Unconventional siege tactics

Mass stone to flesh.

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And then they killed every single person in the city.....because the other moral is "Old Testament God doesn't give a shit about anyone but this one Semetic tribe."

Since gunpowder was first invented, man has had one thought: See that building? Fuck that building, and motherfuck anyone dumb enough to be inside.

I always liked the picture in that one art book where it's got like 50 dragons around Gondolin, just consantly spewing fire at the walls.

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Negotiation

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Just build a big ramp.

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You gotta love how blunt the romans are. They had awesome heavy infantry and did everything possible to use it.

Enemy in a high castle? Build a fuckhuge ramp and march the infantry up to it.

Carthage are better sailors? Strap an ramp on the roman boat, smash it onto the carthanginian boat, and march infantry on it.

Enemy is hitting you with shock cavalry and horse archers? MARCH INFANTRY INTO THEM......fail, and then begrudgingly adopt their tactics

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This comic is always funny

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>>floating the entire castle off of the ground
That's a fucking.

In a fantasy setting, chances are doing the Trojan Horse would be pretty damn unconventional.

>put your party in a bag of holding
>throw it over the wall with whatever
>flies past all the enemy soldiers and defenses straight through window into the castles throne room
>bag hits the ground and tears open releasing your entire party right in front of the boss
>fuck up surprised bosses shit

I positively adore the kind of techno medievalism that Nausicaa had. Trench warfare with rifles and artillery combined with armored combat and religious ceremony.

That artist captures motion well.

The Heroes of Might and Magic series of video games have some interesting sieges.
>teleport a hydra inside the walls
>summon Earthquakes to destroy the castle
>magically send an enemies inside the walls berserk
>magically blind the enemy archers so you can just wait for your catapults to knock down a wall in relative safety
>flying troops

To provide some context.

>>Humans are besieging abhumans who are hiding out in shattered plains
>>Chasms scattered about the plains require mobile bridges to move from plateau to plateau
>>Abhumans didn't skip leg day, so can just jump over the chasms. Humans have limited capacity to engage them deeper into the plains. Plan to skirmish and siege them out.
>>Abhumans figured humans would get frustrated with the prolonged siege and just bugger off
>>Didn't count on the humans to start harvesting local megafauna for their magic gem hearts for ludicrous profit, giving them incentive to stick around for years

Except those dudes who have iron chariots; he's cool with them

Bump.
, just to see who got cool digits

Mass Teleport everyone inside to outside the place you wish to siege. Now you arent in a siege.

Such is the divide between PCs and NPCs.

A bit weird that for something originally developed to destroy fortifications, tanks struggle in sieges against cities.

Retreat, leaving the wounded and sick on the field and lure the garrison to assault your camp. Ambush them there.

Bombard them with some kind of pest.

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A really big Siege Tower.

Because they're not allowed to completely raze the city?

Nah, when you raze the buildings you get piles of rubble you cant raze any further. Ala Stalingrad.

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I'm surprised this /x/ meme is still around.

It's more adaptable than blunt, most enemy would go home seeing that castle, Romans left it for 10 years and then invaded when everyone had stopped caring

adaptable would have been adapting to the situation - instead they adapted the situation. They were inventive and stubborn, apparently a very successful mixture.

But obviously you could call that adaptable too, depending on your definition. I wouldn't though.

The best one is the siege of Alesia, and incredibly relevant to this thread.
>Hey caesar you faggot come 4v1 me siege mode
>No, I'm going to build walls around your fort and now YOU can siege ME
>fuck

I can't remember if that's the same battle, but I absolutely remember reading about one where the Romans had encircled an enemy army, then got encircled themselves. So the enemy waits to fight on the next day, and they wake up to the Romans having built themselves a quick fortress overnight.

Yeah sounds like the same siege, but it was slightly less magical than that.

The Romans took a week or so to build the wall (still incredibly fast all the same) knowing that reinforcements would be coming. There was a few attempts at break outs and break ins over the next few days until the roman cavalry of all things sneaked out and ran down a shitload of archers, which spooked the rest of the reinforcements into running away. The guys inside surrendered not long after.

I can only find this shitty version

Fun fact: The Portuguese adapted Masada's name into an expression for something needlessly boring or to describe an action that won't bring you any benefits, thanks to how the siege played out.

In other words the Romans seiged and army like 3 times their size, saw another bigass army coming, build a wall around themselves stupid fast, and seiged the first army while being seiged by the second army......and won with extraordinarily small number of casaulties. This also meant they had finally conquer the massive region full of folks that had been fucking with them for hundreds of years in less than 10, though it's a bit more complicated than that.

Why wouldn't the castle be warded against that

I get Mount & Blade flashbacks looking at that picture.

pre-gunpowder castle sieges are, by default, unconventional

Giant.

With pickaxe

Qual a fonte disso?

Attackers
- Any kind of flying monster
- Magic that allows for unconventional movement: flight, leaping, moving underground etc.
- Golem siege engines

Defenders
- Moat is filled with monsters in addition to water
- Walls have spirits/gargoyles that will defend the walls from attackers

>A bit weird that for something originally developed to destroy fortifications, tanks struggle in sieges against cities.

No they weren't, the first tanks had no real anti-building or even anti tank capabilities. They were just meant to be able to cross trenches and not be shot down by machineguns or rifles. (one of the earliest anti tank weapons was just a big ass rifle though)

That said, it's not that tanks are bad against fortifications, it's that everything is bad at trying to conquer an area full of people, awkward terrain, perfect ambush sites and cover everywhere. The only safe way to defeat a city is to absolutely flatten it from afar or above, but that usually ruins the whole point of trying to defeat it anyway: capturing it.

Tie spears to cattle.
Point cattle at enemy fortifications.
Set cattle on fire.

.....ok, a bunch of dead, burnt cows at the foot of a slight scratched wall.....what's the point beyond the psychological effect?

>The scent of grilled stake mocks the starving inhabitants of the city, and at night someone will try to open the gates and sneak out to cut themselves a piece. That's when you attack.

ONLY SIEGE CAN DEFEAT SIEGE, Jackie!

Trench warfare is a form of fortification and the stalemate on the western front was essentially a seige by both sides, complete with the whole thing boiling down to both sides waging a war of attrition against the other and attempts to undermine the enemy often failing because the undermining teams accidentally tunneled into an enemies' undermining tunnels by mistake and had to quickly destroy their own tunnels to stop them being used against them.

In any other war shit like the tripoli invasion or the eastern front would have been the most retarded parts of the conflict.

But then the french would lose one of the maginot fortresses to a single german with a luger and the italians would occasionally gas themselves, and the germans would occasionally do too well and two different stormtrooper teams would meet in an enemy trench and kill each other because there was too much smoke to make out whose side anyone was on etc...

Never before or since had so many herped so much derp, for such potato.

Maginot was WW2

couldn't we achieve the same effect by just leaving a load of hamburgers at the base of their walls?

Like, on a peice of string or something so we can draw the besieged troops out one by one.

>Make ramp
>Put it sideways
>Move behind ramp

Let them kill all of your people so you have enough vengeance stacks next turn to OTK his whole army

Wasn't there an actual Old Testament law about mixing fabrics? For what reason?

How much would having access to flying mounts change the way sieges work? Whether it's a pegasus, or I-put-a-fucking-throne-on-my-dragon?

Well it'd get overthose tall walls, for one

Weren't the germans on the defensive anyways when the sturmtiger came out?

In one of his play Dario Fo speaks about a siege of a small keep done litterally trowhing an infinite supply of shit into it

Yes, but they tended to just take assault guns and turn them into tank destroyers anyway. The STG 3 was originally an assault gun but actual had the highest number of tank kills of any german tracked vehicle by the end of the war

Most old Hebrew laws about that kind of stuff has to do with cleanliness. Avoiding certain foods, avoiding mixing certain foods or doing certain things because it is more likely to make you sick or spread disease.

Rahab wasn't killed :)

> build a larger and more impressive castle outside theirs
> the enemy will be so shamed by your superior engineering and craftmanship that they surrender

Mixing fabrics was associated with Pagan priests.

>the enemy breaks out
>they build another, even bigger castle outside your own
>after a century of sieges, entire kingdom is now dominated by a series of nested castles so large they blocked the light from the sun for most of hte surrounding farmlands and caused the warring armies to starve to death

>Enemy city is on a island
>cannot use your siege weaponry on it
>turn the island into a peninsula

Alexander was crazy

>Assault gun
Don't forget your tacticlips and pistol grip bayonet

Is it possible to introduce some sort of biological weapon such as a plague, making sure that your troops are protected against it first?

(But then that might not work in a fantasy setting where magical healing is probably going to be more competent than real life medicine. Well that is, until the healers are exhausted I guess?)

>enemy burns their hill fort to retreat to the next one so you build a facade of a fort overnight to break enemy morale
>build dams around enemy fort during rainy season so it floods and surrenders

God dammit monkey why you so great?

I feel like Caligula's boat bridge deserves a shout out as well.

Depends on how many flying mounts you have. If you can get a force bigger than the enemy army onto your flying mounts, this is now basically a field battle on rough terrain that the enemy can't retreat from. If the enemy army is larger than your flying cavalry force can handle on their own, they can try to storm a gatehouse to let the army in and they'll make it easier to make a beachhead on the walls if you're storming the walls with conventional tactics, but storming fortifications is always a risky business and this won't make it *that* much safer.

Make a giant hollow golem and fill it full of soldiers. Siege towers that can protect themselves.

Build a large wooden rabbit...

At first I read soldiers as spiders and thought that you were Satan's own siege engineer.

Well shit thats a much better idea. Who the fuck would attack a golem the size of a siege tower full of spiders?

You'd have to be in touch with the Drow to get that many spiders. Plus it would take a lot to keep all those spiders alive. Would it be worth the expense?

What if you just used undead spiders? Or spider golems?

It's pretty fun in Total Warhammer.

Using flyers to batfuck archers and vampires/dragons to distract infantry behind the walls while spooky skellingtons climb over them is pretty much the only way to siege as undead.

The general flys around on top of a dragon using magic as support as well.

Why would telescopes help in breaking a siege?

Those are cannons, idiot.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_gun

Literally what they're called

>>The scent of grilled stake mocks the starving inhabitants of the city
and terrifies any vampires they might have in the process.

Why would firing telescopes out of cannons help in breaking a siege?

>The only safe way to defeat a city is to absolutely flatten it from afar or above

That never worked

Spider golems may be durable, but they probably won't be poisonous, and they're expensive to make. Undead spiders are just straight terrifying. If you have a necromancer on hand and a good supply of spider corpses, use those.

Enchant them so that they always show a huge, incoming army on the horizon. When the defenders try to use them it demoralises them.

That or you play the long game: Let them discover astronomy, undermine their faith in the local organised religion and let the inevitable revolution be on better terms with you than the current regime. Probably works like a charm for long lives races like elves.