Strange Siege - Spontaneous Castle Storming

[Edi]

Has anyone run into this issue before? I don't recall seeing it reported anywhere.

Anyhow, in the Back to the Fray MP game, the following has happened twice already: My castle, with significant defending troops, has come under siege by a substantially more powerful force. My units are all of types that don't require supplies, so starving is not an issue. The other player keeps piling on troops so that he doesn't sustain too severe losses, when all of a sudden his army just spontaneously storms the castle, without receiving any kind of orders to that effect.

What's further strange is that these battles do not happen as castle stormings, but as regular battles for control of province, so that you can view the statistics, how many troops and commanders and so forth were lost on both sides, but the fortress walls are present, the towers shoot at the sieging troops and it works in all other respects as a bona fide storming attempt. It just was not ordered by the sieging player, and I did not order a breakout attempt either.

I talked to Soapyfrog over email, he's the one who is handing me my head in that game and he also commented on the strangeness when I asked about it. Is this a bug, or is it some kind of accidental feature we do not know about? It only seems to be triggered when massive amounts of troops are involved. The first time around I had something like 200 banefire archers and 300+ living statues and a small number of other miscellaneous troops, while he had a huge number of devils, and the second battle involved around 150 units + 23 commanders on my side and some 700 - 800 units on the sieging force and 8 commanders (I killed them! Just two bane lords barely escaped with their unlives!), so I think the total number of troops plays some role.

I think I will save the turn files, since the game has not yet hosted the following turn, in case anyone wants to take a look at them.

Edi

[atul]

If I remember correctly you get the statistics listing IF the storming attacker loses... was this the case? Dunno about the auto-storming part.

[Saber Cherry]

Were there berserker commanders on either side? Berserker commanders sometimes do strange things. For example, in the unit view map, any unit with berserk automatically has its combat orders set, by default, to "Attack". Maybe the strategic orders get screwy too?

Alternately, did either of you have a random event in that province?

[Edi]

atul said:
If I remember correctly you get the statistics listing IF the storming attacker loses... was this the case? Dunno about the auto-storming part.

Actually, you don't get the report in that case. I remember several instances of trying and failing to storm a fortress and getting only a "We did not manage to capture the fortress" message.

Saber Cherry said:Were there berserker commanders on either side? Berserker commanders sometimes do strange things. For example, in the unit view map, any unit with berserk automatically has its combat orders set, by default, to "Attack". Maybe the strategic orders get screwy too?

Alternately, did either of you have a random event in that province?

No berserking commanders that I can recall, Soapy only had mindless units and all of his commanders wre non-berserkers with the same item loadout (no berserk items either) and I only had mages, mindless units and non-berserkers and my non-berserk god.

I didn't get any random events, don't know about Soapy. Remember, this is not a single instance, it has happened more than once, so the phenomenon can be duplicated.

Edi

[Jurri]

Edi said:

Actually, you don't get the report in that case. I remember several instances of trying and failing to storm a fortress and getting only a "We did not manage to capture the fortress" message.

The defender does get the statistics, the attacker doesn't. In a succesfull storming no one gets the statistics. (IIRC)