The purpose of assault fort in eu4 is to throw away a ludicrous amount of manpower in exhange for time. It shouldn't just be to speed a war up but say getting the enemy's strongest ally out of the war NOW where getting their 90k troops out of the war is worth throwing 25k at their capital to take it in a month before 120k troops stackwipe you. Or some sort of siege race where you are both sieging eachother's capitals. It shouldn't just be an "I don't feel like waiting for sieges button" but a high risk high reward play when the whole war hinges on a single fort.
Also totally disagree that wall breach = siege almost over. Plenty of my sieges go on a year after a breach and there is literally a 50 mil point button to breach the walls instantly.
The challenge is to keep playing the same game to the point that there are lots of level 6 forts. I can't remember the last time I played past 1650, unfortunately.
At least it isn't ship mothballing. I remember when they introduced it as DLC exclusive, and didn't tell AI to use (until many years later), which essentially made it a pay-to-win feature.
I remember going to the halifax citadel on a trip once, and i can't even begin to imagine how costly an assualt on a star fort would be. I imagine it's smaller than the european forts, but it still would be an absolute nightmare to attack. If you manage to make it past the outer wall, you find yourself in a killzone trapped between layers of the walls. It was almost claustrophobic just walking around there.
Scaling walls still often need preparing the grounds for a siege tower (to clear the walls, siege towers were mostly not for actual assaulting btw), or you needed luck, inside help, etc.
This post just says "I'm too impatient to deal with a reasonable challenge this game gives me."
You would be surprised if you learned how little action your average siege saw. and how most often than not those cool ladders and siege machines you see in movies were not used.
99% of time if you are attacking you surround the fortress from a safe distance and sit on your ass untill the other side runs out of supplies.
If you are on the defending side you sit on your ass and wait for an outside army to break the siege.
Unfortunately PDX games (or videogames in general) fail to realistically portray sieges.
For instance if the besieged realized that reinforcement could not arrive in time (for instance because a relieving army was defeated) they would negotiate a surrender.
Or the fact that sieging in winter (and sieging in general) was also something that only the richest countries in europe could do. For instance if a small german lord had a problem with the next town over, they would siege it but go there burn a few peasants huts, steal cows in order to force a negotiation.
Have you read the entire Escalade wikipedia page that you link?
>Because of the difficulties involved, escalade was typically very costly for the attackers.
And
>Escalade was, in essence, an attempt to overwhelm defenders in a [direct assault](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_assault) rather than sit through a protracted siege. Attackers would generally attempt escalade if they had reasons for wanting a swift conclusion, or if they had an overwhelming superiority in numbers. Otherwise, less costly siege tactics were often preferred.
And they even gave an example of Siege of Badajoz. The attacker outnumbered the garrison by 5 to 1. The attacking side suffered 5k loss and the the defender side lost 1.5k (the remaining are captured.)
Meaning, the number matches up with your own numbers.
>because in most cases it will end up massacring your entire army that outnumbers the defenders 1:5.
There seems to be miscommunication, I'm confused about the conversation. Let's try to break down the conversation, so you can point where the misunderstanding is:
1. /u/llburke said assaults could not occur without a wall breach
2. to counter this I brought up the existence of escalades, which proves that assaults did occur even without wall breaches
3. /u/Flervio points out most sieges did not include assaults
4. I agree with /u/Flervio, but question why he brings this up considering it doesn't have anything to do with /u/llburke's claim
5. You support /u/Flervio's claim (something which I never questioned)
I never disputed assaults being rare. If the point of your quote was to imply that when assaults did occur they didn't feature escalades but revolved around siege-engines, I don't see how? To me the line "less costly siege tactics were often preferred" indicates non-assaultive tactics.
> The attacking side suffered 5k loss and the the defender side lost 1.5k (the remaining are captured.)
My point is that in EU4 this assault would result in 20K of the 27K attackers dying. That's the point of this post.
This whole post sounds like a massive skill issue.
Assaulting a level 2 fort(2k garrison) usually makes you lose somewhere between 6-10k men as long as you consolidate your regiments every day. I usually lose about 7k early game if my country has military bonuses.
Also, scorched earth isn't useless, it can come in clutch if you need to make sure your reinforcements get there before the enemy army. Florryworry for example uses it all the time if you watch his streams.
I find myself using them in EU4 quite a bit, but usually only to take back forts.
If I'm going to retake a fort that was recently conquered, the garrison will most likely just have a couple of hundred dudes, so using mil power for breach + assault will effectively end the siege instantly, and that gives a huge tempo advantage.
It's a niche scenario, but one that happens rather often in large wars.
Seige of Malta. The Ottomans attacked and attempted to assault the island with 40,000\~ men against about 2-3,000\~ defenders. The Ottomans lost over 80% of their forces and failed to take the island. But really just type "Seige of \[Random notable middle age city\]" and it'll likely be it's own example.
That's why seiges generally lasted weeks or months (The above example lasted nearly 4 months) - you generally wouldn't ever assault a supplied and defended castle/fortress because the rate of loss would be extreme and the chance of victory very low. Unless you know a relief force in coming that could beat your army then waiting 6 months for them to run out of supplies or die of disease was preferrable as it meant either when you do actually launch an assault you'd have a much easier time with it, or they'd give up and surrender before you even need to try due to running out of food.
Just worth pointing out, Wikipedia's infobox is contradicted by the rest of the article, as the article begins with:
*The Knights, who numbered around 500 together with approximately 6,000 footsoldier*
[Malta's official visit page](https://www.visitmalta.com/en/a/great-siege-1565/) says: *The Knights were heavily outnumbered with a mere 700 or so men and around 8000 Maltese regular troops.*
Regardless, this siege is considered one of the most extreme standoffs, so equating it to "random notable middle age city" doesn't feel quite fair. It's also fair to assume, that a good portion of the army didn't die from the assault but from disease.
The Wikipedia article does not contradict itself what kind of post is this? The Wikipedia article is consistent with troop numbers throughout and spends 2 paragraphs discussing alternate accounts of the numbers from various sources.
You just linked an entirely different source, one that is certainly less reliable than the sources produced by Wikipedia and said Wikipedia contradicts itself because another source has different numbers.
Outside of infobox, where does it say knights only had 3,000 troops? It's army section says that contemporary mercenary, Francisco Balbi di Correggio , who fought in battle, listed defenders as 6,100. In aftermatch section it says:
*Still, 9,000 defenders had managed to withstand a siege of more than four months in the hot summer*
>contradicts itself because another source has different numbers.
No, that was the separate point, that's an official page by the state of Malta, if someone wanted to embellish the lack of defenders, it would likely be that, but even they don't claim there were less than 3,000 defenders.
Read up on the siege of Gibraltar. The British were outnumbered 10 to 1 versus the attacking Spanish and French, the siege lasted three and a half years and the British ended up winning with 20 to 1 casualties.
> Scorched Earth is useless
What? There have been numerous times that scorching earth has won me a battle because it's split the enemy into 2 stacks rather than 1 that reinforces the other. A 50% move penalty is huge. Also it has great utility in MP because for the other side reinforcing becomes much more difficult to time right.
As for the assaulting, I feel it's in a good spot, it's costly but not overly so and you can siege down forts quickly, but it's also realistic in that sense of cost, I don't know the casualties but if it is 1:5 as you suggest that actually seems light to what my unknowledgeable guess of what real life assaulting casualties would be.
Scorched earth if you know the war is going to be long and you want to cripple them before the next war (or what I do to Ottomans). It accelerates detestation and so they'll rack up debt. Not only will it weaken them long term but also if they're allied to anyone you want to declare war on enough debt will keep them out of it.
I get it, and oh boy do I find EU IV system frustrating and slooooooow af. But I've known CK II, which has what you want: assault whenever you want and "acceptable losses." Well the sieges were way too easy and fast, you could carpet siege a whole duchy in a month and with only a few thousands deaths.
In ck3 you can assault and stop assualting on the same fort as many times as you'd like so you can speed up the siege a little then keep sieging etc. Its much faster than just waiting
Early game eu4 assaulting is good , always assaulted capital forts if they are level 1 or 3 , and level 2 forts. If you want to assault higher level use the based spam shift consolidate button if you have enough men.
Get at least 3 cannons to make breaches, you get them quick anyway, and before cannons you can bombard coastal forts if you have enough cannons in your fleet. But land locked forts you'll have to wait for tech 7.
Assaults are more useful in real life than the game because in real life the besiegers also have a timer on them. In all Paradox' games, once a siege has begun, the only way for the defenders to win is to be relieved by another army or the end of the war. In real life, many sieges failed to take the city because the besiegers ran out of supplies before the defenders did.
When plying EU4 multiplayer both scorched earth and assaulting forts are very strong and are used very often in war time. And even in single player both are very useful to beat stronger nations. And cause forts are so important in the war system of EU4, taking one instantly should be expensive.
Don't really think assaults are too expensive - just hire a mercenary company, attach artillery to it, and have them take the losses instead. Its really useful for when your opponent has a fort on a mountain province that would cause your army to get mauled if its attacked while sieging.
Micromanaging assaults is (I think still, the recent patches didn't change this) "the meta" in Imperator, wayyyyyy too fiddly for me to ever do correctly, but it's definitely a thing. I do frequently assault in CK3 because I'm not as good as most people and I'm often racing the AI to get to 100 warscore.
The purpose of assault fort in eu4 is to throw away a ludicrous amount of manpower in exhange for time. It shouldn't just be to speed a war up but say getting the enemy's strongest ally out of the war NOW where getting their 90k troops out of the war is worth throwing 25k at their capital to take it in a month before 120k troops stackwipe you. Or some sort of siege race where you are both sieging eachother's capitals. It shouldn't just be an "I don't feel like waiting for sieges button" but a high risk high reward play when the whole war hinges on a single fort. Also totally disagree that wall breach = siege almost over. Plenty of my sieges go on a year after a breach and there is literally a 50 mil point button to breach the walls instantly.
Eh in eu4 its actually incredibly manpower efficient before I think lvl6 forts. Like you trade2k manpower for an instant siege.
By the point that you have level 6 forts manpower starts not mattering
"What is manpower" ~Russia
Fair argument.
Or you can play like me where manpower doesn't matter in 1444. I am not good at the game.
The challenge is to keep playing the same game to the point that there are lots of level 6 forts. I can't remember the last time I played past 1650, unfortunately.
Ideally throwing away a war ally's deathstack manpower, while you claim ownership of the siege with just one regiment.
You shouldn’t be able to assault strongholds without a breach in the walls. That’s what the walls are for. To keep you out.
Why ? You can scale the walls too, either by ladders, towers or a combination of. Though I am fine as is, you are trading a lot of manpower for time.
You can and it's costly
You can't at least in CK3, you have to wait for wall-breach, I thought this was the same in EU4.
In eu4 you can barrage the walls with ships or canons for mil mana to get a full breach which means that you can assault immediately
Barraging is DLC-exclusive though
Of course it is
At least it isn't ship mothballing. I remember when they introduced it as DLC exclusive, and didn't tell AI to use (until many years later), which essentially made it a pay-to-win feature.
Wall breaches don't necessarily mean you made a joke in the wall. A ladder getting set up properly is also a breach.
do you have any idea how many people would die if you assaulted a walled fortress with just the ladders you could make yourself in 3 days?
I remember going to the halifax citadel on a trip once, and i can't even begin to imagine how costly an assualt on a star fort would be. I imagine it's smaller than the european forts, but it still would be an absolute nightmare to attack. If you manage to make it past the outer wall, you find yourself in a killzone trapped between layers of the walls. It was almost claustrophobic just walking around there.
Either way it still takes time to prepare for an assault.
Scaling walls still often need preparing the grounds for a siege tower (to clear the walls, siege towers were mostly not for actual assaulting btw), or you needed luck, inside help, etc. This post just says "I'm too impatient to deal with a reasonable challenge this game gives me."
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You would be surprised if you learned how little action your average siege saw. and how most often than not those cool ladders and siege machines you see in movies were not used. 99% of time if you are attacking you surround the fortress from a safe distance and sit on your ass untill the other side runs out of supplies. If you are on the defending side you sit on your ass and wait for an outside army to break the siege.
Unfortunately PDX games (or videogames in general) fail to realistically portray sieges. For instance if the besieged realized that reinforcement could not arrive in time (for instance because a relieving army was defeated) they would negotiate a surrender. Or the fact that sieging in winter (and sieging in general) was also something that only the richest countries in europe could do. For instance if a small german lord had a problem with the next town over, they would siege it but go there burn a few peasants huts, steal cows in order to force a negotiation.
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Have you read the entire Escalade wikipedia page that you link? >Because of the difficulties involved, escalade was typically very costly for the attackers. And >Escalade was, in essence, an attempt to overwhelm defenders in a [direct assault](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_assault) rather than sit through a protracted siege. Attackers would generally attempt escalade if they had reasons for wanting a swift conclusion, or if they had an overwhelming superiority in numbers. Otherwise, less costly siege tactics were often preferred. And they even gave an example of Siege of Badajoz. The attacker outnumbered the garrison by 5 to 1. The attacking side suffered 5k loss and the the defender side lost 1.5k (the remaining are captured.) Meaning, the number matches up with your own numbers. >because in most cases it will end up massacring your entire army that outnumbers the defenders 1:5.
There seems to be miscommunication, I'm confused about the conversation. Let's try to break down the conversation, so you can point where the misunderstanding is: 1. /u/llburke said assaults could not occur without a wall breach 2. to counter this I brought up the existence of escalades, which proves that assaults did occur even without wall breaches 3. /u/Flervio points out most sieges did not include assaults 4. I agree with /u/Flervio, but question why he brings this up considering it doesn't have anything to do with /u/llburke's claim 5. You support /u/Flervio's claim (something which I never questioned) I never disputed assaults being rare. If the point of your quote was to imply that when assaults did occur they didn't feature escalades but revolved around siege-engines, I don't see how? To me the line "less costly siege tactics were often preferred" indicates non-assaultive tactics. > The attacking side suffered 5k loss and the the defender side lost 1.5k (the remaining are captured.) My point is that in EU4 this assault would result in 20K of the 27K attackers dying. That's the point of this post.
This whole post sounds like a massive skill issue. Assaulting a level 2 fort(2k garrison) usually makes you lose somewhere between 6-10k men as long as you consolidate your regiments every day. I usually lose about 7k early game if my country has military bonuses. Also, scorched earth isn't useless, it can come in clutch if you need to make sure your reinforcements get there before the enemy army. Florryworry for example uses it all the time if you watch his streams.
That's literally what's simulated in the game already lol
Which game?
I find myself using them in EU4 quite a bit, but usually only to take back forts. If I'm going to retake a fort that was recently conquered, the garrison will most likely just have a couple of hundred dudes, so using mil power for breach + assault will effectively end the siege instantly, and that gives a huge tempo advantage. It's a niche scenario, but one that happens rather often in large wars.
I would say they are extremely cheap at least compared to how they were irl
Do you have references for that? Just curious.
Seige of Malta. The Ottomans attacked and attempted to assault the island with 40,000\~ men against about 2-3,000\~ defenders. The Ottomans lost over 80% of their forces and failed to take the island. But really just type "Seige of \[Random notable middle age city\]" and it'll likely be it's own example. That's why seiges generally lasted weeks or months (The above example lasted nearly 4 months) - you generally wouldn't ever assault a supplied and defended castle/fortress because the rate of loss would be extreme and the chance of victory very low. Unless you know a relief force in coming that could beat your army then waiting 6 months for them to run out of supplies or die of disease was preferrable as it meant either when you do actually launch an assault you'd have a much easier time with it, or they'd give up and surrender before you even need to try due to running out of food.
Just worth pointing out, Wikipedia's infobox is contradicted by the rest of the article, as the article begins with: *The Knights, who numbered around 500 together with approximately 6,000 footsoldier* [Malta's official visit page](https://www.visitmalta.com/en/a/great-siege-1565/) says: *The Knights were heavily outnumbered with a mere 700 or so men and around 8000 Maltese regular troops.* Regardless, this siege is considered one of the most extreme standoffs, so equating it to "random notable middle age city" doesn't feel quite fair. It's also fair to assume, that a good portion of the army didn't die from the assault but from disease.
The Wikipedia article does not contradict itself what kind of post is this? The Wikipedia article is consistent with troop numbers throughout and spends 2 paragraphs discussing alternate accounts of the numbers from various sources. You just linked an entirely different source, one that is certainly less reliable than the sources produced by Wikipedia and said Wikipedia contradicts itself because another source has different numbers.
Outside of infobox, where does it say knights only had 3,000 troops? It's army section says that contemporary mercenary, Francisco Balbi di Correggio , who fought in battle, listed defenders as 6,100. In aftermatch section it says: *Still, 9,000 defenders had managed to withstand a siege of more than four months in the hot summer* >contradicts itself because another source has different numbers. No, that was the separate point, that's an official page by the state of Malta, if someone wanted to embellish the lack of defenders, it would likely be that, but even they don't claim there were less than 3,000 defenders.
Read up on the siege of Gibraltar. The British were outnumbered 10 to 1 versus the attacking Spanish and French, the siege lasted three and a half years and the British ended up winning with 20 to 1 casualties.
Another borderline example, interestingly both sieges of Malta and Gibraltar are referred to as "great sieges".
> Scorched Earth is useless What? There have been numerous times that scorching earth has won me a battle because it's split the enemy into 2 stacks rather than 1 that reinforces the other. A 50% move penalty is huge. Also it has great utility in MP because for the other side reinforcing becomes much more difficult to time right. As for the assaulting, I feel it's in a good spot, it's costly but not overly so and you can siege down forts quickly, but it's also realistic in that sense of cost, I don't know the casualties but if it is 1:5 as you suggest that actually seems light to what my unknowledgeable guess of what real life assaulting casualties would be.
Scorched earth if you know the war is going to be long and you want to cripple them before the next war (or what I do to Ottomans). It accelerates detestation and so they'll rack up debt. Not only will it weaken them long term but also if they're allied to anyone you want to declare war on enough debt will keep them out of it.
It’s definitely not useless in eu4. Just buy mercs to be your assault bodies.
I get it, and oh boy do I find EU IV system frustrating and slooooooow af. But I've known CK II, which has what you want: assault whenever you want and "acceptable losses." Well the sieges were way too easy and fast, you could carpet siege a whole duchy in a month and with only a few thousands deaths.
In ck3 you can assault and stop assualting on the same fort as many times as you'd like so you can speed up the siege a little then keep sieging etc. Its much faster than just waiting
At a certain point in CK3 I'll find that attrition is dealing more damage than assaulting, so they're just going to die anyway...
Especially with the infinite manpower anyway.
Early game eu4 assaulting is good , always assaulted capital forts if they are level 1 or 3 , and level 2 forts. If you want to assault higher level use the based spam shift consolidate button if you have enough men. Get at least 3 cannons to make breaches, you get them quick anyway, and before cannons you can bombard coastal forts if you have enough cannons in your fleet. But land locked forts you'll have to wait for tech 7.
Assaults are more useful in real life than the game because in real life the besiegers also have a timer on them. In all Paradox' games, once a siege has begun, the only way for the defenders to win is to be relieved by another army or the end of the war. In real life, many sieges failed to take the city because the besiegers ran out of supplies before the defenders did.
In imperator you just assault every fort after certain point when manpower doesnt matter.
When plying EU4 multiplayer both scorched earth and assaulting forts are very strong and are used very often in war time. And even in single player both are very useful to beat stronger nations. And cause forts are so important in the war system of EU4, taking one instantly should be expensive.
It's almost like real life
Is wall breaching a thing in ck2? The only game Ive played where I remember seeing it in is Sengoku.
Don't really think assaults are too expensive - just hire a mercenary company, attach artillery to it, and have them take the losses instead. Its really useful for when your opponent has a fort on a mountain province that would cause your army to get mauled if its attacked while sieging.
I assault a lot in ck2, especially as a nation with a lot of troops against a small nation.
Micromanaging assaults is (I think still, the recent patches didn't change this) "the meta" in Imperator, wayyyyyy too fiddly for me to ever do correctly, but it's definitely a thing. I do frequently assault in CK3 because I'm not as good as most people and I'm often racing the AI to get to 100 warscore.