I say late castle in the post. Well on the specifics, it’d really be up to the developers to figure out how to strike a difficulty balance. Personally I think it could be refined to be useful and not broken. Yeah you raise a good point about arson. Well given the reception it’s all moot anyways.
Good luck destroying a siege towers when it comes cruising out of the FOW and puts 10 xbows over your wall.
Just gonna say again that that ranged attack from siege towers was removed for good reason. And of all unit types, archers do not need a moving tower with high pierce armor to shoot from. It’d be absurdly broken, skirms would get wrecked.
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Well I also agree that siege towers aren’t used a lot, and I’m also only imagining arena at the main place so far.
I think the original post is good, it’s just I don’t know how something only starts working part of the way through castle age - unless it’s a tech you research like with chemistry and bombard cannons which is what you’re saying with treadmill crane.
If anything after researching something to unlock the ability, spending loads of res on a siege tower and infantry I’d prefer it was much easier to capture the castle than harder to. Like by imp 3ish trebs will shred a castle. Why not have it stack with the number of siege towers, like it speeds up capture with multiple siege towers?
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Yeah true, like I said I’m not really a fan of researching to gain access. Just was a thought. How it’s currently produced is fine (except for the cost with the current role it plays).
Yep! In the OP I suggest the number of siege towers should stack, but not linearly! I was being reserved and said it should be the villager build time formula. Maybe it should just be linear like Treb damage output.
Thanks for entertaining the idea!
The other thing that could work and wouldn’t be hard to implement would be to allow monks to convert a castle with redemption, but also to allow monks to garrison siege towers.
Then you could get the castle conversion idea, as well as using the siege tower as a shield for monks, a real siege monk push 
This is a very difficult request. Siege towers currently are useful for one thing in one map (arena) other than that, completely useless.
They should be given a further role but I do not have a lot of ideas. Maybe transport other siege and repairing them in the same time? But it is meaningless for they historical use… the problem is that siege towers are supposed to have a role in real siege, where quick walling does not exist.
The most meaningful thing would be, of course, shot arrows. In age of mythology a similar unit exists, but it is very similar to rams.
But good luck if you want to balance a moving tower…
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Actually you might see murder holes getting researched more in this case too 
Some more ideas, quote to support what you like:
- Make Siege towers immune to elevation bonus dmg. It incentivises using them vs elevated defences and to approach ranged units with hill advantage. It also provides some nice rock paper scissor play vs Tatars, pushing Tatars into flaming camel (which would then receive a slight buff vs siege towers, fire is historically how they handled siege towers)
- Give siege towers a 0dmg projectile with a 1 or 2 more range than, say, mongol scout LOS, with a couple projectile LOS to temporarily reveal an area inside a base (I know this is very easy to change in the dat files) (have the projectile die after a few seconds and have the rate of fire be like a minute or something). Look at it like an actual flare to signal the attack.
- Give siege towers the ability to drop over any 2 tile building (again, to add incentive, niche use and double walling counter)
- Gieve siege tower the ability to convert a stone defense building (longer conversion time than it would take for 1 siege onager to kill a gate). This creates interesting scenarios and forces the opponent to sacrifice more area of his base to wall himself in or push the tower away / kill it asap (instead of focusing on the raiding troops, since that’s the primary benefit of a ram as well that the tower needs, pulling aggro).
- Give rams and siege towers their own garrisons, melee for rams, ranged for siege towers. Not sure if that would be fun or balanced, just a thought.
- Let siege towers absorb arrow fire in the LOS of targets much like walls do for mangonel line / cannon galleon fire. (that’s a thing, right? I’m not tripping?) It would balance the ranged unit stacking thing out, if only just a bit. +1 pierce armor or more HP to compensate for added sponge role.
- Nerf other non-siege units stone defense dmg (except for tarkan)
- Don’t give the siege tower to every civ. I believe each civ should only have four of the following six:
- Siege Engineers
- Trebuchet
- Petard
- Siege Ram
- Siege Tower
- Bombard Cannon
and decrease the effectiveness of mangonel line vs stone defenses (= wall, gate). (see a couple points below for more on petard vs tower vs ram)
- Every unit launched over a wall piece damages it.
- Slower siege tower, but tankier. Weaken ram tank. As it stands, the full +drill mongol siege tower is the fastest unit in the game by a BIG margin. While this is fun and plays into mongol hit/run strats and nomadic lifestyle, everyone still uses rams anyway. Remove mongol siege ram, but make it faster and slow down the siege tower (full tower should be slower than an empty ram) but make it more tanky (as in, ~2.5 times the dmg taken by the capped ram). This gives you a choice between sturdy and slow or weak but fast. Every civ without siege ram then has a reason to sometimes go for towers. Their collision/manoeverability should remain the same though.
- Petards and Siege towers have too similar a role. Breach a base for at least a short time to get some troops in. Petard hole can be easily plugged and Siege tower can be taken down or obstructed by foundation. Petards don’t do well vs castles or filled TC if you haven’t massed them, but other than that they are the superior tool for quick breaching and even demolition. Plus side of the tower is sustained unit raid (like with Goth spam) So between rams and petards, there’s no room left for the siege tower. As such, I would give different civs different tools. Either petard or tower, not both. Depends on playstyle of the civ.
- Make Siege Towers ignore the additional [melee] arrows from buildings / units. Only the main one hits.
- Make Siege Towers heal troops over time (after herbal medicine)
- Make Siege towers rly good (as in, pick a couple of things listed here) and give every chemistry civ access to the firethrower (dat files) in IMP in the Siege workshop to counter it. firethrowers should be slower than all other siege (because fire is dangerous ), but more tanky to siege and melee units, to serve as defensive short to medium range anti-ram and anti-ST unit that also deals adequate dmg to weak units. Firethrower can be easily countered by ranged units, with weaker pierce than ram or tower. Meleeing fire would be stupid, no? Just pierce the reactant storage! (optionally: If it is killed, it does half petard dmg to or something. That way, you can keep it weak to melee units, but at a slight cost to the attacker.)
- Launching troops over a wall make the meme sound: brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrup
- Siege Tower going from full to empty over a wall automatically pushes enemy vils within a certain range into safe buildings. wilhelm scream! not a good raiding tool, but a good eco-stopper. because, different and because… that’s how SIEGE works.
- Siege Towers have a very small chance of turning one of the units it launches into a hero unit of the same skin and civ type. Ok, that’s it, I’m probably at the limits of my daily imaginative powers.
I have better idea, make siege tower able to catapult your garrisoned units. Range is 1.5 at start (so they can pass the wall), it increases with chemistry by +2. So not even triple walling can stop them. The animation would be a dude jumping from the top door, like he was in the pool and you use the same attack as a sige unit to choose the location.
Funny idea. However that should take a VERY long time before it should even be allowed to make the first conversion chance be successful. Much longer than what monks take in converting buildings (maybe at least 5 times as long), since the unit has so big hp and pierce armor, and since castles are very expensive and very valuable.
So not saying no to the idea completely but it shouldn’t be as easy as normal monk conversions.
Edit: and now that I come to think of it, players might just delete their castle when they learn to know what the minimum time for the conversion is and in a situation where they realise the enemy siege tower won’t be killed in time. So just delete right before the minimum conversion time is up. This wouldn’t make siege towers any better tbh.
Its too expensive to be practical. Should be 100 wood and 100 gold, and then it would be cost effective. Otherwise, you might as well make a ram.
Ok let me see:
- remove it from some civs, especially the one having siege rams that are not supposed to be siege civs (say meso civs, Chinese, Cumans, even mongols or huns… but just examples…)
- make it a trash unit, costing, say 150w.
Then it basically does the ram job of absorbing arrow fire for a smaller cost. Cleary not capable of attack buildings.
Maybe just let it to shoot one arrow making 1 damage per shot only.
Which have a direct siege bonus? No.
Trash SO? You can’t be serious, then why would anyone make skirms when you can mass onagers and decimate every infantry and even cavalry?
Trash SO is game winning, I was meaning trash siege towers. The discussion is about siege tower, so I was just thinking of that.
Yep, my bad.
Well Seige Towers still won’t be that viable.
Passing triple walls is a better option imo
In the OP I say that the castle owner can’t delete their castle once conversion has begun. I agree it ought to be harder than monk building conversions. Thanks for entertaining the idea!
I think a lot of people reading the OP missed the general idea and poked holes into all the specifics and hypotheticals. I can understand the fears people have expressed since it’s a 20 year old game, nobody wants to break it. If the dev team were to implement it and put a lot of thought into it, I’m sure they could give it the right niche and balance that wouldn’t break the game.
“Trash” - costing only wood siege towers would completely switch the meta.
HP with high armor in battles is super important. It would change the meta completely. It would look so silly to make ST just to tank enemy dmg output.
On the other hand making it fire arrows makes it really weird, though not as weird as converting castles - this one is just beyond my comprehension. How would the meta even look like 11.
ST is already better tanking unit than Capped Rams.
For now just make ST be able to transport units bidirectionally.
You could make it cheaper as well but not too much on gold. -40W (in total 160W, 160G) sounds like a good deal to me.
Guess I didn’t read the whole thing. In that case it might work.
Maybe you can tune the stats. My basic proposal is to let it make the same role of a ram (soaking damege). Of you make it wood only, probably a stats reduction is needed. Still it is just an idea I proposed, I do not even know how the stats should be changed