Info: Sieges and Army setup

[Gurthang]

Hi everybody,

looking for some info from the professionals out there

When it comes to storming a castle, has the Army setup anything to do with the deployment of the besieged army, or is deployment entirely determined by the computer during sieges?

I have lots of wizards and 200+ troopers in my soon-to be stormed castle, and I would like each of them to cast "Marble Warriors" (range 10, area of effect 25) over as many soldiers as possible. How can I ensure that they the wizards will be within range and that they won't cast the same spell over the same soldiers?

Should I assign each wizard to command 25 soldiers, in order to encourage the computer to deploy them in their vicinity?

All help appreciated!!

[Doo]

Set up with the wizards evenly spread throughout the troops.

The AI will cast the spell on whatever troops are within range, so if there are certain troops you want targeted then make sure other troops are not in range.

It can help to set troops on Hold and Attack to give the mages more time to "get it right", but that depends on your overall battle plan.

[bbz]

The troops size matters in that case. the area of effect means that you can cover an area of 25 sqares. each square sonsists of 6 sizes of unit. so that is 1 elephant(size 6) or 2 knights(size 3) or 3 normal soldiers (size 2) or 6 markatas (size 1). so it depends on what units your army consists of. what you can do is have a sqad of 25 sizes of units and one mage to cast the spell but to be on the safe side you could use 20 sizes a mage since I think it depends on the precision of the mage aswell so he might just cast it on half of them or sth(I'm not too sure about that last one) I usually put the mage behind or in the middle of the troops since mages have some strange casting priorities (they will target the troop with the lowest armor for amrmor buffing spells like legions of steel). Also if it is an important battle I suggest you download the debug mode and rebuild your army there and see how the mages are going to cast the spell,try having couple of sqadrons of 25 sizes of units and assing 1 mage to each of those and posision them in a line or sth.

[Fantomen]

Originally Posted by Gurthang

When it comes to storming a castle, has the Army setup anything to do with the deployment of the besieged army, or is deployment entirely determined by the computer during sieges?

To answer this specific question, army setup works as normal during sieges. The difference is the castle walls themselves, which creates a bottleneck. So depending on your type of army the setup during sieges should be focused on either gaining an advantage from it (i.e. a few strong troops blocking for archers and good battlemages) or to overcome it (flying troops, tramplers or lancecharge in front to break through fast etc.)

During sieges you can more safely put mages to the front left and right to cast low range battlemagic, as they will be protected from flankers by the walls.

If you are looking to block the entrance against superior numbers, you want sturdy and slow units for that. Fast and high damage units break out too fast and leaves the door open while getting surrounded themselves. Living statues are perfect. Though masses of mindless chaff works to, like skellyspam. You can also equip thugs especially for this role.

One example from a recent game of mine was being stormed by a very large army as LA agartha. I had no troops in the castle, just lots of ktonian necromancers. So I blocked the entrance with earth elementals and skeletons while most of the mages stood right behind the walls to the sides casting Magma eruption and Blade wind combined with Destruction.

Tactics such as these actually make it very hard to storm forts full of mages with normal armies, as you can usually do something along those lines with any type of mage. A good way to neutralize this advantage is mass flight or sending in a few mages casting some earthquakes, rain of stones or the like before the real storming. And other stuff along those lines.