Why Siege Battles are So Miserable - Total War: Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires 

Sieges are broken because there generally is no benefit to defending a walled city or fortress. Get rid of ass ladders. Give towers 180 degree firing arc. Make firing positions where the defender can mount artillery on walls/towers. Reduce the length of walls so that the defenders have enough garrison to defend the walls. Currently, the High Elf and Empire fortresses are the only siege maps that provide a significant benefit to the defenders, and they are still pretty marginal.

Imo siege map sizes is a big issue as well. Both for the player and AI. For the latter it messes with its pathfinding and deployement For the player you end up having to thin out your forces all around the map because you don't have enough soldier to garrisson the huge city or run around your soldiers for too long. If they reduced the size of most siege maps by 50% (or more) i believe sieges would feel much better.

I've got thousands of hours in Rome 1, Medieval 2, Empire, Napoleon Shogun 2, and Rome 2. All of those previous titles, while with varying faults and issues, offered siege battle experiences levels of magnitude better than what the Warhammer series offers. The siege battles were trash in Warhammer 1 and seem to be no better in Warhammer 2 and 3. A lot of Warhammer players opine on why the siege experience is so bad. I think the answer is simple: CA created an arcade-like, fast-paced game to cater to the casual crowd. The same mechanics which make field battles so fast-paced and digestible for the average game, also make siege battles totally pointless: OP hero units which single-handedly down enemy units or tank missile fire; unrealistically accurate artillery fire; cartoon-like implementations (units spawning ladders and climbing up the walls). Warhammer is a casual, stream-lined experience, which is likely a large reason for why it has sold so much better than previous TW titles. However, it lacks much of the tactical nuance and strategy that was present in previous TW titles. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Want a game with a good implementation of siege battles? Go play a more game with more realism (basically any TW title that isn't Warhammer).

BTW why archers and artillery can shoot units that they cant see behind the walls?

The main issue is : defences are not strong enough, compare with Medieval II in which you could win as the defender with a fraction of the enemy troops as the walls were such a force multiplier. That's why garrisons need to be a full stack in the first place in W3, while only using the free slots in M2 (say 4x militia spearmen and 2x militia crossbow) already was a serious trouble for the attacker, let alone if I had a couple turns to see them coming and reinforce the numbers a bit. Yes, it also falls back to the idiocy inherited from R2 of having limited armies that need a general instead of freely moving units around, allowing you to detach some units from an army to reinforce the garrison if necessary Upgraded defences, which did not mean you had to sacrifice one of your very limited building slots, also were a game changer. Ballista towers made it a coin flip you'd destroy a ram or siege tower before it touches the walls, while cannon towers meant the enemy had to bring heavy artillery to win. Strategically in W3, this means fortified settlements cannot be used reliably as a good stopping point for the enemy, while your armies do something else. While it's absolutely the case in M2. Other point : much bigger maps which allowed attacking from all sides while having lots of room outside to sally out or a reinforcement army to do its things. Giving more options to disrupt the enemy before they touch the walls.

I think there are several issues. I don't want to sound like a broken record but even with an only melee build if you don't have to build siege equipment (like in a real medieval siege) to climb up a wall, walls are pointless. The gate ai is a joke. The silly points system has been improved simply because they have made the towers irrelevant. It's a problem they seem incapable of improving them.

Exactly this made me stop playing WH3 for now. Even worse: the game forces you to manually play those bad sieges because the auto resolve will screw you over everytime in siege battles. Ultimately this made me switch the battle difficulty allllll the time to avoid those boring sieges.

i had to install 28 mods to make sieges fun

Im not sure if I agree to stand back and let the artillery break the towers if you have a more balanced army. It takes longer time and then the AI get more time to get resources to build towers/ barricades inside the settlement. However with your archer army I clearly see the benefit of destroying the towers.

My usual tactics for sieges is to have some tankier units bait the idea into nice clusters and then raining artillery fire or magic while the ai scrambles like a colony of panicked ants, unwilling to try exiting the wall to stop me. All the siege seems to do is make the ai not want to use its best toys on me, but by the time they would need to use it, their army is already in tatters and the thing leaves.

Make garrisons smaller add recruitment slots to garrison so jou have to pay if jou want a strong garrison but wit the ability to take out the garrison and put it in jour army it gives the choice for a stronger attack but a weaker defence for flanks And jou don't have to keep jour lord in a cetelment for X number of turns for recruitment (Upkeep for extra garrison slots with a discount but no supply lines Increase money from buildings if garrison is strong as a incentive to keep strong garrisons) Remove but laders but add laders a unit can pick up with a limmeted amount Add special recrutebel battering ram in extra slot for army for movement penalty Smal citys 1 wal (low level cetelment) big citys 2 wals 1 main and 1 smal in the city center keep lader clime speed as it it but decrease points to move of the wal to defendebol ramparts Let the ai devend both wals 60/40 so army los won't happen at the first wal or make them fall back at 50% damege No Tower building during a battle only before the start Ammo resupply points 1 outside the city for attacker 1 at eatch wall en citty center for defender More open rooms in the citty for flanking I think that wil work wonders but it won't Be easy If not impossible to at it 😭

The biggest reasons sieges suck are ass ladders and magic, the most extreme example being Drazoath clearing sieges by himself while taking zero damage easily just using flames of azgorh. If walls prevented flying units from passing them (but not landing on them) until capped, or magic from being cast from outside the settlement to within, we could have tiered sieges where taking the walls with infantry is step 1 and step 2 is our reward of fighting within the settlement with the rest of our forces. I know some people would cry about fliers being limited but holding them until after your initial assault to rush the enemy archers that are docked within the city would help give that multi stage feel that some of the older TW sieges had. More single entities need wallbreaker for the same reasons. CA wont fix them though and wont use any fantastical elements in their fantasy game's sieges because they're out of ideas

Yep, siege defense AI stalls without any real goal. This made some sense with long range re-buildable wooden towers (even if it was annoying as hell), but it doesn't now.

The best sieges were Mediaeval 2, though I did enjoy Rome, the pop up defences are as interesting as reading the memoirs of an accountant 🙄 in medieval my friends and i used to bet on how few units could defeat an AI assault on a castle, i miss that

I e seen archeon defeat entire armies by himself in seige battles.

I really tried to like the game, love all the other total wars but I just find it unplayable and messy

A quick fix for sieges to make them tolerable would be to remove ass ladders, add more build areas so that theres no more areas for the enemy to just... walk around, have each tier of walls be an additional turn without taking attrition, and increase the range of the buildable towers by 25-50 percent. And... rethink what units can destroy a wall or a gate. Its seriously dumb that some random general dude can yeet a gate all by himself. For the ladders, id say say make them buildable. 1 turn = 2 ladders but ladders nake your units very tired. 2 turns = 1 siege tower. Units still fresh. 2 turns = 1 Battering ram. Also, they could take a page out of grimhammer and introduce limits to every factions units based on the buildings they have. That way you cant just spam the crap out a few units to win sieges, or at least it would be much harder. Frankly thatd help with more than just sieges, especially if the A.I isnt AS limited as the player. You would have to think about what building chains you want, itd take WAY longer to spam b.s units, and youd have to consider the types of units your enemy will field

Watching battles like this really does make me think there should be a campaign 'supplies' resource like in 3k, but have it used for ammunition, not just replenishment. There should always be a cost to fighting battle after battle with an army. A melee focused army takes casualties that need replenished, and ranged focused armies should do the same. Maybe have some units cost more supplies than others (you can recover crossbow bolts, not gunpowder) and have skavenslave slingers just replenish automatically as they pick up a bunch of rocks. Otherwise have it work just like 3k supplies.

Maps are too huge... Sometime the smaller the better.

Which total war har good sieges

why play a race that only has one good unit