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Garrison and Siege Battles Overhaul

I do no longer update my mods to support new content. That said, almost all my mods basically never need actual updating after patches. So this mod will very likely still work, just not affect recently added content. I do start the game once after patches to check if my mods cause crashes, and intend to keep fixing those critical problems if they arise.

Bigger, stronger garrisons. Led by multiple heroes with improved stats and several spells. Advanced settlement towers do more damage but all towers have less range. Most units can't destroy walls or gates. Ladders are less effective.

• all races have garrisons with more and stronger units
  
• garrisons are still fairly weak in small settlements but become much stronger from level 3 and higher
  
• defence buildings add substantial strength to garrisons
  
• focus is on larger number of mostly lower-tier units to make settlement battles feel less empty
  
• balanced by cost, so some races have fewer but stronger units
  
• artillery is now a big part of settlement defence for races that have it
  
• higher-level settlements have two heroes as garrison leaders
  
• those heroes have mounts and improved stats, and wizards have access to several spells

• high-level settlement towers do substantially more damage
  
• they also apply a 'suppressive fire' effect that slows down targets
  
• towers have a 180 degree firing arc
  
• but all towers have reduced range so that attackers are not forced to rush, and towers can be taken out with artillery
  
• barricades cannot be built (they are broken, only creating pathfinding and clipping issues)
  
• towers can only be built at start of battle (no continuous supply income during battles)
  
• higher-level settlements have more supplies available
  
• most units do very little damage against walls and gates
  
• some very large units do more damage against gates but still less in vanilla
  
• artillery does normal damage, and battering rams do a lot of damage to gates
  
• climbing walls on ladders takes three times longer
  
• battering rams and siege towers are quicker to build on the campaign layer
  
• siege attrition sets in only after one full turn
  
• lower-level settlements are not as difficult to take in autoresolve (no exaggerated bonus for the defender from towers)
  
• high-level towers do make autoresolving less viable (values may need tweaking)
  
• both defenders and attackers now better prepare for sieges and settlement battles and have much more ammunition

The mod tries to make siege battles feel a bit more like an actual siege. Entrenched defenders in a high-level fortified settlement are harder to overcome, but with proper preparation - plenty of artillery - attackers can take out the defenses from far away. Defenders however now do have more artillery as part of their garrisons as well. High-level settlement towers do a lot of damage against large units so that just flying into the town and taking out defending artillery is less viable.

Minor settlements at level 3 get both a melee and a magic caster hero as garrison leaders, both in most cases on a horse or comparable mount. Major settlements get a melee hero on level 2 and both melee and caster from level 3 and up. At level 5 both heroes change into their advanced version, with a better mount (eg Pegasus or Chariot), better stats and an extra spell.

Excessive autoresolve penalty for siege and settlement battles has been removed so the player can autoresolve lopsided siege battles that are just a time-consuming grind to play out while not offering any actual challenge. Sieges should be epic but rare. (Numbers may need some further tweaking to make the autoresolve work out as intended. Also remember that AR is tied to battle difficulty now, and is excessively generous towards the player on Normal. I recommend VH or at least H battle difficulty for reasonable autoresolve results.)

The mod is designed mostly with the player as the siege attacker in mind. >95% of my siege battles are offensive. That said, the changes are a problem in those rare defensive sieges that do happen, because the AI will not account for any of it, and so defending a siege is even easier than before. To compensate for this, the mod gives the AI attacker a missile resistance bonus if the defender in a siege is human and no human is involved on the attacking side. So that the AI will take less damage from towers, artillery and archers. The player will have to rely more on melee weapons to defend. The resistance bonus is 10% on Easy campaign difficulty and 50% on Legendary.

Garrisons are updated at the start of a faction's turn, so on the first turn any settlement you attack will have the old vanilla garrison. The new garrisons will be in place on turn 2.

It appears to not be possible to make magic overcasting work for units that are not proper characters. Trying to give the wizard garrison heroes access to overcast spells proved to be impossible unless I gave them both versions separately, but then they don't share a cooldown, meaning you could cast Fireball and then immediately cast Fireball Upgraded. Eventually I settled on giving the heroes ONLY the overcast versions of their spells.

There is a vanilla bug where battles over minor settlements that are now simple land battles when you fight them manually, are still treated as minor settlement battles if you autoresolve them. I have set the extra strength from minor settlement towers for autoresolve to zero to fix this until the bug has been fixed.

A change that is unrelated to the theme of the mod but included because it is tied to the same database tables: I set all ranged attacks (arrows, spells, artillery etc) to "prefer central target". This appears to make the game target eg a spell towards an entity in the middle of the target unit instead of often picking one at the edge so most of the spell was being wasted. This attribute in vanilla is only enabled on some projectiles, in a way that looks rather arbitrary. To me it seems that it is pretty much always preferable to target an entity in the center.

Some races may have a hard time winning sieges because they lack access to artillery. I guess you'll need to use overwhelming force, distract defenders with shielded infantry or just starve them out. And autoresolve.

Dwarfs got only two garrison hero variations instead of the usual four because apparently they are too short to mount anything and I distinguish those hero units by their mounts (mounts technically make it a different unit).

• Savegame compatible: Yes
  
• Multiplayer: Unknown / not tested
  
• SFO, Radious: Unknown / not tested
  
• Known incompatibilities: None, but you may not see all the changes if other mods are used that edit projectiles, melee weapons, garrisons and siege mechanics

https://forums.totalwar.com/discussion/312842/total-war-warhammer-iii-known-issues-updated-19-01-2023
"In some instances garrison will be replenished instantly"