Bombard towers gain the damage they used to against rams and this applies towards siege elephants as well;
however, bombard towers must have a minimum range, such as 1 or 2 tiles away. If the rams are microed and garrisoned they might still be able to get in close enough to deal their damage when the opponent does not mass up the bombard towers, while trebs and bombard canons would remain the go to methods to destroy them.
this will also allow units that are not rams to more easily kill bombard towers if they get within the minimum range threshold, which would mean more walled in bombard towers and more condensed formations of bombard towers and less sparsed out bombard towers within the base, unless they are individually walled. this generally means that most stone on bombard towers would be built on clusters of them to defend or hold a specific point rather than continuously spanning forward without much care for their defense capabilities when in smaller clusters.
of course this probably buffs Portuguese in the long term, but that can always be edited if one civ holds back the entire unit/building
Or we can leave them as they are? In my honest opinion, I quite like towers being bad, simply because they are boring. It’s not a fixable thing, their state as a static defense, that can’t train stuff, and tends to get knocked down makes them feel irrelevant. Such a waste of stone, I’d much rather have a TC/Castle. So yeah, I’m just naturally against buffing them. Also, considering pathfinding for rams, the chances they could be successfully microed into the min range aren’t ideal.
Kind of seems like circular logic. Bad/weak units will always be boring because they don’t rise to the level of actually presenting a viable choice to compete with your other options to allow for more varied gameplay. For the rare cases where the devs chose to not make towers suck (e.g. Japanese), they can actually offer a viable and interesting aspect of that civ’s gameplan.
There’s nothing inherent about generic towers that means they have to be hot garbage; the devs have just failed to scale them in such a way that they can be competitive with the other lategame options (despite the existence of “upgrades” that at least offer the illusion of this possibility.)
I’m with you as far as not changing the fundamental nature of towers or implementing OP’s suggestion, but they should at least not suck within their intended role. For BBTs, this probably means their projectiles should move faster than a hot air balloon, and for generic towers, either Keep or Arrowslits should provide somewhat more DPS (with tweaks to the super-tower civs).
This would be an interesting bonus for a future civ: towers that can train UUs or generic units.
For me them being boring isn’t so much linked to them being bad, although that doesn’t help. It’s because they are @ waste (got censored without the @ symbol) of stone that’s nowhere near as intimidating as a castle, can’t train/research anything, and gets knocked down pretty quick usually. So outside of the limited area they protect, they are just a waste of res. Unlike Castles or TCs, which are a much better investment, due to both being stronger, and training/researching stuff, which makes them useful outside of their defensive capacity, unlike a tower.
Except they are probably a better defense than a Castle. Maybe they don’t find as big of a use in open maps, but closed maps - especially teamgames - bombard tower creeps are obnoxious to fight and push, they don’t need changing.
Giving them minimum range is pointless as you won’t be fighting just one bombard tower. What will you do against Turk BBT creeps when your trebs get sniped by bombard cannons?
Imo we already have too many units dealing heavy amounts of melee damage to an area from range.
I would appreciate if we would get rid of the last reminders of this misguided idea.
I’m fine with some ranged units dealing mediocre amount of melee damage. But in general, melee damage should be for melee units and pierce damage for ranged units. It’s the basic concept of the game.
Disregarding playstyle preferences, their being a waste of stone is entirely linked to their poor performance for the majority of civs. The fact that Japanese have a tech that 3Xs the DPS of FU Keeps and it’s not considered broken shows how bad the baseline is. For Japanese, despite their towers lacking the production ability and concentrated power you’ve referred to, they provide enough advantages that there are situations in which they’re objectively the better use of stone. Easier to deploy in a sustained push, better for providing wide coverage of eco/trade, and more than double the DPS per stone than a castle.
Regarding playstyle preferences, the distaste for buffing something admittedly bad because it doesn’t fit a preferred playstyle seems a tad biased. I’m very much in favor of buffing things that are weak/boring/dumb/whatever. Units/buildings/techs that exist just to fill a slot clutter the UI and represent wasted opportunities to make the game more interesting.
The problem with Towers in general is just that you don’t want to build them on open maps, as… you can just fight elsewhere. They’re much stronger on closed maps where you do not have space, and the tower creep can be very hard to stop. Japanese Towers are broken, I don’t know why you think they aren’t. Look at any teamgame on closed maps, Japanese when going for tower defense will have absurd k/d ratio.
The same goes for other tower civs - Turks and Koreans have similarly hard creeps to stop or completely viable tower rush strategies. Even Britons can pull it off effectively.
Guard Towers have also been used widely on open maps to defend against smushes, no?
You’re welcome to that opinion, but not only is there nowhere near a consensus on that, I literally don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else say that Yasama towers are broken/OP (although maybe you could dredge up an old post on Reddit or something). Yes, they have a lot of concentrated strength in specific contexts, (like Urumis) but even on closed maps, that doesn’t translate into an extraordinary win rate. There are plenty of lategame comps that can give you ridiculous k/ds (and are more sustainable due to not involving a nonrenewable resource), but it doesn’t follow that those units/comps/civs are broken.
Early-mid game towers are fine. Generic keeps fall off hard though, and even BBTs IMO are not that hard to deal with, outside of maybe Turks or Portuguese.
I wonder if this perception was different if you just could garrison more vills in one tower. Teutons towers already are kind of strong as a proteciion for an expanded eco.
Maybe TCs are also a bit too cheap for that protection role in conjecture with the ability to even train extra vills?
I also once made the proposal to reduce the bonus damage towers take from anti-building attacks (as a tech) which would make them a bit more durable against the commonly used counters.
I’m not sure if this would have any real effect. At best, you’re making already-good tower civs even more obnoxious and at worst you have no effect, outside of idk… Huskarls and Tarkans maybe. Rams, Trebuchets, etc - they all do a ton of bonus damage, while being extremely specialised in taking no damage in return, so all you’d really be doing is just prolonging their lifespan while not helping their supposed weaknesses.
Siege counters towers not only because of the bonus damage, but also the ability to take them down with virtually no damage received in return.
That’s the point why I think it’s a good solution. The idea is to give the player with towers more time to react against siege. He still can’t beat the siege just with his towers alone.
I think this can never be an argument. These civs have insanely strong bnusses to towers BECAUSE towers for standard civs are so bad you can’t really use them. So ofc if towers are buffed generally these bonusses should be tweaked down accordingly.