Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Ashes of Creation Siege Engines and Defenses Part 1: Walls, Ladders, and Tunnels
Goalid
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
I've decided that I'm going to look throughout history at all the different siege engines and fortifications used pre-gunpowder that Intrepid can use as an inspiration for Ashes of Creation's siege warfare. I'll be making a series of posts on this subject in the upcoming weeks. Verra is a fantasy world, so some castle designs and siege equipment will differ from our world. But realism is often more interesting than we give it credit for and gives a sense of immersion into the fantasy world. The purposes of these series of posts will be:
1) To look at how AoC's sieges are designed for enjoyable tactics. This is at the end of the day a game.
2) To add a healthy degree of architectural and military realism. Too much realism would be incredibly boring, real sieges could last for months, Ashes sieges will last 2 hours. But realism provides a connection to our history and immersion that draws a player into the world. That can be invaluable to a player's experience.
3) To talk about two directions Ashes of Creation could take their sieges. One of these directions is to have sieges be won by completing a series of objectives in a linear fashion. An example is New World, you can't break down the walls of the fort and until you have captured all 3 points outside of the walls. And the other direction is by having a single, yet difficult, end objective to win the game. The goal may be to control the throne room in the keep for 2 minutes straight, but to get to the keep you have to get past the outer walls, inner walls, and then take the keep itself. Maybe there are methods to entirely bypass a gate without destroying it if the defenders aren't being attentive, which adds a lot of depth to the strategy, but if the defenders are attentive the attackers are having a tough time taking the node or castle.
For this post, I'll be looking primarily at ladders, sapping, and the walls of nodes and castles. There are important differences that Intrepid must consider between the walls of nodes and castles when it comes to location and size that will drastically change the plan of attack and defense for either. I won't be talking about ramparts, gates, or towers for fortifications, just the walls themselves. I'll be describing ramparts, battlements, crenulations, and machicolations in an upcoming post.
Why are walls built? The answer is rather simple. You want to build a fortification that will keep the attackers on the outside of the wall and allow you to attack them from the other side of the wall with arrows, magical attacks (in Verra), stones, and sallies. Sallies would be a group of raiders leaving the castle walls for a small period of time to harass the attackers, destroy their siege equipment/provisions, and then run back into the castle walls once they are done. Walls also buy you time, so that while the attackers are outside of the wall gaining no progress, the defenders have bought enough time for reinforcements to come and defeat the invading army. When reinforcements were on the way, attackers would become more desperate to breach the walls. If there were no reinforcements on the way, in history you could just starve out the besieged by means of circumvallation.(1)
I think this gives a good idea for a cinematic ending to all defensively won sieges. In many games, the attackers have invaded the enemy keep and are on the verge of taking it, only for a timer to run out and "DEFEAT" to appear on your screen. But... why are they defeated? It just seemed like they were minutes away from victory! Rather, maybe we can get some cinematic of an NPC army coming to the defense of the besieged and driving away the invaders. That would be far more immersive than the industry standard.
Throughout history, the besieged and besiegers engaged in a technological race to outwit each other. Defenders would be attempting to build walls that were nigh impenetrable, while attackers would prefer to just break through any part of the wall and not be forced through the chokepoint of the main gate. This was the history of the development of siege engines.
Walls have varied throughout history, from the early mudbrick and sandstone walls of Ancient Egypt(2) and proto cities to the thick stone castle walls we are familiar with, which seemed impenetrable until the invention of gunpowder. Often the base of a wall is much stronger than the top of a wall, which makes common sense. The mudbrick and sandstone walls of Ancient Egypt were so weak, that the Egyptians depict their battering rams during the Old and Middle Empire as being a thin pole with a metal tip. The tip would break the top part of a wall's parapets (a small wall on top a rampart to protect the defenders from incoming arrows and rocks) to expose the defenders to oncoming arrow fire, and allow the attackers to claim the wall with ladders.
The first siege weapon was probably the simple ladder. Pretty simple, the defenders built a high wall, so you just climb over it to hop onto and over the walls and attack them. Of course, that is if the defenders would let you. Defenders would be showering the invaders with arrows in order to prevent them from climbing the walls. In turn, the assailants would be attempting to provide cover for those going up a ladder with their own hail of arrows, as climbers held shields to withstand incoming fire. The Assyrians were extremely skilled in this regard, being depicted in their reliefs as climbing ladders without using their hands, instead holding a shield to block arrows. the ladder should not be so high in comparison to the wall that it would be above it. For if it was, the ladder could easily be pushed away by the defenders. In the Hundred Years War, during the battle of Pontorson, it is written that a nun pushed a ladder off the castle walls.(3)
In Medieval times, instead of pouring boiling oil on invaders, which has often been popularly depicted, defenders would more regularly pour boiling water, heated up sand, and quicklime. Oil was far rarer than water, sand, and quicklime, hence it wasn't used to burn the attackers except in rare cases. Quicklime is highly alkaline, so you can imagine the pain it would cause to the assailants. Quicklime was also a main ingredient for mortar, so it was typically in great supply. I hope quicklime and slaked lime (quicklime plus water) are added as materials to the game. Quicklime has great importance in being used to create slaked lime for whitewashing, which can prevent erosion for walls. That is typically why castles throughout history were white, because they were whitewashed. Sand would have been heated up in a shield or some holder, and then poured on the invaders. It would get into their armor and burn them from the inside.
Moats would also be built in front of walls, furthering the elevation difference between attackers and defenders. Moats did not have to be filled with water, although water-filled moats did help to make the creation of embankments more difficult, and to prevent sappers from compromising the foundation of a wall. This was their main purpose, along with preventing battering rams and siege towers (which often housed battering rams) from being pushed up to the walls of a city/castle.
Early throwing machines, aka catapults (onagers, ballistae, espringals, mangonels; all of which will be described and have pictures provided in a future post) typically were not a threat to actually take down entire walls. Rather, they would be used to provide suppressing fire against defenders on the battlements / ramparts. They may even destroy the parapets and merlons on top of the battlements, exposing those defenders to arrow fire.
However, upon the invention of the counter-weight trebuchet, the walls of a city had to be strengthened, as the trebuchet could easily penetrate walls. The trebuchet could deliver far heavier packages than the past catapults of age could, and therefore defenders had to evolve with the trebuchet.
Walls were also vulnerable to sappers. Sappers would tunnel underneath a city wall, removing the earth and putting wooden props underneath so that the wall would not fall on top of the sapper.
The sapper would then work there for some time, until they were ready to set all of the wooden stakes on fire, and exit the tunnel safely. They would do this by filling the area underneath a wall or tower with brushwood. The fire would then destroy the stakes, and the castle wall or tower would collapse upon itself. This is one of the most effective methods of destroying castle walls in history, having been used by the Assyrians all the way to the Late Middle Ages.
But there were countermeasures to sapping. First, a water-filled moat could force the sappers to tunnel deep underground, to the point where their efforts yielded no results. It was not necessary however to start a gallery next to a wall, a sapper could begin their tunnel work at their own camp or far away from the walls, and dig all the way until they're underneath the walls, although this would obviously take more time.
A rather clever method the besieged used to discover sappers, was that they would place bells and copper metal on the walls. When these instruments began to vibrate, it let the defenders know that the attackers were attempting to sap the wall. What the defenders would do in response, is they would build a tunnel of their own. They would discover the invader's tunnel and then kill the sappers. They would then fill in the tunnel. This is precisely what happened at the siege of Dura-Europas between the Persians and Romans in AD 265. Archeological excavations revealed the Persian tunnel laid underneath where the tower would have been. There, the archeologists discovered a large number of skeletons, armor, and weapons.(4)
The last important point regarding walls is the location of a city or castle. Castles were created as military camps, where if not taken by invaders, a noble could send out raiding parties (sorties) to harass the invaders. Therefore, the castle had to be taken even if it had a large geographical advantage. The strongest castles were built on hills. This would force the attackers to only approach the castle by the main gate which could be heavily fortified and prevent the placement of siege towers up against the walls. The placement of castles on a hill also created a disadvantage for the invader's siege engines, which now would be launching projectiles uphill.
Cities and trade hubs however did not have the luxury of being built on a hill. Often, they were placed upon major crossroads and rivers. Thus they were more vulnerable to siege towers and other siege engines than castles on a hill. If a city had multiple entrances as well, that meant multiple weak points at their gates. Having a larger section of wall to defend against the invaders was also a disadvantage compared to a castle. To counter siege towers, ditches would be dug in front of the city prior to a siege, forcing the attackers to fill in those ditches before moving forward with siege towers, larger battering rams, and other mobile sheds.
That's enough for the history lesson, how could these tactics be implemented for Ashes of Creation sieges?
I believe sapping is precisely the kind of opportunity Intrepid could use for their planned instanced content in sieges. The attackers sap a chosen section of the wall, and then the defenders discover the sap some time into the siege. An event then pops up on screen, telling the defenders they have x number of minutes to save the wall section from collapsing. But, the tunnels are so small only 10 may enter. This remains true for the attackers who can make it to the tunnel. And now all of a sudden, we have a 10 v 10 cavern battle, the outcome of the match heavily swaying who wins the battle.
A collapsed wall or tower is not a death knell for defenders either, the attackers still have to go through the choke point of that collapsed section where the defenders can stack, and if this is a more advanced node or a castle, it may only be the first outer wall that has been breached. The attackers also have to climb over the rubble they've created. There could be many more inner walls the attackers may have to go through, meaning the winner of this instanced PvP scenario is adding a good chance to their side's victory, but not guaranteeing it.
Intrepid has to make a decision on whether they want walls to be destructible or not. A destructible wall should have a large amount of HP at the bottom, and have less HP on the higher sections. They should not be zergable, having 100 people just going up to a wall and attacking it to me isn't enjoyable. But, the lower walls could be breached with strong battering rams, as well as higher sections of the wall and parapets/merlons with trebuchets / onagers, and battering rams mounted on siege towers.
If walls aren't destructible, then the gameplay will revolve solely around the gates of castles and nodes and hopping over the wall. That can be fine as well, and certainly, the gates should have considerably less HP than the walls, but I believe that only making the gates breakable takes away a lot of the strategy that could go into these 250 v 250 wars.
Walls made out of wood of course would be weak to fire, with lesser quality wood being more flammable. During the Middle Ages and before then, in order to protect their siege engines from fire, attackers would often cover their machines with mortar and animal skins. They would also have water available to put out fires. This can similarly be done for Village nodes with wooden walls, the mayor having to requisition enough quicklime to create the mortar, and hides to protect the node. Maybe wooden walls should be vulnerable to fire magic, but I would hope there's more of a focus on them being vulnerable to potion launchers. Defenders should be allowed to make repairs and clear out fire to prevent continuing damage to the walls.
I believe the mayor should have a lot of freedom with the walls. They should be able to divert node resources to make the walls thicker, raise their height, white-wash them to prevent erosion (lower their needed maintenance), dye them, make them more flame resistant, and should be able to increase the number of ramparts on the walls. They should also have to make the decision of whether they want to upgrade sections of their walls to stone or not, which should be a considerable upgrade. This gives a lot of freedom to a defensive strategy and makes mayors economize, as poorer nodes will have to make decisions on what points they want to shore up the most. Maybe even, inner walls and baileys are created solely by the mayor, and not automatically created by leveling the node up to a town / city / metropolis node.
The problem with moats and ditches in a siege mode, would be that you have to provide a method for attackers to overcome this disadvantage. In history, the attackers would fill up moats and ditches in front of the castle with dirt and branches, so that they could approach the fortification's walls. Then they would proceed to bring battering rams, siege towers, and ladders against the castle walls. I believe I have a solution to how "ditch warfare" could be implemented, but I'll save it for another post.
The location of nodes and cities, and the height of their walls, matter far more in Verra than our world. In Verra, there are gliding mounts. Those gliding mounts could allow the attackers to glide past walls, making them useless. I think this is Intrepid's biggest challenge to overcome if they wish to make sieges like they were in Alpha One, there only being an ultimate objective instead of having to complete tasks before reaching that objective.
I believe ballistae could make a good anti-air weapon that could knock gliders off their mounts, maybe even make it an aerial AoE. But either way, mayors in Verra will want to make their walls nice and tall, and God help you if your node is located at the bottom of a valley.
(Also Intrepid, the A1 castle siege was fun, but that castle would go on the top of the cliff, not at the bottom.)
Ladders could have their materials determined by how sturdy the attackers want the ladder to be, and how long they need the ladder to be. I think ladders should be fairly low on HP, and easily destroyed by a sally attacking its base. Defenders should also have the option to prepare hot quicklime to punish them. But also perhaps, those going up ladders may wield shields to mitigate oncoming damage. If the defenders aren't careful, the attackers should be able to gain control of the ramparts, and totally take control of the outer wall.
There's a lot that needs to go into the sieges in Ashes of Creation, they're probably one of the biggest selling points of the game to players. I hope this post can garner a lot of discussion on sieges. The book I'm primarily drawing resources from at this time is "Ancient and Medieval Siege Weapons: A Fully Illustrated Guide to Siege Warfare" by Konstantin Nossov. I'll be read a lot more on the topic however, so that my posts can include great examples from sieges throughout history. I intend my next post to be about mobile sheds (tortoises), ditches, and battering rams.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_(military)
2. R. Blakemore History of Interior Design and Furniture: From Ancient Egypt to Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1996, p. 107
3. J. Bradbury, The Medieval Siege p. 276
4. https://archive.archaeology.org/1001/topten/syria.html
1) To look at how AoC's sieges are designed for enjoyable tactics. This is at the end of the day a game.
2) To add a healthy degree of architectural and military realism. Too much realism would be incredibly boring, real sieges could last for months, Ashes sieges will last 2 hours. But realism provides a connection to our history and immersion that draws a player into the world. That can be invaluable to a player's experience.
3) To talk about two directions Ashes of Creation could take their sieges. One of these directions is to have sieges be won by completing a series of objectives in a linear fashion. An example is New World, you can't break down the walls of the fort and until you have captured all 3 points outside of the walls. And the other direction is by having a single, yet difficult, end objective to win the game. The goal may be to control the throne room in the keep for 2 minutes straight, but to get to the keep you have to get past the outer walls, inner walls, and then take the keep itself. Maybe there are methods to entirely bypass a gate without destroying it if the defenders aren't being attentive, which adds a lot of depth to the strategy, but if the defenders are attentive the attackers are having a tough time taking the node or castle.
For this post, I'll be looking primarily at ladders, sapping, and the walls of nodes and castles. There are important differences that Intrepid must consider between the walls of nodes and castles when it comes to location and size that will drastically change the plan of attack and defense for either. I won't be talking about ramparts, gates, or towers for fortifications, just the walls themselves. I'll be describing ramparts, battlements, crenulations, and machicolations in an upcoming post.
Why are walls built? The answer is rather simple. You want to build a fortification that will keep the attackers on the outside of the wall and allow you to attack them from the other side of the wall with arrows, magical attacks (in Verra), stones, and sallies. Sallies would be a group of raiders leaving the castle walls for a small period of time to harass the attackers, destroy their siege equipment/provisions, and then run back into the castle walls once they are done. Walls also buy you time, so that while the attackers are outside of the wall gaining no progress, the defenders have bought enough time for reinforcements to come and defeat the invading army. When reinforcements were on the way, attackers would become more desperate to breach the walls. If there were no reinforcements on the way, in history you could just starve out the besieged by means of circumvallation.(1)
I think this gives a good idea for a cinematic ending to all defensively won sieges. In many games, the attackers have invaded the enemy keep and are on the verge of taking it, only for a timer to run out and "DEFEAT" to appear on your screen. But... why are they defeated? It just seemed like they were minutes away from victory! Rather, maybe we can get some cinematic of an NPC army coming to the defense of the besieged and driving away the invaders. That would be far more immersive than the industry standard.
Throughout history, the besieged and besiegers engaged in a technological race to outwit each other. Defenders would be attempting to build walls that were nigh impenetrable, while attackers would prefer to just break through any part of the wall and not be forced through the chokepoint of the main gate. This was the history of the development of siege engines.
Walls have varied throughout history, from the early mudbrick and sandstone walls of Ancient Egypt(2) and proto cities to the thick stone castle walls we are familiar with, which seemed impenetrable until the invention of gunpowder. Often the base of a wall is much stronger than the top of a wall, which makes common sense. The mudbrick and sandstone walls of Ancient Egypt were so weak, that the Egyptians depict their battering rams during the Old and Middle Empire as being a thin pole with a metal tip. The tip would break the top part of a wall's parapets (a small wall on top a rampart to protect the defenders from incoming arrows and rocks) to expose the defenders to oncoming arrow fire, and allow the attackers to claim the wall with ladders.
The first siege weapon was probably the simple ladder. Pretty simple, the defenders built a high wall, so you just climb over it to hop onto and over the walls and attack them. Of course, that is if the defenders would let you. Defenders would be showering the invaders with arrows in order to prevent them from climbing the walls. In turn, the assailants would be attempting to provide cover for those going up a ladder with their own hail of arrows, as climbers held shields to withstand incoming fire. The Assyrians were extremely skilled in this regard, being depicted in their reliefs as climbing ladders without using their hands, instead holding a shield to block arrows. the ladder should not be so high in comparison to the wall that it would be above it. For if it was, the ladder could easily be pushed away by the defenders. In the Hundred Years War, during the battle of Pontorson, it is written that a nun pushed a ladder off the castle walls.(3)
In Medieval times, instead of pouring boiling oil on invaders, which has often been popularly depicted, defenders would more regularly pour boiling water, heated up sand, and quicklime. Oil was far rarer than water, sand, and quicklime, hence it wasn't used to burn the attackers except in rare cases. Quicklime is highly alkaline, so you can imagine the pain it would cause to the assailants. Quicklime was also a main ingredient for mortar, so it was typically in great supply. I hope quicklime and slaked lime (quicklime plus water) are added as materials to the game. Quicklime has great importance in being used to create slaked lime for whitewashing, which can prevent erosion for walls. That is typically why castles throughout history were white, because they were whitewashed. Sand would have been heated up in a shield or some holder, and then poured on the invaders. It would get into their armor and burn them from the inside.
Moats would also be built in front of walls, furthering the elevation difference between attackers and defenders. Moats did not have to be filled with water, although water-filled moats did help to make the creation of embankments more difficult, and to prevent sappers from compromising the foundation of a wall. This was their main purpose, along with preventing battering rams and siege towers (which often housed battering rams) from being pushed up to the walls of a city/castle.
Early throwing machines, aka catapults (onagers, ballistae, espringals, mangonels; all of which will be described and have pictures provided in a future post) typically were not a threat to actually take down entire walls. Rather, they would be used to provide suppressing fire against defenders on the battlements / ramparts. They may even destroy the parapets and merlons on top of the battlements, exposing those defenders to arrow fire.
However, upon the invention of the counter-weight trebuchet, the walls of a city had to be strengthened, as the trebuchet could easily penetrate walls. The trebuchet could deliver far heavier packages than the past catapults of age could, and therefore defenders had to evolve with the trebuchet.
Walls were also vulnerable to sappers. Sappers would tunnel underneath a city wall, removing the earth and putting wooden props underneath so that the wall would not fall on top of the sapper.
The sapper would then work there for some time, until they were ready to set all of the wooden stakes on fire, and exit the tunnel safely. They would do this by filling the area underneath a wall or tower with brushwood. The fire would then destroy the stakes, and the castle wall or tower would collapse upon itself. This is one of the most effective methods of destroying castle walls in history, having been used by the Assyrians all the way to the Late Middle Ages.
But there were countermeasures to sapping. First, a water-filled moat could force the sappers to tunnel deep underground, to the point where their efforts yielded no results. It was not necessary however to start a gallery next to a wall, a sapper could begin their tunnel work at their own camp or far away from the walls, and dig all the way until they're underneath the walls, although this would obviously take more time.
A rather clever method the besieged used to discover sappers, was that they would place bells and copper metal on the walls. When these instruments began to vibrate, it let the defenders know that the attackers were attempting to sap the wall. What the defenders would do in response, is they would build a tunnel of their own. They would discover the invader's tunnel and then kill the sappers. They would then fill in the tunnel. This is precisely what happened at the siege of Dura-Europas between the Persians and Romans in AD 265. Archeological excavations revealed the Persian tunnel laid underneath where the tower would have been. There, the archeologists discovered a large number of skeletons, armor, and weapons.(4)
The last important point regarding walls is the location of a city or castle. Castles were created as military camps, where if not taken by invaders, a noble could send out raiding parties (sorties) to harass the invaders. Therefore, the castle had to be taken even if it had a large geographical advantage. The strongest castles were built on hills. This would force the attackers to only approach the castle by the main gate which could be heavily fortified and prevent the placement of siege towers up against the walls. The placement of castles on a hill also created a disadvantage for the invader's siege engines, which now would be launching projectiles uphill.
Cities and trade hubs however did not have the luxury of being built on a hill. Often, they were placed upon major crossroads and rivers. Thus they were more vulnerable to siege towers and other siege engines than castles on a hill. If a city had multiple entrances as well, that meant multiple weak points at their gates. Having a larger section of wall to defend against the invaders was also a disadvantage compared to a castle. To counter siege towers, ditches would be dug in front of the city prior to a siege, forcing the attackers to fill in those ditches before moving forward with siege towers, larger battering rams, and other mobile sheds.
That's enough for the history lesson, how could these tactics be implemented for Ashes of Creation sieges?
I believe sapping is precisely the kind of opportunity Intrepid could use for their planned instanced content in sieges. The attackers sap a chosen section of the wall, and then the defenders discover the sap some time into the siege. An event then pops up on screen, telling the defenders they have x number of minutes to save the wall section from collapsing. But, the tunnels are so small only 10 may enter. This remains true for the attackers who can make it to the tunnel. And now all of a sudden, we have a 10 v 10 cavern battle, the outcome of the match heavily swaying who wins the battle.
A collapsed wall or tower is not a death knell for defenders either, the attackers still have to go through the choke point of that collapsed section where the defenders can stack, and if this is a more advanced node or a castle, it may only be the first outer wall that has been breached. The attackers also have to climb over the rubble they've created. There could be many more inner walls the attackers may have to go through, meaning the winner of this instanced PvP scenario is adding a good chance to their side's victory, but not guaranteeing it.
Intrepid has to make a decision on whether they want walls to be destructible or not. A destructible wall should have a large amount of HP at the bottom, and have less HP on the higher sections. They should not be zergable, having 100 people just going up to a wall and attacking it to me isn't enjoyable. But, the lower walls could be breached with strong battering rams, as well as higher sections of the wall and parapets/merlons with trebuchets / onagers, and battering rams mounted on siege towers.
If walls aren't destructible, then the gameplay will revolve solely around the gates of castles and nodes and hopping over the wall. That can be fine as well, and certainly, the gates should have considerably less HP than the walls, but I believe that only making the gates breakable takes away a lot of the strategy that could go into these 250 v 250 wars.
Walls made out of wood of course would be weak to fire, with lesser quality wood being more flammable. During the Middle Ages and before then, in order to protect their siege engines from fire, attackers would often cover their machines with mortar and animal skins. They would also have water available to put out fires. This can similarly be done for Village nodes with wooden walls, the mayor having to requisition enough quicklime to create the mortar, and hides to protect the node. Maybe wooden walls should be vulnerable to fire magic, but I would hope there's more of a focus on them being vulnerable to potion launchers. Defenders should be allowed to make repairs and clear out fire to prevent continuing damage to the walls.
I believe the mayor should have a lot of freedom with the walls. They should be able to divert node resources to make the walls thicker, raise their height, white-wash them to prevent erosion (lower their needed maintenance), dye them, make them more flame resistant, and should be able to increase the number of ramparts on the walls. They should also have to make the decision of whether they want to upgrade sections of their walls to stone or not, which should be a considerable upgrade. This gives a lot of freedom to a defensive strategy and makes mayors economize, as poorer nodes will have to make decisions on what points they want to shore up the most. Maybe even, inner walls and baileys are created solely by the mayor, and not automatically created by leveling the node up to a town / city / metropolis node.
The problem with moats and ditches in a siege mode, would be that you have to provide a method for attackers to overcome this disadvantage. In history, the attackers would fill up moats and ditches in front of the castle with dirt and branches, so that they could approach the fortification's walls. Then they would proceed to bring battering rams, siege towers, and ladders against the castle walls. I believe I have a solution to how "ditch warfare" could be implemented, but I'll save it for another post.
The location of nodes and cities, and the height of their walls, matter far more in Verra than our world. In Verra, there are gliding mounts. Those gliding mounts could allow the attackers to glide past walls, making them useless. I think this is Intrepid's biggest challenge to overcome if they wish to make sieges like they were in Alpha One, there only being an ultimate objective instead of having to complete tasks before reaching that objective.
I believe ballistae could make a good anti-air weapon that could knock gliders off their mounts, maybe even make it an aerial AoE. But either way, mayors in Verra will want to make their walls nice and tall, and God help you if your node is located at the bottom of a valley.
(Also Intrepid, the A1 castle siege was fun, but that castle would go on the top of the cliff, not at the bottom.)
Ladders could have their materials determined by how sturdy the attackers want the ladder to be, and how long they need the ladder to be. I think ladders should be fairly low on HP, and easily destroyed by a sally attacking its base. Defenders should also have the option to prepare hot quicklime to punish them. But also perhaps, those going up ladders may wield shields to mitigate oncoming damage. If the defenders aren't careful, the attackers should be able to gain control of the ramparts, and totally take control of the outer wall.
There's a lot that needs to go into the sieges in Ashes of Creation, they're probably one of the biggest selling points of the game to players. I hope this post can garner a lot of discussion on sieges. The book I'm primarily drawing resources from at this time is "Ancient and Medieval Siege Weapons: A Fully Illustrated Guide to Siege Warfare" by Konstantin Nossov. I'll be read a lot more on the topic however, so that my posts can include great examples from sieges throughout history. I intend my next post to be about mobile sheds (tortoises), ditches, and battering rams.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_(military)
2. R. Blakemore History of Interior Design and Furniture: From Ancient Egypt to Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1996, p. 107
3. J. Bradbury, The Medieval Siege p. 276
4. https://archive.archaeology.org/1001/topten/syria.html
6
Comments
I personally would prefer that there were no flying mounts permitted in Siege, except perhaps for leaders of the siege - I don't personally want it to feed towards a tactic.
But all in all I like the ideas presented here.
There would likely only be a very small number of these. Depending on location, it may or may not be possible to glide in, but given the importance granted to the Flying Mount over the Gliding Mount, I can't see that they'd want to remove them from sieges. It'd be interesting to fly a few of your siegers into a castle to attack from the inside, and to fly a few of your defenders out to the siege weapons to destroy them from the outside.
Good times
It's the only reason I'm here...
I'm really concerned over the gliding mounts with this system. In Archeage, you could basically get to a really high point and glide across the map, the drop wasn't very much. I hope that gliding mounts can't ever get that kind of gliding, and there's more drop in their elevation per yard. I actually think the gliding mounts could be enjoyable though. You use the nearby terrain to glide towards the node, or.... maybe siege towers? Instead of using a gang plank, you push the siege tower close enough where you can launch a gliding raid, and then the defenders have to use ballistae to knock you down. And maybe if the ballistae are destroyed, the defenders can bring up scorpions (much smaller ballistae you can disassemble easily and move around) to try and knock out a bunch of the gliding mounts from the sky.
During the last day of Alpha One, they gave everyone flying mounts as a sort of "go have fun thanks for testing" thing. Then we had a siege later that day, and people were flying all over the place, and as you imagine that advantage overwhelmingly aided the attackers and didn't help the defenders as much. But they were pure flying mounts, not gliding mounts, so I don't believe that kind of cluster**** would happen with gliding mounts.
Yeah I'd really like there to be big open field battles just over setting up a trebuchet or onager, which are being used to clear the upper wall of ballistae / defensive trebuchets. Then that gives you more freedom to approach the wall to destroy it, while the defenders are constantly attacking you from the walls with ranged attacks plus raiding parties trying to flank you. The chaos and strategy would be glorious.
Intrepid can definitely do better and i potentially siege could be part of a rock paper scissor system so big siege shouldnt be vulnerable to normal players but there could be anti siege weapons stationary, slow portable or more mobile portable.
Please make castles in intelligent locations. Don't put them at the bottom of a volley where gliding mounts will hop the walls. Please make sure to put them on top mountains, the middle of the plains, blocking a sole route across a large divide etc.