In the stream Zantai said players wouldn’t be getting access to catapults for the fairly good reason that they would trivialize raider camps (and why do we need siege equipment if we’re not sieging other fortresses anyway?). I still think it would be awesome to get some version of them though, purely for the cool factor.
If they were combined into a second type of guard tower that gained the ballistic capability of catapults while lacking its mobility it could be a good and interesting compromise. It would make sense that a fortress that is sieged every couple of years would build such a defense, so it makes sense. I suspect their range would need to be slightly less than the raider’s catapults, least they trivialize that threat. They would still function well as aoe dmg to raiders though, which is fun. They would also add an ongoing stone sink to the economy, which is already a fairly tight resource and thus would be interesting.
While they could still be used to clear raider camps with a bit of setup, the t2 tower already does this so game possibilities wouldn’t actually change much in that regard.
Just a few considerations, Pro and Con:
-
Wheels were only added to medieval catapults (which, by the way, are technically Mangonels) fairly late, so having Immobile catapults mounted permanently would be both a good balancing method and appropriate to our backward little frontier towns.
-
Catapult Towers would have to be a special construction. Starting back in the centuries BC, the Greeks discovered that catapults and ballistae generated major recoil forces, and the recoil forces would shake apart regular stone towers after a few shots. The solution was wider towers built on a solid earth base and faced with stone that could withstand the force of the catapult firing, but also had to be built specially for the catapults. This actually turned out to be a Good Thing eventually, when the first heavy gunpowder cannon came along they generated even higher recoil forces, so the solid ‘bastion’-type towers were a perfect model for what was needed (I believe there is still a good example of an early ‘artillery tower’ at Rothenburg-ob-Tauber in Germany)
-
Another potential means to limit catapultery is that they required specially-skilled or trained men to operate them and keep them in good repair. That means the game could legitimately require Education at the school just as the Teacher position does in order to man a catapult.
2 Likes