Siege towers are the worst in the game. Just don't use them

My experiences are always having the idiots moving the siege tower STOP, get the s*** killed out of half of them by towers, then pile into the tower ONE AT A TIME, and exit ONE AT A TIME, so that once the wall defenders have been completely obliterated, there's still like FIFTY of my troops at the bottom of the siege tower

Ladders are better (with some protection)

Andariel, you couldn't be more wrong. Towers are way better than ladders. With ladders, your men come up 2 at a time instead of like 30 at the same time, which mean smaller losses. Sure, it takes longer to get up, but that's why you only use 2 units to take the wall, one on each side of the gate, and then capture the gate so that the rest of your soldiers can get in. Also, even of you don't use the towers to climb the walls, you should still get as many as possible so that they can fire at the defenders.

Always remember, there is no need to attack where the enemy is strongest. If you go for the corners, you can get one unit up, possibly in the fire shadow of the towers, take the towers each side and let four more units up. The AI troops on the walls don't react to this (although archers do shoot at you). You can get several units up on the wall, then sto with one tower between you and the enemy units. They come through the tower so it is your whole formation against their one man at a time. Do that, using siege towers for fire support and you won't go far wrong.

Towers rock

Also, When the enemy sally forth and I have a siege tower, if I use the tower on Fire at Will will they be shot as they approach me?

positioning seige towers:

from what I've noticed it seems they only have a certain places along a wall where they can be placed - they automatically align themselves with those places. You can move a seige tower to anywhere next to a wall, but only attack in the middle of a section of wall. Same as rams.

oh and those big seige towers make excellent repeating ballistas if the enemy sallies forth. One reason why it's a good idea to build loads of them. Great fun to be had by having a line of 8 mega seige towers all facing the gate the enmy sallies forth from. They do run out of ammo - but each mega seige tower can obliterate an entire unit. It's a good idea to turn off auto-fire from the outer seige towers so they don't all fire at the same unit at the same time. Turn them back on when you've exhuasted the ammo in the central seige towers.

Your troops with missiles get their ammo back when they drop the tower, but the towers don't get a reload if new troops pick them up.

Part of playing any game is understanding how to play the game ... and by that I mean exploit weaknesses in how the AI or certain parts of the game work.

Kudos to whoever it was on this forum that first posted info about siege towers as I had never even realized that they could fire missiles.

They do have a finite amount of ammo but the accuracy and fire rate is nearly insane and can take out pretty much any non-testudo unit in minutes. Since discovering that I almost always take an extra turn when besieging a city and build as many siege towers as I can (i.e. as many non-archer infantry as there are). These monstrosities can dish out death faster than an uzi so I start off a siege by parking the towers anywhere within range of the enemy. There is a chance that a few of the towers may get destroyed (although they are tough to knock out with anything short of onagers), but it's well worth the carnage they deal out to the enemy.

Also, units that have ammo anyway (Hastani, archers etc) add theirs to the tower's ammo, IIRC.

The epic seige towers are insane.(over-powered)
P.S. I didn't notice hastati gave ammo to the towers.

I don't think they do, but I'd have to check to be certain.

Back to the question: If I understand you correctly, you are moving the towers to a spot on the ground first? Then letting them fire all their ammo, and THEN ordering them to attack a wall section?

If all of that is correct, then here's the answer: The guys pushing the tower have to place it at the correct position to get onto the wall. If they don't get to line it up first (outside the defending tower's range) then they will try to do it afterwards, when they are jammed in close to the wall where maneuvering the tower is VERY difficult.

I found that if I order the tower to attack the wall from the start, then the men pushing it line it all up while they have plenty of space. Once the tower gets really close to the wall, I press <backspace> to cancel the attack wall order. If fire-at-will is on, the tower will be firing the whole time. Once it is out of ammo, then ordering it to attack the wall again means they just start pushing the tower straight forwards again, & there is no delay or stuffing around trying to line up the tower. I found that rather effective & I think that's the answer to your problem.

I hope they fix the siege limitations in M2:TW. I would love for the walls to have MANY more sections, so that you could have a whole lot of ladders assault one stretch of wall. Also, trebuchets & onagers should be able to smash a MUCH larger opening in the wall - ie: destroy the adjacent section of wall (like in AOE/AOK/WC2, etc) so that it isn't such a deathtrap for your forces, trying to storm through such a small opening.

GM

@ GMRage:

Yes! That's the answer I needed! I was starting to suspect something like this - that towers/ladders can only contact walls at quite particular points. It's been really exasparating.

Thank you!

This is related, but not directly ... you'll notice the same thing if you fire siege weapons at walls. They will all target the same section regardless of where on a wall segment you want them to fire.