BBTs are good enough. OP even. Get it inside your head.
I don’t know, watch 3k+ TG on arena, BF, hideout and tell me why the pros are always pushing with this useless building and why we see it in 100% of games.
BBTs are strong. They make it extremely hard to push back, you can’t engage with melee units under BBT, you can use them to snipe SO because ballistics, and also they clear out buildings/production without needing any micro or attention or pop and cost less than a bbc. They aren’t that great for base defense, they are an aggressive building that lets you get a foothold right in front of the enemy without being obnoxiously big like castles.
Which is a complete design fail imho.
Just like towers were more used for feudal rushes pre DE.
Bbt is at least very good vs ships as defence tool though.
Bear in mind that capped rams have +1 ram armor and siege ram +2 and I think that can reduce the bonus damage the same way Cataphracts and Condottieri armor do.
So 5 bonus damage would mean 4 damage against capped rams and 3 vs siege rams. At least in theory, I didn’t test it.
15 extra damage might be too much, but 8-10 maybe not.
Using BBT as an offensive tool not only in my opinion goes against the use of what should be the principle of defensive structures, but by the time you can afford to push with army and back it up with several Bombard Towers I believe the game is already in your favour.
Imho their only very good defensive capability is against ships, unless they’re cannon galleons, BBTs make short work of any ship.
Agree completely. I remember them being melee damage, just like Bombard Cannon or Cannon Galleon. It made sense conceptually, and ensured that the opponent needed Imperial Age units (trebuchets or cannons) to safely destroy your expensive Imperial Age towers.
I made a similar thread not too long ago. I won’t repeat all the points here.
Maybe still too big for Capped Ram. 8 means Capped Ram will take 7 damage and will die at 29 shots, 9 means will die at 25, 10 means at 23 instead of 200. Too big nerf imo. Well even doing 2 damage instead of 1 will just cut the number in half. So it will always be a big drop anyway.
This isn’t an invented change, it’s a request to restore what the original game designers intended. Being anti-siege was the niche of bombard towers, they fire slowly and struggle to hit faster units. When they do manage to hit something like an archer it is massive overkill and most of the damage is wasted. Any other defensive building performs better against rams and trebs because they fire faster and can shoot multiple arrows, it is a backwards system.
I don’t personally believe melee BBT would cause balance issues, but if it did I would rather see BBT become scenario-only like fire towers than to see one cannonball reclassified as pierce damage.
Edit: Another acceptable answer would be to split the BBT into two different buildings. One that fires smaller piercing projectiles like an Organ Gun or Hussite Wagon, and another that slowly shoots massive cannonballs for melee damage. Give or take access to each tower as needed for balancing civs.
Castle age siege doesn’t beat BBT. Only battering rams stand a chance but they deal so little damage they are only taking down a BBT if you let them do it.
It’s the original game designers themselves who changed their mind on the matter and nerfed BBT this way, just like they realised pikemen suck agaisnt paladins and eles, that CA with 3 range and 50% accuracy are bad, etc…
Ngl I have no idea what happened internally to spark this nonsense. Maybe the guy who understood what a cannonball was quit ? Maybe they caved to player complaints about turtling? I still don’t see any problem with needing ranged siege to take down expensive towers with zero losses.
I know there are some crazy mechanics in this game (hammering out fires, wololo…), but at a minimum things need to be consistent across the board. If someone decides Light Cavalry is too strong against rams and changes them to deal Pierce Damage I’ll object to that as well, they need to remain similar to heavy cavalry mechanically (that being said a short-ranged pierce damage unit with a lance or spear could be cool).
Look, on the mod page you find a mod with the desired change you want. Look for people that want play the same way you want and with the same changes you suggest and you are fine, this don’t mean they need change the game balance back again.
Imagine what a civ do without good siege? Trebs are also not really a option, maybe petards but everything have pros and cons.
So here is what you are looking for have fun:
Can you explain this one? It does seem like many people are hesitant to use trebs against bombard towers. They seem to be the best counter, and are available to every civ. It is much easier to protect a treb that is 16-17 tiles away than to guard siege rams with pikes or archers while standing in cannon fire.
Is the concern just that your Castles will be destroyed and you’ll be unable to make trebs to take down towers? That is a valid fear, but if the opponent is spending 125 stone per BBT I think it is acceptable to require a stone building to produce counters. Maybe this means hiding a safe castle in some games, instead of using all your stone on a risky forward castle.
Castles are more expensive let’s give them all anti-ram bonus damage /s
All defensive buildings deal pierce damage. Here’s your consistency.
Just replace BBT with “keep” or “Cuman watch tower” for this matter, because they have the same stone cost. And only Japanese (and maaaaaybe Korean) keeps are actually as good as bombard towers, so even if you spend the BBC’s gold cost to buy stone for more keeps instead you’re still not getting something as good as BBTs for your money.
Really the only thing that could be changed about BBT for the sake of “making sense” is to make it so that they no longer require blacksmith upgrades to have max range. Because yes, the dude who “knows how a cannonball works” decided that BBT would need fletching &co to get more range. But even then only the Teutons get BBCs but no bracer so it’s not like it will change much.
Fair point, but visually it is inconsistent. If there must be a slow-firing tower with high pierce damage just give it the scorpion/war wagon projectile and call it a ballista tower. No need to show cannonballs for this when it operates differently than every other cannonball projectile.
I agree that BBT range should be independent from Bracer, just like Hand Cannoneer and all other gunpowder units.
The damage per shot is so high that only rams and unpacked trebuchets (and technically the siege tower) really care about whether the damage is melee or pierce. For any other unit it makes almost no difference.
The change in update 1.0b from melee to pierce was to give the bombard towers another counter in the form of rams, rather than requiring that they be taken down at range. Otherwise if you don’t have a castle for trebs, you can be in a situation where there is no unit you can make to deal with them.
Exspensive? What are you comparing them to? You can place TWO bombard towers for a cost of ONE bombard cannon, which die like flies.
Besides switching back to melee damage will require many other considerations, like a negative bonus against buildings or else a bombard tower push will become even more menacing.
Personally id also like to see how it would work, but thats obviously not something on top of rebalancing priority list. Bombard towers do have their uses as they are now, just search the youtube for “bombard tower” and sort by date
I mainly compare them to keeps, both cost 125 stone and Bombard is 100 gold vs Keep’s 50 wood. Really anything with stone cost is a significant investment (it means fewer Castles and TC’s), and if we’re talking late Imperial Age then gold matters as well. If I plan on using it for garrison then the Keep generally seems like a better option, with better accuracy and multiple arrows, especially for civs like Koreans or Japanese. I find it very strange that Keeps are more effective against rams than Bombard Towers are. Keep also has a lower upgrade cost and researches sooner, it doesn’t require chemistry.
All that being said, it is very rare that Keeps are worth building. Bombard Towers are almost never seen in serious games, maybe occasionally as a meme (correct me if I’m wrong here, I just can’t recall any tournament games or anything with bombard towers as a legitimate strat). I personally end up making them only when I’m playing Portuguese and end up with a few Feitorias and excess stone, or as Turks where the extra range makes them harder to counter.
BBT’s have relatively high HP for what they are, it takes a very long time to siege down even a few BBT’s with trebuchets. Trebuchets are also extremely expensive, and losing any number of them to a cavalry charge and/or BBC/onager while trying to take down a BBT is a huge loss. The case against castles is much different, because castles are far more valuable to make and much harder to place, which justifies risking a large number of trebuchets to take it down.
BBT don’t do melee damage because melee damage BBT’s are broken. They can be spammed up in a conceded area in groups in a matter of a minute or so. Pushing through BBT’s is slow. Attempting to circumvent them gives your opponent an overwhelming positional advantage on the map, similar to giving up water. Attempting to siege them will often result in a loss of the siege spent, whether or not the attack is successful, as raids pull your army back and separate your army from your siege or your army from your town, whichever you feel is less likely to end your chances at the game.
Don’t confuse “I don’t see them” with “They are bad.” You don’t see a lot of things in Imperial age, especially in 1v1’s. An underabundance of opportunities, combined with a scarcity of good matchups make a lot of things a rare sight.
? Maybe they caved to player complaints about turtling? I still don’t see any problem with needing ranged siege to take down expensive towers with zero losses.