How common is it to successfully defend a city against an army roughly 1.5x larger than yours?
DiscussionYou sir, are better at the game than I
Khans Guards are insanely overpowered and my army was around 300 KG and the rest Legionaries/Elite Menavliatons. The KG alone killed well over 3,000 by themselves but it took a ridiculous amount of micro splitting them into various groups. Their Glaive will one-shot most troops climbing the walls and the only real casualties I received were after they broke down my main gate and pushed through my infantry. They were still able to hold them off with my help, but we lost about 100 every attack.
Swap to 100% kg, trust me it's hilarious. They can beat everything else even fians. The wiki even says the only way fians win is if you dismount, hold fire and charge with KG.
He’s better than all of us
I managed a battle of 400ish against 3300. I had like 5 khan's guards left.
Do you also factor in level of City’s wall? How much does that matter?
Doesn't matter very much if you're destroying their trebuchets and catapults regularly. They're going to get on the walls regardless so all you can do is just try to stall them long enough that your archers run out of arrows before switching to melee.
Also, destroy their siege towers before any battering rams. They will take massive casualties trying to climb up ladders and you can usually hold off the majority of their forces at the gates with just a small retinue of infantry. Plus, if you have fire pots or rocks, you'll be able to knock out hundreds by yourself while they are bottle necked inside you palisade walls.
50% damage reduction for friendly troops?
Bannerlord difficulty. It's been a long time since I looked at any of those sliders so I'm not sure what the default is for that. I just turn it to Bannerlord, randomize my character, then get started ASAP. I'm one of the few people who doesn't care what my character looks like since I rarely see them anyways.
Plus I exclusively play in first person and only switch to third person for issuing commands and then it's right back to first person.
pretty common if defenders have ranged they can thin out about half or so of an army before they get siege equipment to the walls most of the time especially if you have catapults
Ah ok, good to know that wasn't just a one off occurrence. My medic was absolutely fucking them up with the catapult lol
just remember if you are ever attacking, take the time to build some ranged siege cause those rocks fly both ways
Definitely, I was studying how the AI does all that (not the smartest bunch but oh well)
When I'm defending against a big force I like to dedicate one attempt to 'pre aiming' the catapults. Just figure out what you need to drop boulders on specific spots. AI does a good job at hitting what it's aiming at with them, but they aren't as good and picking a good target. If you line up your shots on where the enemy is going to bunch up to push through your lines you can get a handfull of kills with each rock. I ended one 400 vs 1800 defense with over 300 personal kills on bannerlord difficulty
Damn, I'll keeping that in mind
Apparently the final perk in medic only works for the clan leader
1.5x is not that hard in open field. All depends on your and enemy army quality and composition.
Before nerf you could F1F3 khan guards vs 7x bigger armies and just afk for a while to come back to won battle. Not sure how it is now because I dont like other changes devs made.
Good to know
Depends on troop composition and terrain and tactics.
It's easy if the smaller force is more elite. Open fields favor cavalry while mountains favor archers. Tier 6 units can take on increasingly overwhelming odds as enemy troop tier goes down.
For example 100 left crossbowman would get wiped by 20 elite cataphracts. But 20 fian champs can take on 50 elite cav if the terrain can shield them from couched lances.
mountains or high terrain also favors infantry. I would personally dismount the calvary and use them as infantry.
Good to know
1.5x is not even close to a threat in a siege defense unless you’ve got nothing but bottom tier troops
Ah ok
I found taking over the catapults yourself and destroying the siege equipment really helps
I'll have to get better with all that, I can't aim for shit
Picking up the ammo and dropping it on a group of soldiers works really well.
1.5x is almost always a guaranteed win for a player led defense. If you think about it if you have 200 troops a 1.5x ratio means the enemy only has 300 troops. Apply that out and a 600 man defense is against a 900 man attack. The player on defense might lose these if they have breached walls, crappy troops, and no artillery but that is unlikely. Even if the player did have all those disadvantages the autoresolve would likely still give them the win if they couldn’t win it manually.
It was something like 400 to 700, but I will definitely keep that in mind though
You could fairly consistently defend 4X outnumbered, after that though, it gets a little dicey, unless y I ur siege defense weapons all do what they are supposed to do
Noted
Extremely common. The defenders have bonus advantages that makes the victory significantly easier to achieve. Send troops instead of going in.
Sloth ill keep that in mind
I think my best was like 800 vs 3000 or something like that. As long as you have elite troops you are almost guaranteed victory. With siege engines up it’s even easier.
Noted
I had a 400(ish) mixed troop garrison win against 3,000 (ish) attacking army. I remember it was a Vlandian castle and Derthert wanted it back. Catapults took out the siege towers and battering ram then started focusing on their mass troops. We had some good kills on their crossbows. Used rest of the stones above the main gate to throw onto the mass of troops at bottom of ladders. Then just camped at an angle and kept headshotting people going up the ladder. Lasted like 40 minutes. I think I leveled my Athletics by a significant amount from that battle.
I bet
Depending on what they are using for siege equipment you can do way crazier odds if you just make it so they have now way in but cleaving thru the front door, I was outnumbered by 2k men but destroyed all siege equipment so they had to chop through the gate by had to get in and my shield wall at the door was better than what they threw at it. Shit by destroying enemy siege equipment I’ve beaten larger enemies without having any causalities on my side
Niceee
Extremely easy, you just have to take out their siege engines so that they have to come up the ladders or through the front gate. Shield wall the gate and have plenty of archers on the walls and you can take on some real bad odds.
I like to have a 1.5:1 mix of archers to infantry in my garrisons because you get way more benefit from archers in sieges.
Definitely
Having catapults on your side (and the enemy not having any) makes a big difference. Also your troop quality and composition can be deciding. If your party is 50% Fians than your enemy will have it rough. The wall level also may give your archers an advantage.
But if the enemy has 3 times my number, it is hopeless in many cases, unless the enemy retreats due to low moral. Though in the case of siege defense the autoresolve (send troops) is surprisingly strong. Autoresolve can win even in 1:5 scenarios, assuming your tactics level is high enough.
That's good to know, I don't usually use it
I tend to save before starting the battle, mostly because the ai sometimes does some weird shit and I lose a winnable battle. But occasionaly it is impossible for me to win, no matter how I try, due to the game mechanic never giving me enough troops at once. When I then give autoresolve a chance, it manages what I couldn't.
Personal best (with the better pikes mod) Was 350 v 2000 Pike wall inside a choke point, archers behind to pick enemies off the walls
I wish I had a PC so I could do some modeling lol, that's a good tactic though
It took several battles to whittle it down. And I lost all of the garrison of the town... but the pike wall held strong. The big thing is remaining alive to keep command.
With 400 troops if you disable the Door Ram your gonna win everytime.
Noted
Yea thats the debate though if you wanna ride the siege to wait until they attack to break in. But if you break in early you can ride out and damage the ram to almost being destroyed then retreat and wait for them to attack making sure you keep your catapults up. Fuck ballistas they are trash. If they bust your walls its gonna be a bad day.
Quite common.
Ok
Didn't mean to step on your victory tho, be proud of it!
On the other hand, considering how fortifications give you a massive advantage, it's not an impossible feat.
Very common. Many factors impact this. Raw numbers matter less than the quality of the troops. And the AI sucks at sieging so it is very easy to destroy them with a much weaker army (quality and quantity). A 1.5x fight earlier in the game might be a little tricky if the AI has leveled troops and you have lower tier troops. But a 1.5x fight by mid game is typically trivial as you have mid-to-high tier troops. By end game this type of fight becomes very easy as the AI will come at you with mobs of recruits while you have high tier troops. Even 5x or more of your numbers becomes very easy.
Think of it this way. If the AI assaults you with low tier troops and you have a few hundred Fian Champions, the defense becomes a joke. You could beat 10x or more of your number when the AI primarily has lower tier troops.
It was relatively early game, that's good to know though
Most sieges come down to three factors
What is your troop makeup - Are the majority of your troops elite or are they militia. Sieges are a pure infantry battle so whoever has better infantry has a massive advantage that can make up for 2 and 3.
Level of your walls- high level walls are taller so more time for archers to kill enemies on ladders, level 1 siege towers are also a ramp that let’s enemies over the wall in large numbers so almost as dangerous as
The Ram - probably the most important aspect of a siege battle is the ram. If they break your gate it’s a disaster. If you can destroy the ram 9/10 defenders win. I’ve lost a handful of siege battles after taking out the ram because even on ladders Knights and Druzhinnik will still massacre militia.
Noted
I regularly defend cities with like 500 against armies of minimum 2,000, because vlandia and sturgia are big now and they covet my land.
Understandable
Yeah, vlandia is annoying as hell because they'll regularly ask for peace and it'll last less than a week while I'm on the other side of the map recruiting trroops or trying manage a castle or refill my shop warehouses. My vassal ai is also brain dead so we end up fighting the whole war around lageta or ortysia. The econ of both is nonexistent because like 10 thousand men die at both every month.
1.5 is pretty trivial unless all the defenders are T1.
If you have good engineering then just having more / better siege engines will get you the W.
if they breach the gates,pretty rare. If they dont,pretty common especially if u have many archers
Fian bow goes twang.
Yeah kinda often, my strat is to auto select till all the archers are along the wall then place infantry where the ladders and end at the gate.
Then if it’s a big army sit on a ballista and pick apart the groups and spawn and attack or if it’s a smaller army I’ll be with the infantry fighting on the walls
I normally have 3 catapults for the ai and one ballista for me just because I’m shit using the catapults
I mean, cities at that time were built to withstand seige and attack so its historically pretty common (I could also be entirely mistaken its been a bit since I read a book on medieval seiges)
From my experience - if I can’t stop their ram breaking the gates I am almost always screwed.
I can generally fight a pretty good defense with a 1.5x enemy if I only have to hold the walls. But the walls + gate being breached is almost always a L
If you have good prebuilt defenses, enemy ai suck ass at sieging with their catapults and stuff. Once you actually get to the combat, if you have a good mix of high tier archers and infantry to block entries, you can drag sieges out for a looooong time. The best I remembered doing was like 300 vs 1800, and it took a ton of time, but I ended up surviving with most of my troops due to having a mostly archer based army
Things that worked for me
-all max tier troops should be defending and garrison should be at capacity -destroy the siege towers and ram -aim the catapult yourself -keep shooting arrows at the climbers once out of catapult ammo -have trait that stops veteran troops from running away
You can defend very easily if you take out siege, I’ve barely won at 5-1 odds because there were only ladders.
The o linear to even the odds is to take a small part of elites, go to the castle or settlement before the opposing army gets there and when they siege instantly start making fire catapults. As soon as you have all of them set up they will obliterate the field. And you can alone an ambush to destroy their siege weapons and towers so when they attack they have nothing to hide behind
Oh thats easy, anything under 5x as large as my army is easy. 5x is pretty enjoyable, and after that it becomes fun in a challenging way.
In my experience this is like, most of the time when I defend. Archers, Archers, Archers, and build up ur catapults!
Depends on defender party comp. 100 fians or khan's guard on the walls can probably hold off 500+ attackers. Doesn't even really matter what type of attackers, tier 7 ranged are just that OP.
Short of that, I think you can still game the AI. Sally out and destroy siege engines if they ever build a trebuchet or more than 1 siege tower. then just make sure you have as many catapults built as possible. You should be able to destroy their ram and lone tower before they reach your walls, as well as score a few dozen enemy kills. Then they run away. Repeat until victory. You may be fucked if they ever actually get to your walls though, then it turns into a normal battle
Noted
I held about 300 v 1200, by sneaking into a castle that was under siege then sending troops, mostly all elite tier troops against big bloated armies of tier basic tier troops. Something like 500 militia spearman taken prisoner
Pretty common, usually fairly easy. Never without losses tho
650 vs 7400, won the final defense with 85 men left, the walls being packed with anti siege equipment and the enemies insistence on using siege equipment made it pretty easy to funnel them up one side at a time since every time their battering rams and towers got destroyed; first 3 defenses I think I only lost 20ish men total but after that started losing a lot more per battle
1.5x larger than yours in a siege defense is an expected victory for me, on field it could definitely be a little harder. My best peice of advice is that tactics seriously make a difference on the field and if you use it well enough you can sometimes clutch victories against enemies 2x your size, very satisfying when you do manage something like it. I used to just f1 + f3 and go beserk but i changed my playstyle a lot from watching strat gaming on youtube (go check him out!)
In siege defense though, you need food so the towns garrison doesnt starve out. Its for this reason i downloaded the donate to granary mod letting me donate any type of food to any allied castle or town granaries so they dont just starve while i have like 500 food items in my inventory like vanilla bannerlord mechanics. It just adds a ton of realism tbh
But for vanilla, my workaround is if the fief youre defending is owned by you and the food is low (you can check through the manage town/castle button) then I recommend taking the fiefs garrison troops out and giving them to a second party, adding that party to your army (no influence needed, yay) then sharing your food with that 2nd clan party of yours thats in your army
Another general tip for sieges though, if you want maximized success for siege defense, i would auto resolve and prioritize recruiting archers then infantry since the auto resolve seems to favor those two unit classes in sieges
Siege weapons fug.
Common if your defending city has at the beginning of the siege an Fire Weapon.... Just Throw the shits down on the Battering ram and The Siege will be easy to defend since they now come all with the ladders or Towers Wich is way more easy to defend. I mean flaming pots are The Weapon of choice to destroy Strong units with Shields.
My best was 458 vs 4,900. I had about 23 troops after the battle was over.