I have suggested the corpse catapult many times in this forum as a cool concept for an UU. The problem is that I wasn’t sure about the mechanics. An area with a slow damage on time seems difficult to program. A weak attack but with bonus against Calvary and elephants is just a worst onager that has already a strong attack.
So, I came with the.idea of using a trebuchet, instead of a catapult. Turks and tatars used to throw corpses over enemy walls, so a trebuchet fits more into that role.
-It would have long range, and mounted and dismounted configurations, like a treb.
-It would have a really weak attack, but ignores armor.
-It could have a BIG area of effect, that is the main difference with the treb.
-It could have a bonus against Calvary, and farms.
-Lastly, it could affect garrisoned units inside a building, as long the building is affected by the area of impact.
Now, if you compare the effect of 4 of these units against four trebuchets, the normal trebuchets are scary because they break TC, castles and buildings from afar. The corpse trebuchets don’t, but they can weaken the farms and all the units in a big area, so it forces the enemy to answer it.
Another possibility is that the corpse impact doesn’t damage the farms, but it removes part of the remaining food. Although practically this is the same than killing the farm by damage.
I would suggest weak attack + wide area of effect +ignores armor, because that doesn’t implies designing a new mechanic. And also, a catapult because I would prefer trebuchets to be the unic siege unit with two configurations.
A catapult like this would be useful against high pierce armor units such as eagles, huskarls, plumes, rattans.
Archers still would stand one direct hit, but the wide area of effects makes microing against them more difficult.
One other possibility besides a catapult is a suicide unit, like flamel archer or petard, but with corpses. It could be a wagon full of corpses that, upon suiciding, desposite the corpses in their place which start to decay as normal corpses. The “explosion” would have the same effect as the catapult: wide area of effect, low damage, ignoring armor…
The same civ could have an Unique Building: the hospital. Basically, it would be a garrisoner house that heals faster than a castle, but cannot fire arrows.
I don’t think a lot of the extra effects are necessary(garrisoned units, farms etc.), a wide area of effect and low damage to units/very very low damage to buildings(say 1 damage per shot to buildings, 4-6 to units, aoe of the area of 3x3 farms, fire rate of trebuchet or slower) gets the concept across without anything requiring them to make major changes to the game in order to include the unit - @JokerPenguin593 I don’t know about making it a catapult/mangonel type of siege unit, you would want to emphasize the intended use to be to force someone to come out from a walled area and fight you, the unpack/pack mechanic of the trebuchet would help to prevent people from using them as an onager substitute, plus I would definitely want them to have friendly fire aoe damage so you cannot use them during a fight without killing your own units too
Damage values might actually need to be lower than mentioned to units, using one of them is obviously not a problem but you don’t want it to be possible for someone to build enough of these to create a zone of instant death that you cannot cross with the attack ground command
I wouldn’t mind the addition of this type of unit but I don’t think that it will be added to the official version of the game, might be wrong but it doesn’t seem like something they would do for an official civilization, then again they did add flaming camels so anything is possible
I would like to see sonwthing like this. The only mechanic I saw of this is the dead cow thrower in Stronhold franchise, and it is very funny and usefull to weaks the turtled enemy