The siege tower is a forgotten unit with little chance to play, it costs 125 wood but occupies three population. However, Battering Ram have been updated frequently, and the cost of 300 wood only occupies one population.
For a very low-cost and very unpopular unit. It is very unreasonable to occupy three population
3 Likes
I agree that siege towers are under-used, but that’s in part because they are very clunky to use as well. You have to load units into them (Max number is 8), then you need to approach the stone wall, and manually unload them. Then that’s it.
The lack of stone wall play in-game is particularly disappointing, as this was one of the more innovative changes to the AoE series.
3 Likes
Siege Tower is cool in concept, but not practical in gameplay as players dont do this tactical sieges with defenders on the walls very often. They just destroy them.
It should definitely be rebalanced to be more useful. Few suggestions:
- Units carried by siege tower gain ability to walk down on other side of walls even if there is no gate or tower. (at least for 10 - 20 secs ? so they can be used to bypass walls)
- Pop cost should be 1
- Carry capacity should be increased to 16.
- Movement speed could be increased to of 1 tile/s so its closer to default infantry speed. making it useful for tactical deploys into middle on enemy ranks.
I would like to see siege tower mechanics to act as a ladder for your units: in other words, they would provide a path up the stone walls instead of having a carry capacity. This would allow players to use siege towers to capture enemy walls by rushing up troops.
Right now you have to load a siege tower with 8 units, unload them onto the wall. If you want more units using the same siege tower, you have to manually reload units, then manually reload them back on the wall. It looks ridiculous and feels clunky.
7 Likes
Great idea. If siege towers could just be parked on a wall to act as both an on ramp /off ramp for stone walls with no carry capacity they would be super useful.
6 Likes
In fact I think that was how they worked in reality. But it could also be loaded, and at the same time serve as access to the back of the enemy wall.
1 Like
along with forming a pathway once parked on a wall
they should get a modest low range archer attack 1 for every 2 units occupying the tower. The attack would bypass the stone walls defensive resist.
its still pop inefficient to fight this way, but archers from the siege tower would counter the archers on the stone wall, since the siege tower itself is archer resistant. However if the Tower is destroyed (by siege units, not torches, it needs a torch resist since units on walls could counter it too easily, or not let units on walls use the torch ability is likely better solution) so are the units lost.
OR/ and. when the bridge drops, should give a medium area effect damage to soften troops underneath the door, on the walls edge, so that units unloading from the Tower have a better chance of gaining a foot hold since a lot more units can be garrisoned on walls than inside the tower.
To prevent abuse, it should have a slow raising animation and not do damage unless the gate drops from completely closed.
I think forming a path onto the walls would be a good start. The rest are neat ideas, but they might make siege towers OP: no one would make stone walls because of how easy stone walls could get captured.
Bonus on top of stone walls need to be buffed as well.
1 Like
You cannot have unit on walls when you gave cannons, IMO cannons simple don’t fit into his game… I believe that at some point they will get rid of siege towers since none use it.
1 pop space
16 carry capacity before attaching to wall, then act as a ladder once attached
Near total immunity to non-torch/Springald/Cannon damage
+++Ability to research arrow slots in blacksmith to allow archers/handcannoneers to attach from inside like Hussite Warwagon.+++AGE OF SIEGETOWER+++
1 Like
stonewall need to be built, and units need to be deployed on the stonewall, and here comes the siegetower? no, trebuchet or ram is still more handy. the tower is useless unless the stonewall get huge HP to make it impossible to destroy then the only way to tackle a wall is the climb up it
1 Like
In the current version of AOE4, the rhythm of the game is too fast, so that the city wall does not play the function of buffering the enemy’s attack at all, but simply becomes an obstacle. To make the siege tower useful again, first of all, the soldiers stationed on the city wall must be changed. to be useful, which would require vastly overhauling the current game mechanics.
In the current situation, the developers obviously don’t have enough time to solve this problem first. Maybe after half a year, the developers can start thinking about how to make the garrison on the wall become effective after the game has reached a balance.
1 Like
This is how aoe2 did it. They are still under utilized there, but atleast it makes more sense
I generally think stone walls should be much stronger. Because the construction time of the stone walls now takes much longer, this is even more important than before. Why should you build a siege tower when a wall is destroyed with 2 to 3 bombard shoots?
As a rather defensive player, I was pleased to hear that in AOE4 units can be positioned on walls. However, due to the weak walls, this does not lead to such a strong defense as expected. As a result, I rarely see units being positioned on walls.
2 Likes
Best use for Siege Towers is to BM the enemy in a tourney. 
Just my 2 cent, but what about ram tower (unit look like AOM egyptian siege tower but have ability to drop troop on the wall and ram building but no arrow shoot)?
I mean hardly anyone use garrison slot in ram to carry infantry at all. Combine both together might not be too bad.
I remember the AoM siege tower and thinking that they worked really strangely: shooting arrows instead of mounting units on walls.
I think the AoM siege tower was changed to ram and shooting arrows in AoM, because ensemble studios tried to get walls to work, but were unsuccessful, requiring changes to how some of the units worked. I recall AoM also had ships that would change purposes depending on what units you loaded on them. This mechanic also ultimately proved too complicated.
I think if you garrison units in the aoe4 siege tower, the effect should be like garrisoning unless in an outpost where now you can fire arrows and negate the height advantage of wall defenders. This might also make siege towers more useful other than just for one disposable attack on one position.
The concern I have is that if you allow siege towers to fire arrows, they might be used as mobile outposts. Tower rushing is already annoying without them having the ability to move around.
I agree, once you make fortified walls around the city, a breach in the wall should be a rare event made by a serious attack, as in the reality.
2 Likes
I don’t know if it was a glitch or something but when I was playing the Russian campaign and trying to take the city of Novogorod I unloaded a bunch of musketeers and man at arms onto the wall and they could literally move nowhere else but on that one patch or tile of wall unless it was broken for them to walk down. Otherwise they were stuck! Is this is a glitch I experienced or is this actually how they’re supposed to be used? From what I’m reading here, this wasn’t a glitch with the siege towers?? I don’t think they should be able to unlock an opponents gate because that could be a bit broken and all game you’d just have players sending tons of them just unlocking a guys gate at any time which makes no sense that a guy can get into your base just because he’s got a siege towers with 8 spearmen in there to unlock your gate. That would be broken. The units you release should simply just be able to move all around across the walls and I walk down maybe to a gate into the base but not unlock it for the outside troops to enter. Maaaayyybe they should be able to walk down the gate into the base maybe. Or maybe it should be an expensive ability to use that they only gain access to when on a wall? Even then I dunno but something needs to be fixed with siege towers.