To dodge, or not to dodge?

the war function in this game needs to become more strategy and less slug fest...having an attack doing nothing but taking simple resources which the game is overfilled with just makes the slugfest siege mechanic the only worthwhile war function....lets make this more of a thinking game than whoever is the biggest wins..i would love pathfinding, i would love battle magic and i would love an attack to cause more damage if the defender wimps out...this could be such an awesome war game with a few adjustments and we are seeing what is happening to the game with its outdated game mechanics and current game play...sory i have to get back to clicking

Nalleen and Hora both have interesting ideas as well. Especially the idea of occupying a city and having access to what the people produce while you're there. If you go in with attack troops and occupy you will have the disadvantage of trying to defend with those troops when you're hosts troops come home.

Hmm....  I would like to OCCUPY an enemy city plus forcing the population to produce stuff for me while sitting there... (something like tribute...)

Edited by Hora - 18 Aug 2013 at 14:33

Myr wrote: I just think that there should be some additional penalty to leaving your helpless citizens at the mercy of an enemy army.

i don't disagree at all that it's a very silly mechanic, worthy of Monty Python, to have all the armies leave the city for their own protection while the the attackers sort through citizens looking for anyone in armour, finally leaving in disappointment.  i'm only saying that it works that way because the abstraction of combat in illy is so very...abstract.

to put things on a firmer basis, unwalled cities would have to be immediately raidable while walled cities were not; t1 and t2 siege engines would need to be collapsed together (because really, there are siege engines that only affect walls and others that only affect buildings?); siege attacks would attempt to focus on walls and some number of "misses" would hit buildings; and once walls were reduced (or sapped by engineers, or gate security infiltrated by spies in place) the raid/razing/conquest could occur.  cities would need to take population damage in a raid based somehow on the amount of goods taken.  and why stop there?  sieges without engines should still be effective, because the food production is not really "in the city", it's in the surrounding countryside, outside the walls.  so a siege in progress should disrupt growing, mining, etc., hindering or preventing the generation of resources.  at that point, a patient player without siege engines could fairly well starve a village in the same way we currently reduce population with siege engines...just like they did in the "good old days" of real siege warfare.

defenders, of course, ought to be doing more than sallying forth from within a sieged city.  why not allow their own siege engines to fire on the besieger's engines (with similar collateral damage for misses)?  what about a sovereignty building representing additional fortifications, whose purpose would be to increase the bonus awarded by the wall?  might the long-awaited battle magic help to even the contest, since the defenders would be so much closer to their mana than the attacker?

i don't have the depth in illy combat that a lot of you in this thread do, but from what i have seen making it "realistic" would require more work than a point fix or two.  i can only speak for myself, but the reason my defensive garrisons leave a city under attack is that defending is a fool's errand in illyriad.  if my troops had some way to sell their lives more dearly in defence, with cover behind a thick stone wall, than attacking without any such advantage, that would be enough to keep them in town.

That's true. If building damage were allowed for attacking armies, the attacking armies should be 100% blocked by the city wall. Cavalry would be unrealistic, but perhaps ground troops could use ladders or something.