Hello,
The long answer:
The 1650 rules state: “In order to sucessfully siege a pop center, your army must be large enough to accomplish the task.” And: “Army size and strength (for purposes of seige) are based on troop numbers and the presence of war machines.” The rest of the text also touches on every other factor but the kitchen sink, which makes this a complex order.
If the order text is taken at face value, a player SHOULD be able to create siege armies of all MA or AR, and bring in enough war machines to equal or defeat the value of the fortifications, and that would lead a reasonable person to believe that you would actually suceed at the Siege 2 out of 3 times you try it, if the factors indicated were in your favor. Unfortunately, while the “quantity” of troops, war machines and comm points may be in your control, Siege seems to fail more often than it should. I believe that the minimum number of troops need is either unreasonably high, or the other factors have excessive effect upon the results even if you have enough troops, war machines and comm points.
Unfortunately there is no reference to how large an army is needed to siege a given size pop. There is a table, “Population Center Size Factor”, that indicates the force needed to Threaten, but it does not state a Siege value. It might be that there is some greater ‘threshold’ number of troops necessary to have a reasonable chance to sucessfully siege a location, X troops for every person in the pop for example, which will in theory allow the siege-er to surround the town completely and starve out the locals.
[As an aside, per the order text, I wonder if enemy armies acually “help” you, because they are assumed to eat food and therefore aid in the starving out of the locals…hmm…]
Anyway, this is/was available on one of the advice websites for a while:
"Q: What is the benefit of sieging a population center?
A: The benefit of a siege is that it reduces the food stores at the population center and doesn’t allow transfer orders, or market buy/sell orders, affecting the population center to take place. Once the food stores are gone, there is a continuing reduction in population center loyalty. Furthermore, there is a chance that if the sieging army has war machines, then the fortifications may be reduced each turn the population center is sieged. Revenue is also not received from any population center under siege (Note - revenue will still accumulate in the capital even though it is under siege - maintenance costs, orders, expenses, etc will be paid, but no transfers or market buy/sells will work there either). The net benefit of the siege is frequently that the population center will be more vulnerable to other forms of capture (threaten, emissary influence, army attack) but without the risk of troop and/or population center level losses. Of course, sieging takes time and the troops must still be fed and maintained . . . "
Many players forget, however, that siege is really just an economic attack. Your nation does not “benefit” from a siege. You only block enemy buy/sell/treasury activity, unless you can cause the food stores to run out. So if the pop produces food, I’d say don’t bother. Second, the result only starts to lower the loyalty and thats it. The pop is not reduced one level, the harbor or fortis doesn’t colapse, etc. Just a loyalty drop, and a random one at that. So unless you want to practice on an unfortified camp for the comm points (an interesting idea) I’d say that this order is only really useful against towns or bigger that produce gold and no food. That means you will likely need a big-points comm to pull this off, even if you have more than enough troops and war machines.
But it seems that even if you do bring enough troops, war machines and comm points, that all the other factors drain away your chance of suceeding faster than they do for Threaten. Siege just never seems to work, at least not that I’ve ever seen. This of course may be one of these “vicious circles” where people stop doing an order because they heard it never works, so there are so few attempts that we can’t fairly judge the order.
But even if this is true, Siege is not worth the results…
Nosing around in my allies’ turn sheets leads me to conclude that If you have the troops, war machines and comm points, you’ll do better with threaten than siege. Think about it: Threaten is clearly based on a number of troops and war machines, and there is a number in the rulebook at which your comm will have some reasonable chance of sucess. That means that you can at least reasonably plan for a decent Threat attempt.
Siege on the other hand costs the same amount of orders to raise the army (of some unknown size), orders to train the comm up high enough, orders to build the war machines, the gold to support the army and the time spent marching there. And then siege has every factor in the world influencing it, and that means commanders often fail the roll to complete the siege order even when they have MORE than enough troops (however much that really is) or comm or war machines to “reasonably” suceed. Worse, even if you do suceed (congratulations on that 3 point com increase) all you get is something that an army of 100 MA led by a 10 comm and a 10 point emmy can do anyway, automatically, at a risk of much less gold. Siege usually fails, and when it does suceed it doesn’t get you anything but 3 comm points. No gold, no dead enemies, no artifacts, nothing. Siege sucks.
The short answer:
Don’t bother. Issue Threaten with that army instead, and on the same turn use an Emmy Team to influence and an agent to sabo the forts. You are more likely to end up with the pop, an army to defend it, the gold, the stores and all those skill point increases for all 4 characters involved.
My two cents. Others may have experienced contrary results…
James
