I Have Never Witnessed a Petard or Siege Tower After 300 Hours of Playing
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Petards are insane if you can cover them towards castles and town centers.
Siege is definitely more rare, but I’ve seen and used a tones of petards
Both great on Arena
A certain snake was once on the receiving end of a king snipe with the help of petards
you haven’t lived if you haven’t engaged in a petard war with a nearby enemy castle 😉
treb wars are for high elo players
petards wars are for desperate yet innovative low elo legends 😘
Petards are a weird unit, which I think most players instinctively dislike due to their slow hiring speed, coupled with a “high but reasonable cost”.
They do their core job, “killing buildings” exceptionally well, with a particular emphasis on taking out walls and gates. This page lists their different damage bonuses, and take note that they’re all “additive” — which is to say that any of the categories that match “tally up” additional damage. So if it’s a building, it takes an extra +500dmg, but if it’s a building AND a wall, it takes +500 and +900 combined.
[https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Petard_(Age_of_Empires_II)](https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Petard_(Age_of_Empires_II))
The trouble is just getting them in there to do the damage, since they’re disallowed from entering unit transports (rams and siege towers).
Ideally, there are two general ways to use them; either they’re the “initial breaching charge” to cut a hole in enemy defenses, so that you can instantly burst into an enemy safe zone, without warning, and do some kind of brutal raid before they can muster troops over there to punish you (for example, getting a cluster of 10-or-so CA into an enemy town — you can gun down a lot of villagers before they can get a response over, and that’s if they notice it immediately).
The alternate way to use them is to shore up a “mob” of units, by giving them just a little extra punch against one or two critical enemy buildings (such as a TC). The idea here is that you sneak them in as part of the mob; they’re mixed into a large group of other units, and the enemy hopefully won’t notice them, or will struggle to micro into hitting them. Most units, even knights, have a bit of work trying to fight a town center, and the TC can act as a “bastion” to help an enemy regroup, but just a mere 2-3 petards walking with an assault force can drop 2/3 of the TC’s hp.
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Castles are rough for them, because although they do respectable damage to castles, you do need a bunch of them to take one down, and castles *slaughter* petards by default; for them to work against castles, you have to pull some kind of “ruse” to draw fire so the petards can actually get in there; you can’t just walk the petards at the castle like you can with a ram.
Siege towers are already niche to begin with, but I really think they would at least see some more use if they weren’t so bloody bugged.
Insta castle destruction with petards.
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I’ve seen petards. Not in the most competitive of matches, but still.
I saw both in my first 2 hours
All in LS siege tower with Goths is mad fun on Arena, albeit a huge meme strategy that only works on LEL.
You must not play arena a lot
You must meet some clowns.
Petards I’ve seen used more in regicide as a way to snipe castles, then have cav archers to snipe the king.
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