With the release of Total War: Warhammer 3's new 'Siege Proving Grounds' beta, running from July 24th to August 7th, everyone is talking about the miraculous and long-requested removal of ass ladders. For those unfamiliar with the term, this refers to when you run a unit up to a wall in a siege and they magically extricate a 30-foot ladder from seemingly nowhere, hence the loving parlance, ass ladders.
It's one of the elements that makes Total War: Warhammer's sieges feel more arcadey, especially when you consider that any unit can also attack and break down gates. Both of these together make traditional siege constructs like rams and towers a bit redundant, so in an effort to create more meaningful siege battles, insta-ladders have been banished, siege attrition has been tweaked into a more gradual decline, and battle AI has been adjusted to make your enemy more responsive.
These are all really good changes, and the former has helped the battle for the walls feel more significant, but Total War: Warhammer 3 has a much bigger problem when it comes to gates. First off, it's unclear whether the infamous gate bug has been fixed. To put this in perspective, I've played the Total War: Warhammer games for almost 3,000 hours since the launch of the original, and this bug has appeared on and off the entire time, though it definitely got worse with recent instalments.
The bug happens when your troops are attacking a gate: The enemy gets too close, opening said gate, and this lets in a trickle of your troops who start fighting the unit. Now trapped on the other side of the gate, these troops get murdered, while the rest of the unit gets confused and stops attacking the gate since it's technically engaged in a battle. In some of my campaigns, this would happen in almost every siege battle, and it's a bug that dates back as far as Total War: Rome II.
Unit pathfinding in relation to gates has always been an issue as well—you select your army and try to move them through the gate and many decide to climb the walls instead. The good news is that removing the ladders has improved this significantly, I guess because units now have fewer potential routes to take in getting past the walls.
But the biggest issue around gates, in my opinion, is that any unit can smash them down. It might take a little time for your basic infantry to hack through, but there's no negative consequence to them hanging out and chopping away; in fact, it's one of the safest places on the battlefield, sheltered from towers and missile infantry. Plus, there's no way to destroy a gate segment of the wall entirely. I do, however, think there are some changes that would help:
- Only certain units should be able to attack gates: First off, only specific units should be able to attack gates—monsters, constructs, axe/greataxe infantry, artillery, any unit that makes sense. Miners have a unit tag that says "Good against gates", so maybe this tag could be more broadly distributed so factions have gate-wrecking specialists or even regiments of renown.
- Use unit tags to create specialist siege units: The removal of ladders has made unique infantry units like Warp Grinders (who can destroy walls) much more powerful and fun to use, but there just aren't enough of them. There could even be a new "Escalade" or "Climb" unit tag for Rangers, Grypt Ghouls, Gutter Runners, etc, letting certain specialist units climb walls (with grappling hooks or their claws), where it makes sense.
- Use the ancillary and banner system for sieges: There are currently a few cases of ancillaries that increase number of siege towers constructed, but these could be used more broadly to improve sieges, or even provide banners to units which let them perform a certain role in a siege. Maybe ladders could even be banners you assign to units before a battle.
I think the decision not to give every unit a ladder is a great one, but Creative Assembly needs to treat gates the same way if it actually wants to make siege-play more meaningful. If not, then there should at least be some kind of disincentive for massing non-specialised units under a gate and taking your sweet time to smash it down. I guess magic would do the trick and AI does seem to be a lot better at punishing clumped up gate-attackers with it, but some spells can't hit the units underneath. It could also be a gate-based ability, like dropping rocks on them or something.
Many settlements have campaign buildings that improve unit stats during a siege and offer extra defensive supplies, so why not attach tangible upgrades to these? They could be actual battle abilities or even the long-requested wall-mounted artillery that we previously saw in Total War: Three Kingdoms. To be honest, I'd be happy to see CA entirely remove the ability to use defensive supplies to build during battles—Total War isn't a tower defence after all.
Why not make siege constructions more like they were in Three Kingdoms? It makes much more sense to place your defences in advance of a battle and plan how you're going to funnel and tackle the enemy vs. adding an additional layer of micromanagement when you're already spinning lots of plates directing units.
On the whole, I think the Siege Beta is really positive and shows not only that CA is taking sieges seriously, collecting feedback from the beta to implement, but that it plans on investing in Total War: Warhammer 3 (and Immortal Empires) for a long time to come. After all, this siege system has remained mostly intact since the first game 9 years ago, so I think making efforts to change it this far along shows that we'll likely be playing Total War: Warhammer 3 for a while yet.
The Siege Beta is available until August 7th on the Steam beta tab for Total War: Warhammer 3, in case you want to give it a try yourself and leave CA some feedback.
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