Assistance with Operating the Siege Workshop
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As a campaign player, I typically do not utilize Siege Workshop units apart from Rams.
My army composition consists of two different units, depending on the faction, such as cavalry archers and light cavalry or spearmen and archers.
For sieges, I prefer using trebuchets or garrisoned rams if restricted to Castle Age scenarios or playing as Mongols.
I avoid anti-unit siege like Onagers and Scorpions due to their expense, weakness in melee combat, slowness, clumsiness, and AI avoidance.
I have only used Onagers once in a Le Loi scenario to counter chu ko nu spam.
I do not use Bombard cannons and prefer trebuchets because of their longer range.
I wonder if including Onagers and Scorpions in my army would be beneficial or if they are better suited for multiplayer.
For campaign missions it does not really matter.
If you want to play scorpions or onagers, they’re best paired with halberdiers though, to keep enemy cavalry and infantry away from your siege.
20-30 scorps stacked on top will pose a threat to anything getting thrown at you, I’m pretty certain.
One factor that impacts multiplayer siege is, in the castle age, mangonels outrange town centers.
A human player can garrison the tc, and use villagers or melee units to stop rams.
This means that for castle age pushes against tcs, the mangonel acts as a mini treb, letting you whittle down tcs from a safe distance.
Other factors matter too.
For instance, you don’t really need to “tech into” castle age siege.
You just need to construct one building.
This means that if you’ve invested all your resources into melee units, but you NEED range, it’s cheaper and faster to make some scorpions or a mangonel, then upgrade the archer line to match.
I find it fun as a casual ai player, to go man at arms with a scorpion follow up.
The ai responds to the feudal age man at arms with archers, and then folds under scorpion pressure.
Mix in a ram or two to soak archer fire, and you’d be surprised that even against the ai, it’s a versatile combo.
PS the scorpion is weak to melee, but it’s actually quite resistant to skirmishers.
This means that in some combos, it can be very hard to counter at range when you have melee units or monks supporting.
It’s also a godlike unit when you mass 15 or so.
The pass through damage is insane.
For a fun time, play as the Khmer and get thier double shot unique tech.
Against the AI – don’t bother with mangonels and skorpions.
Cannons are super versatile, but not sure if you need that.
They are more accurate than Trebs against units, so they can kill high value targets like enemy siege (including Trebs) easily, don’t have to be packed and unpacked (so you can just patrol them into buildings, if you’re lazy), can kill bunched up units …
but if all you need is a castle-killer, a treb does the job as well
AI has godlike micro against mangonels, best you can do is just attack ground an area to deny passage, you may not always find damage.
They’re quite useful in multiplayer, arguably more so than rams.
A good mangonel shot can flatten a group of archers or skirms and change a game completely.
Similarly scorpions can do a lot of passthrough damage to low hp units like pikes or archers/skirms.
Using bombard cannons instead of trebs is useful when you want a multipurpose siege unit that can take down enemy trebs as well as archers or skirms.
If you get bombard cannons out, enemy trebs are basically unusable because they become so easy to snipe from range.
The enemy also needs to constantly babysit their archers because a couple of stray shots can end the game.
Tradeoff is that bombard cannons do less damage to buildings than trebs and have lesser range too.
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