Thats interesting, I wonder if its simply the AI on that map? Was this the same map youre comparing both situations to?

Originally posted by EmotionallyBroken:

Thats interesting, I wonder if its simply the AI on that map? Was this the same map youre comparing both situations to?

I haven't tried an attack/ defense on the same place yet, but I could try to see.
However I can say it's been like that for the course of several different battles.
Usually when I attack, I destroy the defenses first so they aren't an actual problem in the battle. I did have a battle recently though where I missed an enemy onogar and it managed to get one of my towers low enough health that enemy troops actually managed to beat it to death trying to hit soldiers coming off of it.

For defense, I defended both a town and a castle recently. The town does have pretty ♥♥♥♥ placement admittedly. The mangonels are spread way out and have poor depression and rotation so they have only a few real good areas.
But even regardless of the terrain, my defenses prioritized shooting whatever the closest troop was over shooting whatever the largest mass/ closest siege engine is.
I went far left to destroy the siege tower they had built hoping that the AI would take out the ram. Instead, the 2 right mangonels focused only on ground units.
They got one or 2 good hits that killed about 20 archers in total, but they didn't shoot at the ram a single time, nor did they kill any of the infantry around it.

I'm curious if I'm missing a way to get them to prioritize their fire, or if I'm just kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥. It's very annoying when my units are focusing on lesser targets.
Archers are ♥♥♥♥, and I did definitely take a large number of casualties from archers, but I took way more because they got a battering ram to the gates.
I only managed to barely win the battle because I manually destroyed the one siege tower the enemy built and spent the rest of the game camping the ladders, basically just praying the infantry at the gates could hold.
We didn't even win on casualties, we won with morale shock. The enemy forces were down to mostly t3 and t2 troops that retreated just as they were about to completely wipe out my units with the final numbers being 173 to 50.

The best part of defending the town was sally out option, when it would trigger assault after completion. I loved doing those. Forced attackers to storm using ladders only. Now you can successfully sally out, destroy siege engines, but it does not trigger assault which is kind of pointless. They get rebuilt again and again.

Instead, now I defend the towns from the outside. Wait until the attacking army is engaged in the assault (wait for attacker numbers to dwindle down as much as possible, watching garrison soldiers as well) and then attack the camp. This loads a normal battle, with garrison participating in it, but then at the end you can sell all prisoners in town right away (especially if you clicked on the town instead of the siege camp to initiate combat).

Originally posted by TruXurT:

The best part of defending the town was sally out option, when it would trigger assault after completion. I loved doing those. Forced attackers to storm using ladders only. Now you can successfully sally out, destroy siege engines, but it does not trigger assault which is kind of pointless. They get rebuilt again and again.

Instead, now I defend the towns from the outside. Wait until the attacking army is engaged in the assault (wait for attacker numbers to dwindle down as much as possible, watching garrison soldiers as well) and then attack the camp. This loads a normal battle, with garrison participating in it, but then at the end you can sell all prisoners in town right away (especially if you clicked on the town instead of the siege camp to initiate combat).

I've been doing that a lot too. It works very well on armies that outnumber by about 300 maybe 400. The main reason I HAD to defend this one battle in person was it was a Vlandian army of 1400+ and the town only had 260. At absolute best, they could get the army down to 800 before breaking. My party brought it up to just over 500 total, but more importantly gave it units with armor.
We managed to win barely. But it was because I had to manually destroy the siege tower they built and got lucky enough that the AI could hold both the walls from ladders, and the main gate after they breached it with the ram.
I also got 120 kills with my character alone by the throwing fire ammo meant for the mangonels lol.
But that that battle would have had waaaaay less casualties if the ai had actually destroyed the ram like they were supposed to.
I could have allocated more infantry to hold the ladders and we wouldn't have had to hold multiple areas. We could have just focused on the one remaining wall the enemy had to attack from.

Don't even bother defending, the defense AI isn't very effective regardless of whether it is aided by the player or not, instead you should lightly defend your cities with a chaff garrison meant to die and be replaced and one only large enough to make the attackers waste time assaulting the city, then just bring in a real army and fight them in a field battle or recapture the city if you are too late. I've won sieges against dozens of armies pouring in just by having a big army sit nearby and hit the armies every time they congregate outside of a city. It's an effective way to get lots of free prisoners and XP and it avoids wasting time protecting something that really isn't worth the effort defending.

When I have cool looking modded soldiers using the custom army mod it can be nice to fight a siege for screenshots though, but otherwise it's way better to just be the attacking army in any given situation, the AI seems to be far better in that situation.

a high wall lvl like 2 or 3 makes defending towers much higher.

most defending siege units are not able to hit anything
(only the first 10 second in a battle when the attacker is far away).

its much better to auto-resolve this defending siege battles.

Originally posted by BaronVonPickle:

Originally posted by EmotionallyBroken:

Thats interesting, I wonder if its simply the AI on that map? Was this the same map youre comparing both situations to?

I haven't tried an attack/ defense on the same place yet, but I could try to see.
However I can say it's been like that for the course of several different battles.
Usually when I attack, I destroy the defenses first so they aren't an actual problem in the battle. I did have a battle recently though where I missed an enemy onogar and it managed to get one of my towers low enough health that enemy troops actually managed to beat it to death trying to hit soldiers coming off of it.

.

One of the reasons I am disappointed by the lack of castle building features they showed in previews. :(

I think your party members siege skill mgiht be a factor? I know plenty of people grab the catapults themselves, and just do it themselves, which is quite satisfying to see :)

Originally posted by FizzyElf:

Don't even bother defending

Come to think of it, why are you (OP) defending at all? Dont you have cities to conquer?

Originally posted by EmotionallyBroken:

I think your party members siege skill mgiht be a factor? I know plenty of people grab the catapults themselves, and just do it themselves, which is quite satisfying to see :)

That is the ONLY thing I can think of. I have my battle size turned to max, and on defenses, that usually makes it prioritize the low experience garrison units to hold the walls instead of my experienced veterans.
I have noticed that when I am besieging a fief, my units take control and tend to have better accuracy.
I don't doubt a garrison peasant or even militiaman would be worse at aiming, but I don't know if that would actually effect their targeting ability; mostly because I don't think the devs actually designed AI to "think" and have actual targeting depending on what kind of unit they are.

Originally posted by EmotionallyBroken:

Come to think of it, why are you (OP) defending at all? Dont you have cities to conquer?

First off, I like to manually defend because it's fun AND it got me a ♥♥♥♥ load of experience in engineering. I went from 150 to 203 because I hit 4 good shots with a fire mangonel.

The biggest reason though was I had just gotten out of a war that ended with us taking almost all of Sturgia, at the cost of some war exhaustion and low numbers of experienced troops.
The Vlandians declared war with a strength of 14000 since they have really conquered most of the map in this campaign.
We have about 5000 in numbers and are far enough away that we can only really win on a defensive war if we just beat them down slowly.

I HAD to defend this town in particular instead of doing the usual method of waiting outside for the town to beat their numbers low enough to assault the siege camp was because the Vlandians sent an army of 1400+ (literally 1/10 of their total strength) to siege our town of only 300, half of which were militia.
The absolute lowest the town could get the enemy to was 800 before collapsing, which would still pummel my party of 250 in a head on battle.

Defending towns manually can often have much better outcomes, and in this scenario, was the ONLY way for me to hold it since my other parties were attacking a castle despite the war strategy being set defensive.
I managed to take out the siege tower they had built and then spent the rest of my time holding the other walls ladders by throwing ammunition meant for the fire mangonels which was enough to hold.

I made this post though because I noticed the AI had not tried to fire at the ram at all, and that was really annoying me.
If the ram had been destroyed by the other 2 AI defenses, the enemy would have only been able to attack from the one remaining wall using ladders and the casualties we took would have been way less.
Instead, we barely won on a miracle. When the AI broke, they had just breached the walls fully and were literally surrounding the infantry holding the main gate.
They were about to pincer us, when some how, the morale shock caused them to break. The final numbers were 170+ to my 50.

Because we held, we captured 3 vassals and 6 lords of Vlandia, inflicted a casualty ratio of 3:1, held the town, and even have a chance to counter attack a second lone castle that the army they sent had used to garrison troops for attacking Sturgia.

I did get an achievement for my effort though :D
I got the "against all odds" for winning a battle where my party was outnumbered by over 500 troops.

Originally posted by Urmel:

a high wall lvl like 2 or 3 makes defending towers much higher.

most defending siege units are not able to hit anything
(only the first 10 second in a battle when the attacker is far away).

its much better to auto-resolve this defending siege battles.

Yes and no. The siege engines definitely did have less depression, but they only had a blind spot of infantry closer than 60 meters. They had multiple chances to fire on the ram from this specific battle, but simply refused.
I also do agree that auto resolve is better, or even better is to just wait outside until the AI beat the attacking numbers low enough, then to assault the siege camp.
I had to defend this town manually though because the party attacking was a Vlandian army of 1400+ vs the garrison of 180 militia and 60 or so garrison units which was too low to beat the AI down, and auto resolve would always result in a loss.
By manually holding, I was able to cheese the battle by destroying their seige tower and then holding the other wall ladders by throwing fire ammunition meant for the mangonels which killed about 120 of their higher leveled troops and forced them to start sending less armored infantry to assault.

Originally posted by FizzyElf:

Don't even bother defending, the defense AI isn't very effective regardless of whether it is aided by the player or not, instead you should lightly defend your cities with a chaff garrison meant to die and be replaced and one only large enough to make the attackers waste time assaulting the city, then just bring in a real army and fight them in a field battle or recapture the city if you are too late.

So I do this method usually, but I disagree on "don't even bother defending".
First off, I do still find manually defending to be really fun, even if the AI are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lobotomy victims. I also managed to get a bunch of engineering XP since you can get easily 30 levels from one good shot and defending makes it SO easy to get a good shot.
On top of that, I HAD to defend this town manually because the enemy had too many. The garrison was 250 vs an army of 1400+ Vlandians. The AI could only beat them down to 800 which would crush me and auto resolve would always fail if I tried to defend.
By manually defending, I was able to make much better use of the fire mangonels and even used some of the ammunition as throwing projectiles which gathered an additional 120+ kills on their infantry assaulting the ladders.

And I know you're thinking that I could have let the town fall, but I am not in any position to fight a long war against Vlandia and every battle counts.
I tested it out to see what would happen and 2 things happened everytime. The cost of a peace treaty went from a payment of 8000 daily to 10k, and they immediately went to assault another castle close to the town.
By holding the town, I got a bunch of XP, I captured 3 vassals and 6 lords of Vlandia, we inflicted a casualty rate of 3:1, we lowered the cost from 8000 to 4500, the AI army my kingdom created is currently attacking another Vlandian army of 450, and we can even counter attack a lone castle the Vlandians took from the Battanians.
Holding the town was not only very very benificial, but I found it really fun.
It was an extremely intense battle that ended with 170 of them charging the remaining 50 of my troops before their morale broke and they retreated.

I just made this post because I wanted to vent about my defenses not targeting the siege engines. I wasn't sure if I was missing a way to make them target specific structures or if other people had the same problem.
From what I've gathered, a lot of people have similar experiences and have to let the AI resolve defensive battles for the most part which I think is ♥♥♥♥♥♥.
Manual defense is really fun and even beneficial over AI resolve and it shouldn't be overlooked just because the AI are moronic.

User error

I absolutely LOVE defending. Some places, especially castles, have the worst siege placement, but most are pretty good. I hop on a catapult and target towers and rams. Then once those are down and their only access point is ladders I throw fire pots at the poor saps down at the bottom.
Enemy has catapults or trebuchets? Ambush. Destroy the artillery, leave the ram and towers alone. Focus on using your numerical superiority (You start with 100 vs 40 in the first wave) and kill the enemy until they outnumber you, then retreat.
They build another Treb? AMBUSH AGAIN! I reduced a 1400 man Imperial attacking force to under 300 with my 400 Banner Knights just doing Ambushes, then Sallied Out to finish them off before they had a chance to cut and run.

As far as the AI targeting siege, that's hit and miss, literally. Sometimes they focus down towers so fast I don't have to do anything, sometimes they aim at troops, sometimes they fire at scattered units. Might be a Tactics skill thing, I don't know. What I do know is that if you have a governor with good Tactics and Engineering, they will make attackers suffer, a LOT.

I do feel your pain. happens to me a lot, AI just beeing AI
but the best thing you can do in bad situations in sieges is take over and try to do as much damage as you can do. not even talking about destroying their towers / rams but killing as much units as you can.

or just taking out the ram so you can focus on slow soldiers climbing the towers. - you got a big advantage there.

tiral error.

best case you get the enemy to retreat by holding the walls long enough.