MA Ulm in CBM 1.9x

[Mightypeon]

Ups, I read that wrong, sorry for this.
Yet still, even the Siege Bonus may drastically influence what people can throw at your sieging force under some circumstance.

[Amorphous]

Do not worry about it, Mightypeon, such things happen (and thank you, llamabeast).

When it comes to the siege bonus, I have a hard time seeing it as something that should be considered an in-battle effect. In a certain sense it is, of course, but in a similar manner so is everything else in the game (and I mean everything). The springing point here is that for the siege bonus to actually effect a particular battle, a number of conditions outside the battle has to be met. And a number of those are not something you control.

In the end, however, it is just a question of choice of term, and not really important to the actual argument.

Let me try to put it another way:

You need to win battles to be able to siege a castle and you need to win a battle to actually take the castle once you have breached the walls. Arbalests are not there to provide a siege bonus, but to help win those battles.

Certainly, the sapper map move is better than the crossbowman's, but since you are able to bring infantry to the front-line, you are also able to bring arbalests to the front-line. Once there they outperform the sapper given the right - and rather easily predictable - circumstances. It is as easy as that.

To go up a level, a real problem with the argument against the arbalest in this thread, is that it looks like a popularity contest, where the winner is crowned "bestest ranged unit ever" and the loser gets to go home and be forgotten, never to be used again. This is just not appropriate for a strategic evaluation of units in Dominions. Hiring sappers does not prevent you from hiring ulmish crossbowmen in the future and if you then do hire crossbowmen, nothing prevents you from going back to hiring sappers again at some later date. In fact, nothing prevents you from hiring both sappers and crossbowmen at the same time (50/50, 70/30 or whatever) for those occasions where you know you will have use for them both in an impending battle.

If I point out situations where arbalests are better than sappers in order to show that arbalests are sometimes a better choice than sappers, pointing out another example - however elaborate - where the converse is true is not a counter-argument. It is simply an argument to the effect that sappers are also sometimes useful. To the best of my knowledge, though, none in this thread have tried or even wanted to argue that sappers are never useful.


Finally, it may be of use for you to consider a situation when you are not playing Ulm, but instead playing against it. Go through the exercise for a couple of nations and consider what you would and could easily do against Ulm at different stages of the game.