I’ve been thinking a bit about the upcoming combat changes and mulling over what I hope it will look like, so I thought I’d type some of my thoughts out in case they are useful food for thought for the devs.
Catapults: Please, make trebuchet instead, they are much cooler. That aside, I think the intended function of trebuchets will be to force static defensive setups to either leave the safety of their fort and sally out to fight in the field or suffer the harsh consequences. My hope is that they will have a fair bit of a setup time once they reach their firing position, so you can see where they are going to be a threat and make a rush at them before they get to fire. If they do get the chance to fire though it should be limited to a couple of highly devastating attacks before they run out of ammo, so that the cost of not rushing them is very front loaded but at least over quickly (giving the player a tough but real choice). I would like to see them come with three flavors of ammunition. Rocks, obviously, for pure area damage. Burning pitch, which would create a large zone of fire that set buildings afire and does fire damage to anyone caught inside. And plague cows, which would give very nasty (and combat hindering) diseases to anyone caught near them that could then spread. We would also have access to such weapons, and so I think they would need to be balanced by requiring significant resources for each shot you fire, with a fairly long reload time between shots. Rocks would cost stone, burning pitch would require wood & coal, and plague cows would require cows.
Knights: I’m kind of expecting the mounted knights to just be more mobile higher health melee fighters. Which is cool, but then they come with the same significant downside of expensively equipped melee fighters in feeling unsustainable if you are losing thousands of gold worth of equipment whenever one dies. I think the best way to work around this issue in an interesting way would be to have downed knights drop all their ‘broken equipment’ upon death, which could then be collected by village laborers afterwards and repaired at the armory or blacksmith to be used again, or looted and scurried away by the raiders. So it isn’t guaranteed you will recover the investment, but if you are able to and then repair it for about 25% the cost of making it from scratch (or whatever number% feels balanced) then it would feel more worthwhile to send high investment melee units out to fight and die for glory. It might also be interesting to give the elite of raider knights the chance to drop a piece of ‘broken equipment’, they’re generally so tank that even if you beat them they will run away, so killing them takes a bit of work that could be fairly rewarded.
So that’s it, the ‘stick and carrot’ of encouraging players to not just hide behind static defenses but to sally out to take the fight to the raiders.