Your armies have fallen, your panicing and the enemy has a huge army near your castle. what do you do?

This chapter will help you defend what is rightfully your's and break any seige on your castle.

if it is early in the game and the enemy already has units at your door the best way to keep them out is to use archers behind your walls with large amounts of cheap troops holding the gate openings.

EXAMPLE:
|====+S+====|
|_BB_AAA____|
|_BB__C__BB_|
|____AAA_BB_|
|====+S+====|

A-archers
C-comms
S-scouts/spears/swords
B-barracks
+-towers
=/|-walls

Lets say the enemy is atacking the north side. following the example above will hold them back till the enemy has higher ranged troops. once you have the main force backing off move some archers into the towers to get the extra +3 to range to keep them even further away.

While all this is happening build a large force of scouts/ swords at the south gate. once your force at the south gate is about 1/2 the size of the enemys move them out to flank the enemy and cut his/her supply lines.

When the supply lines are cut/disrupted rush all of your troops from the north gate at the remaining enemy. Thus ending your seige and giving you a foothold back into the game.

That would work good. But here is a situation I was once in. I beat 1 guy but he quits before castel takeover. I take all his resources and go on to the next guy. Its a clear victory for me until I leave in the middle of a battle for 3 days straight. I put them on defensive mod but when I get back my army is mostly gone.

I go straight to building a defensive castel. I used towers all over the place and made a wall of palisides around the castel to act as a wall before getting to my castel ( I suggest adding draw bridges). I deploy marksmen like crazy (stacks of 40 and 50) and place them in the towers. I also setup outpost so I could see what was coming.

Well the guy I had almost beaten was scared to come all the way to my castel but another guy who was really close wanted to fight me but was afraid to engage so I pick off his front line pretty easy with my marksmen. ( I have very few melee troops at this time) He starts coming down and I keep shooting and shooting every turn with every marksman in range and luckly he retreats. I start deploying macemen and spearmen groups which proved to help later on.

The guy pulls back for a long while so I start reinforcing the left side of my castel and sure enough here he comes on my flank well he stuck with it the rest of the game and broke through the palisides a few times but I kept them from going far with my melee troops while I hit them with my marksmen.

In a defending situation shoot a group of men to low #'s and then hit another 1 of his big groups. The big groups are the ones that are going to do the damage. If you turn his troops in to small #'s then its going to discourage him and he will want to pull back + it will be easy to kill them.

I think you can use some of the things I provided even if your not in the exact situation. I didn't give to much advice (I want to keep some things to myself) but I'm sure somebody can use it.

Scenario 2: Endgame

So you're down to the last few. And it turns out the game leader still has most of his troops left, although to be honest for the number of players he's knocked out he should have be subdued at least a little.

So, anyway. Your castle is next on the list (surprise surprise!) and you know from spy reports and visual sightings that he clearly outnumbers you. Time to escape to the castle!

The key to most sieges is of course time. In this case, you need to keep the main force at bay for as long as possible, something which you can't do if he just throws the whole lot straight at your door. Putting a wall or two over the entrance helps a bit, after all - if you're surrounded, why would you want back out again? Just remember to get your troops inside first!
(Choosing a wall over a drawbridge means it can't be taken over later. Again - buying time.)

The next thing you can do is tie down his main force and harrass them on several fronts. You don't need to be able to wipe them out, just be a big enough pain to get him to chase you! If your opponent IS willing to take on the castle with a reduced force, more fool him - but more likely you'll just buy some time while your opponent works out what you're doing :-)

The market helps here a lot. You need ranged troops - lots of them - so you will likely need all the market techs, and hopefully you already have 3 barracks and the recruitment techs. The market techs let you sell off all the other resources you don't need, so you can focus on your chosen ranged troop (marksmen or ballistae, chosen for range)

If you're in a skirmish game, you're a very lucky guy because you can build a massive ballista stack and put it in a tower, punishing ANYTHING that challenges you. But otherwise, you need as many of these guys putting in towers as possible. Remember you are getting range and combat bonuses, so it helps level the playing field a bit.

The saving grace of a combat like this is if there's someone left - this is the time to ally with them. Bear in mind that between you there will be 6 active barracks to your opponent's 3, so if the game lasts - you'll eventually win it.

The other thing to remember is that unlike in so many other games, you're not playing for territory. It is HIS job to rat YOU out, not the other way around. We play for points, and if he wants his - he has to earn them :-)
The joy is in the damage you do to him, not how many mines he chased you from.

If you're lucky, your opponent will try to charge and fail. If you've got towers actually inside the castle instead of on the front along with the walls, he can't actually reach your troops any more except for either by ranged troops or by a melee charge taking out the front. He'll need siege weapons or it will take a LONG time to get you this way! :-)

If you're unlucky, like me, your opponent will catch on to what you're doing, and set up his own towers. SERIOUSLY bad news. If you can, shoot the comms. If not, then make sure your towers are all he can hit. Draw it out, he can only shoot from a couple of points in this case

Not to be forgetten is, as Stealth says, the outpost :-)
Build and upgrade. Without them, your range bonus is effectively useless because you'll not be able to see AND reach them until the range bonus is ineffective anyway.

Now oddly enough, it didn't work for me. But note the following. See Saint2k's position in rankings AND the "Active Veteran" table. He's probably seen this trick before. Then note my chosen ally SeaCow. We didn't actually ally straight away - it only happened once Saint2k had totalled everyone else, so it was pretty hurried. Also, like Stealth I went offline for a while (not out of choice) and came back to find Seacow physically inside MY castle. Like any annoyed player, I threw his troops out
The problem being that his army never fully recovered,

One further addition to castle defense concerning the tower armies. As mentioned earlier, your tower armies are vital to defending the castle under a seige situation. To protect your armies from melee troops, a few well placed walls will prevent melee attacks on two of them and only leave one position that the other two can be attacked.

Build one wall in front of the southwest and northeast towers, two walls in defense of the northwest and southeast towers. Your southeast and northwest towers are immune then to melee attacks and your southwest and northeast towers can only be attacked from one position.

Your enemy can't takeover and remove as you have troops too close and it would take 16 attacks on 4000 strength walls to destroy and 24 on 5000 strength walls. If you have any forces at all, you should be able to prevent that from happening. 8)

Last Edited : Tuesday, 22 October 2002 - 17:47

So we now know that the best castle design is that which has a curtain wall with towers and outposts inside the curtain wall grounds. A stone main wall with drawbridges and many towers. and all importan buildings inside the walls of the castle.

Example(not to scale):

XXXXXXXXXXX#XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XO________+_+___________OX
X___RR____________RR____X
X___RR[][][][][][][][][][][][][][]RR____X
X________mm[]____________X
X________mm[]XX__________X
X_____|====+#+====|_______X
X_____|+_________+|_______X
X_____|_bb_____TT_|_______X
XO____|_bb________|_______X
X_____|________bb_|______OX
X_____|_TT_____bb_|_______X
X_____|+_________+|_______X
X_____|====+#+====|_______X
X________bb[]XX___________X
X________bb[]_____________X
X__________[][][][][][][]RR_____X
X________________RR_____X
XO________+_+__________OX
XXXXXXXXXXX#XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

X-PALISIDE WALLS
O-OUTPOSTS
+-TOWERS
#-DRAWBRIDGES
_-EMPTY SPACE
R-RESOURCE BUILDINGS
[]-ROADS
b-BARRACKS
m-MARKET
T-TECH BUILDINGS
=/|-STONE WALLS

Last Edited : Wednesday, 23 October 2002 - 01:36

But with that design, you have new problems.

1) How long is it going to take you to build all that? Too long I bet

2) How are you going to defend all the frontiers at once? It's easy enough with a walled castle, but this would be a MUCH larger perimeter.

As for the ASCII mapp...you're very brave :-)
That could have gone VERY wrong...

Protecting all sides is simpler than it looks. first you have the 5-8 towers with ballistas in them covering past the outer wall and even further still. NOTE towers 5-8 are inside the main castle. at the outer gates you have marks in the towers preventing any catapults from coming near.
Note that the original design has 5 spaces from the W and E inner side to the outer wall and the N and S inner sides are 6 tiles to the outer wall. Now inside the main castle at the gates you also have marks or arbs or archers. marks could hold past the outer wall, arbs could hole the inner court yard, archers could fire 1-2 past the outer wall.
You'll have 1-2 barracks that can be producing ranged troops while the other 1-2 are producing calv/melee.



actually I predict that the castle would be completed
in 40+ turns using 36,500 gold+ and about 5000 in other resources. it would take a grand total of over 50,000 gold to build the entire castle and to have 200 Comms running here and there builing things.

Now if you get and average of 2000 gold per turn the construction would take only 25 turns. What are most of you doing by that time? taking your 2nd castle? making falcs? bashing the poor noob?
And even if you become under attack you may pause at the different stages of construction.

Phase 1; build your tech buildings, barracks and market. take near by resources.(we all do that)

Phase 2; upgrade your main castle walls and incorperate your 5th tower.(heres where it changes)

Phase 3; begin building your outer wall in the corners to protect the outposts

Phase 4; build your 6th tower inside main castle, start with your outposts.

Phase 5; complete you outposts, continue with outer wall.

By this time the castle is 1/2 finished and you have a small army gaurding your only weak points.

ascII???

Last Edited : Wednesday, 23 October 2002 - 01:32

I prefer to put all three barracks inside the castle like this:

|===+#+===|
|_________|
|_bb_T_bb_|
|_bb_T_bb_|
|_bb_T____|
|_bb_T____|
|_________|
|===+#+===|

My basic castle design usually looks something like this, but I'm not sure if it's a great one, 'cos I haven't been under seige yet (knock on wood). Mostly I just wanted an excuse to make an ascii map too.

ps. ascii are the symbols, numbers and letters you can find on yr keyboard. Do a searsh on "ascii art" or check out this link: www.ascii-art.de/

Here's a nice one if you like Star Wars and got Java installed: www.asciimation.co.nz/

Last Edited : Wednesday, 23 October 2002 - 09:50

I have a totally different tactic...


I build only the 4 structures (market, training guild...) then max 1 or 2 outposts. I even sell some unnecessary walls and towers. Sometimes i use buildings (like market) as walls or REPLACE walls with other useful buildings. Also never put buildings outside the castle since it's easy to take over.

I think it's easy to defend a castle in fist turns because you can research pikemens and +20% defense in castle and let the enemy to enter. 100 scouts cannot kill 15-20 pikemens in castle. If you buy few pikemens each turn, the attacker will retreat (ask BLOODAXE about that )))))

savetuba's second map is useless because of resources waste. If i want to attack something like that, i will use balistas, commandeers (many of them) and few melee. I would push his archers back with my balistas then TAKE OVER all walls and towers and SELL them right away Then retreat with the new stolen resources and raise a melee army.

dby's map seems much better. Next week i'll attack one castle that looks like dby's and i'll tell you later about how hard it was
However i prefer to take over a enemy barrack instead of building one (if it's possible)

Last Edited : Friday, 25 October 2002 - 06:19

Here's another ascii version of my basic castle, though this one does not have stone walls and drawbridge yet: hem.spray.se/robert_porschke/waronline/ascii_wol.htm

Maybe WoL should go ascii instead of that fancy flash stuff?

ps. sorry about the spam

Last Edited : Thursday, 24 October 2002 - 09:06

ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange. In other words, those little characters that count as letters and numbers (as in a written number, like "Posted Thursday, October 24, 2002 - 09:02" has numbers in it, as opposed to a "10" in a database.)

But enough trivia already. I would actualy vouch for virtually everything CoD said, except going to attack next week

(I can't do that, unless I'm in a battle game... :-) )

dby how do you generate those ascii pictures? i never seen a color one but i think it's possible

www.degraeve.com/gif2txt.shtml - you can generate html colour ones too, but they're not "the real deal", IMHO.

Ok, enough about ascii. Back to defending castle subject.

Lots of ballistas inside the castle and maybe some big stacks of commandeers, marksmen in the front towers, and a tablespoon of tough troops at the doorstep protecting the marksmen. That's my recepie for a well defended castle. Of course, building walls in front of the towers could be clever too.

total all out invasion on me, i knew i'd be the next target several days in advance, wot i did was build "The Great Wall of EVille". i was fortunate enuf to be in a corner, so wot i did was boxed myself in with walls, its giving me time to prepare, and the outposts/towers i got posted everywhere are going to me to peg off his units and bring them to a mangable size...i hope

the-e-ville the question is: do you have enough resources? what are you doing if nobody will attack you? you still loose the game because you don't expand.

yeah i am the player against the e ville and i am using range to attack your unitsand i will use a secret trick soon btw u dont have much resources because it`s the corner of only 1 castle and we ( me and little marckel ) share the whole map

For real, you got a secret trick??

Do tell us the secret trick hehehe!

i cant tell it here because of the e ville its not a really secret trick but a handy trick