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attrition, so the siege will eventually succeed if
the siege force is large enough.
A siege may be temporarily interrupted if a
friendly army attacks the besieging army. During the ensuing field combat the siege will not
progress any further; but unless the enemy is
defeated the siege will resume once the battle is
over. This attempt to lift the siege will not allow the defenders to receive reinforcements or
repair any damage to their walls. The siege will
simply pick up from the point that it left off.
The besieging force may decide to launch
an assault of the defences at any time by clicking the “assault” button. This orders the attackers to abandon their slow, methodical efforts to
grind the defenders into submission, and immediately attempt to swarm over the walls and
capture the city. Unless the walls have been
breached to allow an easy point of access, the
casualties on the attacker’s side are likely to be
ghastly and their morale will plummet quite
rapidly.
To have any real chance of success, the infantry component of the attacker’s army should
outnumber the defender’s garrison size by a
large margin. If the number of attacking infantry drops below the number of defending
garrison, the defender will become immune to
any further morale loss during the assault. The
morale-loss immunity takes effect as soon as
the attacker has sustained sufficient infantry
casualties to create this imbalance. Cavalry is
nearly useless at assault and will virtually never
contribute to the battle unless the walls have
been breached (and even then, they are much
less effective than normal). Artillery is somewhat more useful, but the brunt of the assault
will be borne by your infantry.
If the defender is able to repel the attacker,
the siege will resume. The morale lost by both
sides will be recovered over time, although the
current progress of the siege will limit the maximum possible morale of the defenders. The
besieging force will slowly replenish its forces
via monthly reinforcement, whereas the garrison will not, so it is possible to accelerate this
process a bit by launching a series of successive
assaults. Unless you have an extremely large
force that is likely to wipe out the defenders,
you should probably wait until the walls have
been breached before thinking about launching an assault.
Only the commander of a siege can order an
assault. A defender cannot initiate one, nor can
any other country whose army is participating
in the siege. The siege commander will always
be the owner of the army that first initiated a
siege. If two or more nations’ armies participate
in a field battle and then jointly initiate a siege,
the commander will be determined by the leader with the highest siege rating. If these values
are equal, the commander will be the leader
with the highest combined fire and shock values. If this doesn’t break the tie between nations, the country with the largest force will assume command. Once a commander has been
chosen, only his departure from the siege will
cause a new commander to be selected.
If you are patient, you can simply wait for
the city to surrender to your army without a
fight. Once the walls have been breached, the
defenders’ morale and garrison will begin to
drop fairly rapidly and it should only be a matter of time until the city simply opens the gates
to your army.
Capturing Provinces
Control of a province is transferred to the country that commands the siege force as soon as
the city has been captured. The ownership of
the province does not change. Ownership can
only be transferred as a peace condition. There
is one exception to this rule that we will discuss
in more detail in the next chapter: an army that
captures a colony that has not yet evolved into
a full-fledged colonial city will have the option
to assume full ownership of the province as
soon as it has been captured, or it may choose
to destroy the colony.
When an enemy army first enters a newly
captured city, there is a chance that some of the
soldiers may get carried away with the thrill of
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