Take crush damage from siege towers

[alre]

This may be late to discuss in time for A25, but I think it's the case. From the point of view of game experience, it's weird that STs have crush damage, while fortress and stone towers don't have it, and bolt shooters don't have it either. For the way a ST looks, and the way is darts look, it's odd that it has crush damage. Also, from the look of it, a siege tower may host a little bolt shooter, maybe, but not a whole catapult.

From an historic point of view, STs built by most civilizations in the game generally only hosted light infantry hand shooting at the besieged, and if other siege engines where present, they would have been used on the garrison anyway. AFAIK the only siege towers we know to have been used to breach walls were those that included a battering ram.

From a balancing point of view, crush damage makes ST pretty strong, not much against buildings (also against buildings of course, but that's not the relevant bit), but against enemy rams, which should intuitively make splinters of siege towers (at least by my intuition). Rams are a clear candidate for countering STs, but they can't sustain STs crush damage in practice. Especially if elephants are nerfed, STs should still have viable counters, because they don't have many. In practice, if crush damage was removed from STs, it would make it necessary to play ST together with rams, which would make the strategy more expensive and micro-requiring. Other strategies that employ STs as mobile fortifications would not be changed, as pierce damage it what counts against people.

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

I think a great way to nerf siege towers would be to make their arrow output equal to a fully garrisoned tower. Unless I am forgetting, siege towers have 10 arrows when fully garrisoned. 6 arrows instead of 10 would be nice. Also, improved pathfinding may make it easier for melee units to properly damage the siege towers as they retreat, which, in a24 is usually when melee units get stuck around each other w/rotation.

[Lion.Kanzen]

it should have 2 types of attack. (when implemented). Arrow and catapult / ramming.

[alre]

15 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

I think a great way to nerf siege towers would be to make their arrow output equal to a fully garrisoned tower. Unless I am forgetting, siege towers have 10 arrows when fully garrisoned. 6 arrows instead of 10 would be nice. Also, improved pathfinding may make it easier for melee units to properly damage the siege towers as they retreat, which, in a24 is usually when melee units get stuck around each other w/rotation.

I like the idea, and maybe have 5 siluette turrets? One can only dream...

3 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

it should have 2 types of attack. (when implemented). Arrow and catapult / ramming.

What do you mean? catapult and ramming are two very different things.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

Generally speaking siege towers such as the one used at Rhodes were more designed to house catapults and ballistas, which makes the concept of them launching arrows at all somewhat odd.

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

Well I don't know if we want to have bolt shooters be that mobile.

[Player of 0AD]

I don't see any reason to change siege towers. They are not too OP, there are many matches where I massed and teched them up, but I lost them nevertheless - because of cavalry, rams, elephants or even melee infantry.

Currently they are a important counters to archers and especially elephant archers - when I looked into the current development version, elephant archers had like no nerf? Can that be?

[Yekaterina]

49 minutes ago, Player of 0AD said:

I don't see any reason to change siege towers. They are not too OP, there are many matches where I massed and teched them up, but I lost them nevertheless - because of cavalry, rams, elephants or even melee infantry.

Currently they are a important counters to archers and especially elephant archers - when I looked into the current development version, elephant archers had like no nerf? Can that be?

I have never used myself, and rarely encountered any elephant archers at all, so I am not sure about changing them. 

 

There are two ways to deal with siege tower roles:

1. Make them a proper siege weapon, in which case give them all crush damage and a damage penalty against units, e.g <Multiplier>0.5</Multiplier>

2. Intend to use them as anti-archer units and give them all pierce, no crush. In this case they would do little damage against buildings and hurt ranged infantry a lot. 

 

I like the current arrow output, and I wouldn't mind if you increase the max capacity to 20. 

[alre]

9 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

Generally speaking siege towers such as the one used at Rhodes were more designed to house catapults and ballistas, which makes the concept of them launching arrows at all somewhat odd.

STs in game don't look such as the one used at Rhodes, they look like ordinary, much more modest STs that throw arrows, or darts at best. Their projectiles have that appearance too.

1 hour ago, Player of 0AD said:

I don't see any reason to change siege towers. They are not too OP, there are many matches where I massed and teched them up, but I lost them nevertheless - because of cavalry, rams, elephants or even melee infantry.

Currently they are a important counters to archers and especially elephant archers - when I looked into the current development version, elephant archers had like no nerf? Can that be?

Elephant archers are too good for their cost. It's been proposed to raise their population to two. I agree.

9 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

I have never used myself, and rarely encountered any elephant archers at all, so I am not sure about changing them. 

 

There are two ways to deal with siege tower roles:

1. Make them a proper siege weapon, in which case give them all crush damage and a damage penalty against units, e.g <Multiplier>0.5</Multiplier>

2. Intend to use them as anti-archer units and give them all pierce, no crush. In this case they would do little damage against buildings and hurt ranged infantry a lot. 

I agree with you here, but It think that, as siege weapons, they look weird. It strikes me as very strange that a ST can destroy a fortress, while a fortress can't hope to do any damage to STs. What I'm suggesting is to make a quick rebalancing of STs to define better their role while not changing it too much. Siege in general could be changed again in the future.

For instance, if garrison is displayed one day on top of fortresses and fortifications, the ST could be given a much more realistic role of shooting at them (not the building).

[Yekaterina]

1 minute ago, alre said:

For instance, if garrison is displayed one day on top of fortresses and fortifications, the ST could be given a much more realistic role of shooting at them (not the building).

An interesting proposal! I will look into the programming side of that. So you still want pierce damage then? Perhaps it should be given a capture attack.

[alre]

this thread is about a quick balancing issue. displaying the garrison on top of fortresses, like they are on walls, is something I would like a lot, but I don't dare to ask because it's also a lot of work. If you want to try that, I can only say thank you.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

2 hours ago, alre said:

STs in game don't look such as the one used at Rhodes, they look like ordinary, much more modest STs that throw arrows, or darts at best. Their projectiles have that appearance too.

And yet the name given to a siege tower is 'helepolis.'  Clearly the artistic direction needs to be changed for them to better reflect its historical usage.

10 hours ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

Well I don't know if we want to have bolt shooters be that mobile.

That's what the Rhodians said.

[alre]

mmmh true but helepolis was a general term, the one at Rhodes is just the antonomasia. Also STs are accessible to various other civs, so the discussions here are about the general unit. Also the naming in old languages is not really thrustworthy, the game is being made in english, and the original language names are given afterwards: you can see a clear example of this with greek barracks, called "strategeion", not to say about civs for which we don't really even know the original language.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

4 hours ago, alre said:

mmmh true but helepolis was a general term, the one at Rhodes is just the antonomasia. Also STs are accessible to various other civs, so the discussions here are about the general unit.

I'd recommend citing a source for that.  Helepolis is literally what Demetrius called it, and this kind of design was not just for a single siege.  Two ancient sources refer to  contraptions of this sort being specifically ones designed to mount artillery and ram down structures.  Since the siege tower to my knowledge is only used by successor state kingdoms in game, I would say that that this version would work well enough generally.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Vitr.%2010.15&lang=original

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/20C*.html#48

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

@Thorfinn the Shallow Minded

So what would the gameplay role of siege towers be?

would they kill infantry from 90 m, with bolt shooters?

would they be stronger than rams in health, or in melee damage vs buildings?

would they be able to destroy buildings from a distance?

would they still need to be garrisoned by inf?

From your description of their actual historical characteristics it seems like they would be a merge of all the siege engines available.

[Yekaterina]

If we go completely accurate according to history, then it will upset all of the balancing advisors, so let's find a compromise:

Allow siege weapon to garrison 1 bolt shooter and fire at most 1 bolt.

Remove crush damage from regular arrows, and decrease their accuracy as well as pierce.

 

Or simply don't change anything for now, let people do intensive games on A25 and see what complaints we get about siege towers.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

5 hours ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

So what would the gameplay role of siege towers be?

would they kill infantry from 90 m, with bolt shooters?

would they be stronger than rams in health, or in melee damage vs buildings?

would they be able to destroy buildings from a distance?

would they still need to be garrisoned by inf?

From your description of their actual historical characteristics it seems like they would be a merge of all the siege engines available.

Valid questions.  They would be in my mind be more or less what you said in the last section.  Their function should not be anti-archer as a general rule and their projectiles should be anti-building, with a shorter range but higher attack probably.  More siege could perhaps be garrisoned within them to increase the projectile count.  The ram could then be an optional add on, maybe an upgrade for individual units.  They probably would be quite resilient at the cost of being more expensive to categorise them as the ancient equivalent of a super-weapon.  Of course to unlock their full potential, a player would need to train a few ballistae.

1 hour ago, Yekaterina said:

If we go completely accurate according to history, then it will upset all of the balancing advisors, so let's find a compromise:

Allow siege weapon to garrison 1 bolt shooter and fire at most 1 bolt.

Probably this won't change for alpha 25.  That all said, any changes will have the inevitable effect of disrupting balance.  Merely being conservative to maintain the fragile gamestate stifle innovation.  That all said, I could go with that approach over the current iteration, but it doesn't change the fact that at the moment the game makes siege towers like machine-gun mounted troop carriers.  

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

I totally agree that siege towers (and for that matter archer eles) ought to be more interesting/dynamic units. History is definitely the right thing to use for inspiration in this regard, but we should not be slaves to it. I do quite dislike the way elephant archers are used in a24, as simply meatier archers. I think making siege towers garrisonable with a variety of unit types could be fun/ interesting and owe to their flexibility (I'm no historian but it seems people can't quite agree with what should go in them, so why not any ranged unit?), we would need to be careful with the accuracy while moving (decrease), range and repeat rate values to make sure it stays balanced.

Elephant archers and siege towers remain great topics for discussion during a25.

 

[alre]

kushites have it too. maybe romans too?

Even if you could garrison a bolt shooter in a ST, bolt shooters only have pierce damage.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

17 hours ago, alre said:

Even if you could garrison a bolt shooter in a ST, bolt shooters only have pierce damage.

Well that's odd since they had roles in sieges just as much if not more if I am not mistaken.

[alre]

I know right? It's quite odd how siege machines work in general, there is no consistency. Removing crash damage from ST would smooth that. I don't think this is the best possible solution, but it is a good balance to me, that allows a more realism-based gameplay. It also makes it less problematic to nerf elephants.

The point here is that bolt shooters and ballistas from inside STs, were used during sieges, of course, but against the garrison, not against the walls, because they weren't big enough to actually damage walls from the distance. Their scope was to clear the area around the ram to break trough. For further convenience, rams were in fact included into the towers.

Since this is a game and you don't want a single unit to do a lot of different things (cav doesn't dismount, soldiers don't switch weapons...), it's logic to have one that does the clearance, and one that does the ramming.

references:

- crash damage was removed from bolt shooters with this changeset, I don't know where and how it was discussed

- looking in the internet, it looks like the widespread opinion is that ballistas were too weak to breach walls, although it's not clear how large one should be to have a chance on it

- also looking in the internet, it seems that "helepolis" was given as a name to a tower that had a gangway to the wall (the one at Rhodes) and also to later towers that included a ram instead. The usage could depend on the age and the most general meaning would refer to any siege engine. Ammianus came out as a source in my quick research.

[wraitii]

11 minutes ago, alre said:

- crash damage was removed from bolt shooters with this changeset, I don't know where and how it was discussed

You can see the differential ID in the commit: http://code.wildfiregames.com/D2494. It's quite a long discussion.

Now I'm not sure about siege towers, but bolt shooters are currently supposed to be 'sniper' units, so not walls destroyers (those are the stone throwers), thus no crush damage.

[Freagarach]

On 07/06/2021 at 10:38 AM, alre said:

For instance, if garrison is displayed one day on top of fortresses and fortifications, the ST could be given a much more realistic role of shooting at them (not the building).

(Already possible. To have both melee infantry garrisoned inside the fortress and ranged infantry on top of the fortress, one just needs to change the templates.)

[alre]

Just now, Freagarach said:

(Already possible. To have both melee infantry garrisoned inside the fortress and ranged infantry on top of the fortress, one just needs to change the templates.)

what!? amazing! what do you think about that option?

I guess that would require a lot of work from the art team though.

[Stan`]

Actually no. I implemented that feature for @wowgetoffyourcellphone

All you have to do is define points on the fortress template. No art required.