How to Make Siege Towers and Placing Troops on Walls Viable?

It seems that a lot of development work went into the concept of placing troops on walls, and somehow making that a core aspect of defensive play.

We see it all over the promo material and it features rather heavily in the campaigns, but it seems borderline useless in match games.

Walls are used extensively, and all of the siege weapons other than siege towers have a niche that they fill and see play at all levels of play.

But what about the siege towers? Useless. And have you ever seen a competitive game where any player utilized the garrison on wall mechanic? I think not.

Maybe this is partially due to the lack of stone wall towers in the current pro rules, but gates could allow for wall access and we never see it.

I understand that pro gamers will always prioritize mobility and map control over turtle defenses, but this is an issue of them NEVER seeming to have a place in the meta.

What can be done? Or should the whole idea just be thrown out?

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The siege tower was a little bit useful in age 2. After age 3, various siege devices can effectively solve the enemies on the stone wall and the wall makes the siege tower completely useless.

Siege towers need to be strengthened or even redone. For example, ranged units can be stationed on siege towers for the same buffs as walls.

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1st solution: Stone towers, gates, and wooden gates are able to be captured by the enemy if no allies units on that or close that.
2nd solution: still can damage to a building like a ram, just a lite ram version with less hp and less damage, and able to garrisoned units onto enemy walls if needed

Yes stone walls are too weak. 2 to 3 bombards shoots are enough to destroy a stone wall. Therefore it is rarely seen placing units on walls.

Placing units on walls and unique civilizations in gameplay were two things which were newly in AOE. I think they should make it therefore more important to place units on walls.

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Go full stronghold on it.

Siege towers become godtier arrow sponges and stay attached to walls, allowing units to just use them constantly like an armored latter.

Allow allied siege towers to target your own walls to evacuate and/or reinforce wall sections without a nearby gate/tower.

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I have seen beasty to use grenadiers on wall on one game but I think it was ladder.

Anyhow stupid mechanic just for RP reasons. No point of trying to force it.

Whole idea can exist and be there but trying to enforce it is stupid. Its like china isnā€™t supposed to build walls and stay passive so devs removed all the chinese wall bonuses and then proceeded to give them 25% extra dmg on the walls because they would like china to camp on walls!??!?!?!?! Makes absolutely no ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā–  sense the stupidity in that whole change is another level.

I can tell you rn there is very specific tactic in TG that utilizes stone walls. Ill not tell you how to perform it or what are requirements but its essentially 90-95% winrate. It can be stopped but only with very few civs or with insanely good coordination or if its map where its easy to wall of opponents access to your base.

I play as solely china and I have not yet discover any method that allows me to handle this tactic and I have tried multiple approaches but still wanna face it and learn.

Siege towers need to allow units to scale down opposite side of wall, without this they are too situational to be used much. Big QOL improvement which may be necessary to make them worth using would also be ā€˜dockingā€™ them, where they become another staircase to the wall.

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Defensive play style is not rewarded in this gameā€¦cannons are extremely OP vs walls,gates and towers,. And the end when the best features of the game are not used, you know that game was rushed or poorly designedā€¦

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Pretty much this.

Siege towers are way to finnicky and APM intensive to be used in practice. You have to constnatly micro new units and deploy them over and over onto the wall. It just just have a deploy mechanic where it is once deployed. it acts like a access ladder same way as Gates do. And also allows friendly units to use it to access the walls.

They should also allow Units on the wrong-side of the gate be able to open the gate. To prevent the Reverse-gate cheese. And have people build gates in the actually correct way.

At the very least putting units on the walls actually becomes viable in order to force-open gates to allow your cavalry in, and thus encourage better Walling-techniques.

And allow Siege towers deployed on pallisade walls, simply allow infantry to bypass the pallisade wall via the Siege Tower.

Suddently, you have a meme-material becoming something of a menace against hardcore turtlers. And battle near the Gates becomes far more intense and interesting.

4 Likes

Yes go the Stronghold way sounds great. Defensive structures, especially stone walls are by far too weak.

@TsudaTumiko Well said. Defensive structures are so weak that the only new features of AOE4, placing units on walls, is not used :frowning:

Please developers make stone walls and defensive structures stronger.

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First of all ā€œturtlingā€ as you guys call it would be the default for the middle ages. This insane RTS micro nonsense that age of empires invented has no historic basis. Even in the age of mobile warfare (which didnā€™t come about untill WW2!) there are lines of defense itā€™s never just a free for all of cavalry running around all cartooney acting like jerks. Thatā€™s why I donā€™t play this game, itā€™s for micro managing aggressive basement dungeon jerk trolls, itā€™s mouse and keyboard athletics not real strategy. I prefer 0 A.D. for my rts fix because defensive buildings actually work and losing units actually hurts you. Also when you man the walls itā€™s effective.

This.
The Stone Walls are too weak,
They need to have more HP,