Catapaults... Holy Crap!!!

Try building squads and company sized unit stacks to be able to better take the hits.

I noticed those in another game, they are mega strong sure. They're not overpowered though because the human can build them too once you research catapults. Typically you can win the game before they research that far, it's an end-game tech. The reason they have like 800 hp is you set the game to ridiculous, difficulty setting beefs up AI unit' stats for each difficulty (as it should do). You need a lot of archers & high level spellcasters to take these things down. If you let the AI grow too much they'll get out of hand. I don't think killing just one AI by turn 250 is a fast enough pace, typically there's only 2 or 3 AIs left in my game by turn 250. The game I lost I moved too slowly & one of the AIs grew out of hand & had catapults as welll as some ridiculous monster with over 1200 hps. In that game, the catapult killed my sovereign, one shot did 75hp of damage and I lost since I was attacking an AI city he didn't resurrect. It was the only game I lost not counting my first two "learning" games.

I havent played long enough in V1.9 to encounter catapults, but the only counter to them are other catapults or Custom Archer units. In V1.8, since I was doing most of the attacking, the Archers would fire first and usually kill the catapults before they had a chance to fire. Even then, I took the cowardly way out a few times ( of reloading a save game ) when losing one of my Dynasty members in the group.

I hope Trebuchets dont show up in V1.10

Ooh. Good idea!

Trebuchets? So would that translate into artillery type units that would take a turn to set up? Or would they be just as mobile? And if we have catapults, why not ballista? That'd be handy against a dragon or a troll.

actually i would REALLY like there to be ballista's.  these would be really good for attacking big creatures(dragons anyone?).

Hmm... to me what's weird here is that the AI has two different catapult. The HP gain might be explainable by leveling, but I don't recall anything that would raise their atk. Were you modding something?

Edit: Also, how late game are we talking about? If it's really late, then he might have researched high ATK and HP bonuses.

Until we have walls that need to be torn down, siege engines need to be of a variety that are good for targeting monsters and troops. Machines that throw a big rock are for structures, machines that throw something smaller (like a balista bolt) with accuracy or a lot of somethings (bunch of small rocks) that hit a large area are for hitting troops.

Bingo !!!! It would be nice if we actually had the correct type of units/target these siege engines were designed to fight, i.e. castles & walls. I don't see the current fortification techs in the military tech category providing the proper "target" for these weapons. A level four city with a thousand people & a fortress looks just like a town with 20 people and a hedge. "greek fire" could be a type of shot that is researchable past catapults that gives catapults a more realistic anti-personel ability. Catapults should be able to smash walls, which don't really exist in this game at the tactical level.

Until walls show up as walls in TC, they should make that attacker have to besiege the town for a period of time before assaulting it. Siege engines should reduce this time and go to anti-personel mode in TC.

How long did Gondor's Walls last? (LOTR:ROTK)  That was one short seige for one long movie!

I do agree with earlier comments about mobile weapons for troops and fixed weapons for structures though.

Fleet you do kno that by turn 200 or so... Level 5 City- that you can build a Tower of Erogg of some such that grant +2 mana point regeneration every turn to every caster?

Earth Giants(8 Mana) mana regened at +3/turn = 3 turns

Ice Giant (10 Mana) = 4 turns

Bear (8 mana) = 3 turns

Other Giants (16mana) = 6 turns.

one of each of the above can be summoned per caster every 14 turns.  3 good casters can churn out an entire summoned stack in 14 turns.  Not bad for no gold/iron/material ...

1.1 needs to make the kingdom equipment tech trees be progressive and not regressive as they are now...Seriously.

This is not a good example though, history shows that well defended cities with walls have held out for long periods of time (even into months) forcing the attacker into a long drawn out sieges. Frontal assaults usually fail & those that were successful paid extremely high prices:

siege of Jerusalem 72ad, Siege of constaninople (all of them, 7 or 8), Alesia, Gibralter, Troy (recent research suggest a historical battle did in fact take place). Even early gunpowder was not so easily able to take down strongly defended fortresses (constantinople 1543, malta 1565).

Fortress tech should provided a massive defender advantage, but correspondingly needs to be very expensive in both tech & resource cost. Since this is a fantasy game, perhaps magic could supplement the siege capability somehow .. those teleporting elementals could appear beyond the city walls for example, or flying units could "fly" over them (not that I've seen any flying units).

There should actually be city walls that span the tactical grid & one should be able to position archers on these walls and they should get a "massive" defense bonus, like 200/300% at least. It should be "extremely" difficult for a human to take down an AI city defended by 5/6 archers and a couple of heroes (human should at least lose several units), and it should be "impossible" for an uber human stack to beat an AI uber stack in a fortress. Perhaps the best that could be hoped for is to "soften" up the defense a little at the cost of the attacking force minus heroes who could escape. Of course this is an end-game tech that goes hand-in-hand with catapults. BTW: it should go without saying that the attacker is not able to move from ground to wall square, except for flying or teleporting units.

There's basically a disconnect in this game with fortress tech, I'm just not seeing the fortresses in T.battles.

Cows fly through the air...

the cow jumped over the moon....

I agree that city walls can be really cool, just make sure there is some variety. Moats, Wooden walls, stone walls, towers, fire walls, acid moats, casting lightning to fry people in the moat, filling the moat with oil and lighting it on fire, summoning a wall of man-eating vines...

I just brainstormed these in 30 seconds... there is a huge potential here!

And the attacker could use earthquakes/tremors, fog to hinder the defendders that are sniping them, not to mention all the mundane siege tactics like sapping (undermining) the wall.

More like a disconnect between the rest of the game and tactical battles.  It's like they were designed by people that don't like tactical battles!

I'm pretty sure my joke is at least partially reality, but I'm a sarcastic bastard, it's the way I roll...

If we have trebuchets, we really need a proper combat system, not MoM+, or the MoM-lite we started with.  Something expansive enough that we can actually have a defensive position with artillery emplacements.  Just having them be a bigger catapult will be further expansion into the bigger is better market.

Tactical combat is like a river, it's either fast, or deep.  When you go for both, all you get is a mess.

How about ballistas and maybe Cowtapults?

Agreed on the City walls- those really helped AoW, and you could add in a set of spells to deal with them.  (Crash Walls, Regenerate Walls, Levitation, etc)

You wanna shoot cows at them? Thats just mean

I knew about that tower but I have never gotten a level 5 city. I usually play to turn 500 or so and I have never gotten a level 5 city. I suppose I am turning out too many units from all my cities and that is keeping the population down. Recently I re-did my Sov so that he has +2 prestiege instead of the base +1 but havn't played wiht him enough to see if I can now get to level 5 in a city. Perhaps that is a strategy I need to "go after" instead of the squads (8 pack of units).

I agree there's a huge potential, but the potential is just lost if the AI can't use it adequately. What't the point of having a fortress if you can take down down the AI just as easily as before? This would only serve the human player & make it impossible for the AI to take human cities. Any additions to fortress tech need to go hand-in-hand with AI improvements, so that the AI actually "uses" it, otherwise it's a worthless "broken" feature to add to the long list of other "broken" and "seemingly overpowered" features.

Personally, I'd love to see this stuff, but I'd be against adding it if the AI can't be programmed to use it effectively (by making the game challenging).

@Fleetnote

According to 1.09 changelog, it's impossible to have a group of catapults, as does dragons and demons. However it seems that the changelog was wrong.

Tips againts catapults: Bring 3 to 4 casters and some fodders (preferably archers, i suggest going for custom kingdom with master archer), if you have items that can make your casters cast 3 spells/ round, give it to them, then cast confusion to all catapults on the field, their atk should become negative value, which means that they'll miss all the time. Then you can have your casters cast haste as many as possible on your archers or your Dragon if u have him (the one from the quest), plus burning sword if you want to boost their atk. Your 8 squad archer should have no trouble reaching 150 atk and your dragon can easily have 300 or more atk, and they act 5 to 10 times/turn depending how many haste you stacked on them. Well, watch them obliterate those catapults easily.

Edit:

Forget about summoning, caste haste, burning blade, or confusion, these spells is the most overpowered tactical spells at the moment, especially haste and confusion.

Back on topic, yes the group catapults are OP and don't make sense. I'm currently doing a massive map with about 8 factions left out of 20 around turn 450. AI has mostly resorted to mainly using mega catapults since they have 100 attack and 525-950 health. They never ever miss and have long range so heroes are goners if they come up against them.

First off catapults shouldnt have that much health or take that long to kill, and why doesnt my fire spells do extra damage?

Secondly catapults should not have 100 accuracy, i would feel less cheated if the catapult aimed for my archers and hit my hero due to inaccuracy rather then casually sniping whoever it feels like for max damage.

Apart from that and a few other issues and bugs that have mostly been reported i'd say 1.09 is the most fun i have had with Elemental since the beta. Think i'll just disable catapults until 1.1 comes.

Why would you take away the one good unit the AI has? unbelievable. The AI is a complete washout in this game, and you would take away the one good unit the AI does have. This is just unbelievable.

I think the AI needs to have much more powerful units. They need to have extreme spellcasters that actually cast that firebally & firestorm spell before the human player does. I would like to see their sovereign actually kill my sovereign. The AI needs much stronger archer unity & even horse or warg archers that can take down their equivalent human couterparts. I would like to see AI stacks "concealed" in this game which I cannot veiw, mated with strong AI units which, at size 8, have a reasonable chance of killing any of my "killer stacks." It would be so cool if I would actually lose a tactical battle that I initiate: 1 out of a 500 times simply doesn't cut it.

Having a "killer" unit is the only good thing the AI has in its arsenal in the game as-is. Not only is this too rare, it should be expanded upon in many ways. And yes, it should target whatever the most valuable opposing unit is, which would be 1) strong spellcasters 2) strong archers 3) other ..