful as whats in front of them. I never build towers in game anymore as they serve no purpose beyond being a vaguely annoying distraction to the opponent and me if they get captured, whats more they cost resources that are better used elsewhere. That being said I would prefer stronger walls over towers at this stage, after all there is a garrison bonus on walls, and I would like to have incentive to investing stone into passive fortifications.

Gaps in walls while problematic aren't a big issue when you can quite literally go through walls with little effort. I am against deleting trees because this can be abused by Rome to delete an opponents forests. Also forests are good impediments to rams and elephants which is why forests in front of walls are good. Yes and that is largely because walls lack meaningful impact to the battlefield.

I would suggest 25% or even 30% as a start, if that is found to be to much we can drop it down. We need better passive and active defenses overall

At this stage we need better defenses not more ways to destroy stuff. Gates will die easily enough to siege, the point is to give the defender more control over his position than he currently has by giving him better tools. The workman is only ever as good as his tools or so they say.

To clarify on the gate weakness I mean that the weakness of gates be further emphasized than they currently are.

So I have been thinking, and I am going to suggest raising the health of stone walls. Right now they are useless except to deter raiding. However I also think gates should be kept at a weak level. This way you leave the obvious weaknesses of walls open while also allowing defending players to better control the flow of an assault on their town. I do not think the stone cost should be altered or the build time.

Ah I see, so essentially a button that merges a couple units into a ram? Or a single unit into a ram? And then a button with that unit to turn it into a better ram?

So basically just a stat upgrade? For rams?

I like wild ideas I do How hard would it be to code, what about art and how practical would it be game play wise?

In fact I would love to see the Onager as part of the main game in some capacity for Rome. alongside Centurions

I know he has code for field catapult construction, I seen it in DE and I would love to see it as a roman legionary bonus.

Alrighty, that makes sense

Nicely laid out I am curious as to why units have such high crush armour, Is it to prevent one shotting by elephants? Catapults? All civs can already build siege workshops, also making it come from barracks but for Macedonia requires a workshop will weaken it for Macedonia as nearly all players will already have a barracks by default, better that everyone can build a workshop second age if they have this mini ram available.

I know about clubmen, however you need a lot of them to be effective, the cost factor alone keeps them as a gimmick unit. A single ram is worth more and costs less.

Adding a phase 2 ram is not changing half the game and I hardly think creating a stripped down ram model is hard. Going with Aiend on that one. Phase 2 has no meaning currently, unless you are going for merc cavalry as carthage. We need more diversification in phase 2 options.

Very interesting, so in terms of practical gameplay how do you envision that playing out?

That is an interesting observation, definitely a different setup, I rather like it, how exactly would it work?

Alright, that is agreeable simpler ram construction entity in P2 and then a more advanced piece of machinary for P3.

A fair point, I would advocate for the tower mechanism, with the added caveat of focusing organic units over buildings

Yes. At this stage our main objective is to convince as many of the development team to agree to our ideas as we can. General rule of thumb should be short and concise ideas with as much logical foundation as possible.

More seriously, there are only three phases not four. So a light ram in second phase would make it far more meaningful than the current "everyone rush phase 3 as fast they jolly well can" I don't see why everyone should not get a tree trunk hauled by a couple guys. It does not take a rocket scientist to tell a couple guys to pick up a random log and start smacking the local neighbor's door with it. The difference would be much lower pierce lower since they are just a couple guys with a log, so shooting them would be just as effective as smacking them with pointy sticks and swords.

Ram army go brrrrrrrrrrrr

Case in point, one glaring weakness of siege towers is a target rich environment.