loftar wrote:the ram was destroyed while you looked away for five minutes.
Let's talk about a time before power level boost.
You may have been hoping that in the Siege Chess update, when the attacker build a battering ram, the defender would block the ram with archery towers or catapults, and the attacker would destroy the archery towers with catapults, but that's not really how it works.
Naturally, the attacker will build the siege engines at an appropriate distance from the village's wall so that the defender can't destroy them from within the wall (and then run a bot that detects defence-side activity and alerts them), and there are three ways for the defender to destroy it: by hitting it directly for four hours(RL) per siege engine, by building archery towers and protecting them for at least an hour (longer if there are fewer archery towers or they get hit and repaired) until the archery towers destroy the siege engines, or just by using catapults.
However, if the attacker has aleady built own catapults, the defender can't use catapults because the attacker's will become attackable first and it will break the defender's (Of course, every catapults can move, so the defender can bring it from out of range, but if the attacker's has the same or greater attack range, they can intercept it. If the defender's catapult has a longer range, the attacker can also move the targeted siege engines to attack or evacuate it).
This leaves the defender with the choice of either hitting the battering ram for 4 hours or building and defending the archery towers for at least 1 hour, but if the archery towers are built late, the attacker's catapults will be able to attack the archery towers.
When the defender fails to build archery towers within 30 minutes, the defender must then have enough fighters to drive them out for the full four hours, and if they fail to stop the attacker's characters from running to the battering ram and repairing it, they have to restart the timer.
If the defender manages to destroy one of the rams, it's not over: they must repeat the process until all of the siege engines are destroyed. And you know that in the late game, you can build dozens of rams and catapults by yourself if you really want to. And even if the defender destroys all of them, they will get another ram notification within an hour.
This is what happened from World 11 to World 13.
The point is that the defender has to be stronger than their opponent to destroy the rams, and it takes time.
Similarly, the attacker has to be stronger than the defender and spend a lot of time to win a siege, but if the attacker loses, they only lose time and effort, but if the defender loses, they also lose the village.
And even worse than that, in my opinion, is that the attacker can annoy their opponent and waste their time just by building a few siege engines, which will set off an annoying alarm from the moment they're built until they're destroyed, and then they have to go through a cumbersome process to remove them, and there's virtually no limit to how many they can build.
If sieges are to be reworked, there must be a way to prevent unlimited siege engine(ram, catapult) spam and eternal sieges that restart as soon as the siege ends.
For a simple solution, just make siege engines as easy for the defender to destroy directly within a few hours as any other structure, or make the charge time (the time it takes to be able to attack other siege weapons) of siege engines installed by the attacker several hours longer than the defender's siege engines.
Why should rams and catapults be able to dry up instantly, while claims and walls (and houses, wagon stations and strongboxes) need time to harden before they become difficult to break?
The attacker can set up siege engines without risk, run the alert bot, leave his character in a safe place, and sleep, and then when he get a alert that his opponent has set up a siege engine, he have an hour or two to gather fighters and set off. In the meantime, however, the defender should still be on site, as they never know when they'll come. Have the attacker set up a siege engine as well, and defend it for a few hours. This is a simple way to stop unlimited ram spam.
Alternatively, make it easy to directly destroy siege engines that are on repair cooldown. The reason for making them harder to destroy directly is so that the owner don't have to stick around to guard them, so if the siege engine is repaired recently (due to damage caused by being attacked, moved, firing), the owner can try to protect it.
Last edited by steelman on Thu Aug 03, 2023 3:58 pm, edited 4 times in total.
by Zampfeo » Thu Aug 03, 2023 2:09 pm 
