# Medieval 3 Siege Battle - Gamplay Reveal!

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Invicta
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mE7c_fdxxc

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mE7c_fdxxc) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

Hey everyone, we got our first look at some Medival 3 gameplay featuring a siege hearkening us back to the days of Medieval 2, but even better. In this case, it is a 360°ree city that makes its way back. Multi-layered, they show the different phases of the assault, maneuvering to clamber up over the walls. Some cool new features in that now towers are fully simulated on the inside, so you can have battles within there. And using the destruction tool, all of these towers can have their walls uh brought down low and reveal what's going on inside. Furthermore, once you get inside the castle itself, all the upgrades that you've done on your campaign are present and available. Level of city investment in the walls. Have you upgraded to moes, bastion, artillery, the likes? And then furthermore, once you're actually in the battle, there is a system of barricades. Allah Total War Attilla, but new and improved, made even better, made even smarter with higher firing positions, uh reduced surface area for assault. And then finally, they cap it all off with this massive assault upon the keep, which now you can fully go inside and bring the camera along with you for some epic action. Most excitingly for me, CA acknowledged that they had read my post on unit cohesion and have actually worked it into the game itself. So, great to see that feedback being implemented. So, we'll be breaking all this down in a recap of not only the entire live stream to squeeze out all the juice of this juicy lemonade of a presentation as well as some other stuff I've picked up from the blog. So, with that being said, let's get into it. I have gathered the live stream notes here, which we'll be diving into. We'll start off with a Medieval 3 recap blog, which covers some additional details that have come out between this current and prior live streams. And then we'll be digging and separating out the different chapters of the live stream that went over an hour. So, this includes their overall vision for battles, for sieges, development tools, and then they showed off some gameplay for wall assault, street combat, and uh defenses. So, let's get into it. We'll start off here with the Medieval 3 recap blog. So, they talked a bit about just reframing things. Where is the game at sort of overall? So, first off is what do they mean by pre-production? So, again, a lot of people were thinking that, you know, when they say early pre-production, it means that they have notes on a board. uh they're reinforcing the idea that it is very much not true. They do have a lot of stuff that's working. It's very much placeholder, but that is just intentional so that they can focus on figuring out very highlevel conceptual uh mechanics and working out how that works. And you'll see that in the live stream. So, u yes, they are in pre-production, but it doesn't mean they're not making substantive gains. Uh then they give us a bit more details when it comes to the campaign map. was starting date and timeline. It seems that prior uh to the new year they were saying they weren't quite sure on the date. It seems like now they are starting to settle on a 300year uh time span from 1140 to 1440. That gives you a big span of the middle ages. But it does lop off a significant amount of time from the early medieval ages. uh we might question why they would do that and I think that is answered by well if you look at sort of around 11:40 11:30 I think the reason why they're picking this as the start date because this is after the first crusade and so you have the formation of the crusader states which te's you up for something being set up in the world so that you can play in that sort of sandbox versus if you started earlier prior to the crusades the dynamic sort of sandbox nature of the campaign would mean that you probably couldn't get to uh the Crusades. It's it'd be up to the player to do that versus the way they're starting it now is it would already be baked into the game and you have that dynamic in play, which I think is smart. Uh they didn't mention this, but maybe in the future what we could see would be different start date setups or DLCs where things are crafted around really bringing to life different time periods in history. I would definitely enjoy that. Or maybe even zoomins. Um and then they get into seasons, turns, and time. So across these 300 years, that's a long time frame. So they said that at a base level, the way they're going to do this is one year is one turn and within that you're going to have seasons that rotate every five turns. So every fifth year you'll get a winter. That seems a little clunky, but it is sort of one of the conceits that they've had to made for allowing you to cover this long time period. Uh but one of the cool things they did say is that they will allow players to actually control the speed at which the game is moving. Uh they didn't quite say to what level, but presumably you could say one turn is one season and you'll have four seasons per turn. So essentially four turns per year, maybe even beyond that. Uh and they also say that will trickle out to aging rules for leaders and other things like that. So I really like the leaning in on customization for your campaign and how it plays. We saw a lot of that in uh Total War Pharaoh where they innovated a lot on player controls, endgame states, and the like. So, I really like that that'll be uh in play for Medieval 3. Then they talked high level for repeatability and faction diversity. So, they're coining this as horizontal replayability, which is different factions just having different nuances to them. And then vertical replay-ability, saying that within a particular faction, you can just play it different ways. And that is built out of kind of systemic uh ways that you can

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mE7c_fdxxc&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

play the game. they have mentioned in prior streams. For instance, when you look at the campaign map here, each of these settlement regions can develop organically based on where you decide to build. You're not preset on specific city locations and preset building trees. It's very much dynamic. You could build very tall in a city or you could scatter it out. The prosperity of a city is a factor of trade which then influences what you can build, when you can build it. So, that is them uh again allowing for this vertical replayability. So overall, if they can nail the two, it'll make for a lot of replayability uh broadly across the game. Uh then they wanted to reflect on, hey, we're listening to the community. We heard a lot of feedback previously on taxation, trade routes, specific goals, technologies, all that stuff. So they just said, hey, we're here. We're listening. And I was really psyched about this. They specifically called out my contribution to the game. So they said psychology of war, discipline, and cohesion. So cohesion was a mechanic that I had pitched uh a couple weeks back, posted on the forums, got a community rep that confirmed that it was before the team and it looks like they took a look at it. So for me, cohesion was essentially the degree to which individuals acted as a unit. I had given a big presentation on sort of how that played out and essentially it was like this. You have units that have magnetism between the unit um soldiers and the unit leader and as you move cohesion would go up, it would go down. that would have implications for the weight of a unit, its ability to hold up in battle, and uh kind of I tied it into a bunch of other things. And for me, the main takeaway is cohesion is just realism at the core of battles in antiquity. Uh battles are made out of individual soldiers and you're really, you know, honed in on to what degree do they act as a force. And um for me, I need cohesion if it's to make any sense to be something that is visually intuitive and not something that's hidden behind as a well, your cohesion is low because the number says 20 instead of 50. No, for me, cohesion needs to be something that's sort of built into the simulation. So when CA address, I'll just read it uh verbatim. They say, "We discuss intentions for medieval 3 to size the psychology of warfare with morale as the core system and cohesion emerging naturally from discipline, fatigue, environment, and battlefield context rather than as a separate bar. " So, it seems like they're kind of speaking the language that I had said. I'm very keen to see uh essentially how this plays out, but they are very much seeming to mirror the language that I had used. So, they say here, "COhusion affects how well units keep formation, resist charges, and avoid being picked apart, creating tactical opportunities that ultimately feed into the primary goal of breaking enemy morale. " So, I like that. That is very much uh in line with what I was thinking. But again, the implementation will be key for me when I hear it's a something that kind of falls out of the simulation. To me that kind of reads as something more like this where you have troops that kind of messily run around each other like fluids which is good to an extent but I think um baked within that you still need the aspect of cohesion which is to me this like magnetism to the leader where yes units with uh soldiers with a unit might want to flow out and kind of just fluidly scatter themselves but I think it is key to have that magnetism that draws them back to the unit leader um because that would play into my idea of using bannermen and musicians to influence that cohesion and have them draw back into the unit. I'd be afraid if it's just oh it falls out of the simulation that they become very fluid. We lose all sense of rigidity. So I'm very keen to see how that plays out. So now we can look at modular units and regional revenues. So the first thing to note is that because we're spanning 300 years, armies do evolve and change. They say early armies are going to be region-based levies that are tied to local lords, economies, and traditions versus late game forces are going to be more professionalized standing armies. I really like that. And I like in particular that they're going to try and um not just make it a type of unit. For instance, like we saw in Medieval 2 early game, you have access to, you know, peasant levies, but in this case, that levy is going to be grounded on what local lord is raising them. What is the economy like of that region? and what are the traditions that might inform the arms that they bring to bear and all that. So, I really like that. They go a little bit deeper where they say each region feels its own customizable retinue with distinct heraldry and potential long-term traits, giving units a strong sense of identity and grounding them in the world. So, again, I could imagine that you might have a unit from a specific region of, you know, the Frankish realms that maybe has a preference for using axes or a history of using uh the Francesca or other weapons like that. Uh then they go on and they talk about recruitment. They say it will resemble three kingdoms. Uh in terms of mustering, generals are replaced by regional lords in this case. And while full unit modularity isn't planned, players will have flexible retinue composition and narrative events like emerging heroes. That's really cool. It rings very much true with what I was thinking, but you know, I'm not going to claim credit. This is a very general idea that almost anyone looking at the period or a military history simulator would come up with. But that being said, I think what I came up with in the concept is probably along the lines of what they're thinking. So in this case here, you would click on a unit and for instance here, it's generically speaking a heavy sword infantry unit, but it is

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mE7c_fdxxc&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

you know, the knights of Tulu. So you would have the heraldry there, the name there, and then in my mockup, you would be able to see the different officers that are uh tagged to this unit, members of the retinue that you could change and play with. So I hope that CI does draw inspiration from this in the sense that I think each of these characters should be clickable. your unit, whether or not they are a lord in the campaign, even if they're just a, you know, a local commander, I would still like to click on them and learn more about them and their personality. And then, like CI said, there could be an event that promotes them up the chain. Uh, furthermore, when it comes to the actual officers in your unit, again, I think this is something where you should be able to click on them, get information about them, and customize them. And I think there should be different classes of these units that have different impacts on how your troops perform. So, I had here sort of like officers, and then I had musicians and bannermen. uh musicians for instance and bannermanmen were meant to handle more of like cohesion and morale. The officers up here might be better for um your discipline of your troops, how well they fight, things like that. So, we'll see which way CI takes it, but I would like to see something that's a bit more detailed like I have here. And then lastly, in the blog post, they cover modding in Medieval 3, and they are trying to commit to modding support from launch. Now, obviously, we can expect that's going to have a decent amount of bugs and improvements, but they are committing to having something available at launch and supporting it throughout the life of the project. And in terms of what mod tools we can get, they're going to say that we have access to the new suite of mod tools, including the War Forge tool suite alongside the engine advancements and tools that our developers are using for production. So, it seems like this is going to be a great upgrade exposing this to the community. And I really hope that they combine that with an ability to actually make our own campaigns. You know, obviously there'll have to be the concerns about whether or not people make Lord of the Rings mods and things like that, but I really hope that it is technically possible to do so in this game to the same extent that we saw with Medieval 2 that led that to be a flourishing title. So that is going to be it for this recap blog and then now we can get into my recap of the roughly 1 hour uh live stream. So this one is broken out into different sections and yeah let's go into each one and I'll interspers some clips from the uh from the live stream to give you a sense and feel of it. Uh so we'll start with their vision for battles. So they are commenting here well what makes Total War special in terms of battles and campaigns? They say the two it's the in intersection of highle strategic campaigns and low-level tactical battles the merging of the two that makes the some of the parts greater than the the whole. So this is very key to just what Total War is and they're looking to reinforce that. So they say here that campaigns give you the stakes and the sort of relevance and the backstory for a particular combat and the battle itself serves as the cinematic the climax of the story that you're telling on the campaign level. And it's very important to keep the two interlin. Uh in terms of how they want to deepen that connection, they keep calling upon this phrase window to the world, which is a pillar of their design. And what that means is they just want you to really feel like you're engaged in a world. So one of the ways they're doing that is that they are going to more strongly link the terrain from your battle maps to the campaign. We've seen that in past Total Wars where if you were to position your troops by a mountain range or a forest or a field or a bridge, that would actually be relevant. And so they're looking to drive that home. Um, yes. I hope that's true. Uh, I think it's really important and I kind of got tired of the pre-made tile sets that we were seeing in recent titles. Uh, and then within the environment itself, they're looking to add more detail, more nuance to the terrain. Uh, if Pharaoh and recent titles are anything to go off of, that means a lot more well sculpted areas with terrain that's impactful in terms of movement, like when it means mud or, you know, slopes, things like that. Uh, and this is just a piece of concept art that they showed that is trying to drive home that relevance. And to me, one of the cool things that I do see here is you see sort of the the remnants of a camp. So maybe that means that we might even have a reflection of the baggage train in battles. And maybe that is some sort of capture point that's relevant to gameplay as well. Um so yeah, I like where their head's at. Uh and then they showed us here again, this is a mockup. This is apparently concept art of a battle, but to me it looks very close to what the game uh looks like. Uh but yeah, this just kind of is the look and feel of it. A couple things to mention is that they aim to have slower paced battles, reduce the tempo from what we've seen recently. They did admit that historical players do like that kind of slower, more methodical thing, and they're looking to find ways to make the phases of battle more distinct. Maneuver, skirmish, the clash, and then the pursuit thereafter. Uh, in terms of scale of all this, they're looking to kind of stick to the triedand-true 20 unit army stack. Um, and then when it comes to the map size, they are still debating how large the maps is. It maps are. It sounds to me like they're not going to go the full size of Medieval 2 where it's just insanely large. Um, but they said they want to kind of still have that feel. So, they want it to be large enough for that sandbox feel for Medieval 2, but yet small enough where you can have a focus gameplay without a lot of dead

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mE7c_fdxxc&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

air. And um yeah, it's just kind of a reflection of kind of the modernity of how people expect games to play nowadays is very much more fast-paced. So, they're trying to find the balance between the two. Uh, another thing that you can notice here in this battle itself is that the UI is quite minimal. Again, this is just a mockup, but for me, this is great and it shows the intent of where they're heading. They want the battles and the spectacle of it all to really be the focus. So, Goneway is this obnoxiously large mini map. gone away are the kind of big unit cards and all the stats and all the kind of like um numbers on screen and I hope that means that they're going to look more into a lot more visually intuitive ways to display the nature of your troops. So obviously here unit size is something that we would see. They're trying to have banners that might represent things that are inherent to the game. Already I'm seeing an idea of maybe the unit spacing and formations could be a reflection of their overall cohesion. And then again, take a look at this in the back. Again, we're seeing another teaser of some representation of the baggage train in the camp. So, I really hope that is a feature uh of these battles. Other stuff they talked about in this section in terms of their vision, is they do want to switch up a bit of how battles play, which used to be grindy and blobby. And um you know, cohesion does play a role in that, but something else that they're playing with is this idea of momentum. And this is meant to capture the eb and flow of combat. And one of the things they said is that they want to have this idea that small events can ripple across the battle and change your momentum. So they gave an example where in the same way that uh the routing of a unit can lead to a chain routing and a an overall collapse, they want something to happen that's to the inverse where instead of something being a chain routing, there could be like a chain inspiration that could have, you know, happened because there was a heroic action at some place in the battle that rallies the troops. could be your general showing that he's still alive, that he's fighting, that he's in the front lines. They reference the idea, I think it was in Shogun 2, where you could have your general dismount from his horses, showing that he's going to be standing there and fighting with your army. So, I like that idea, the fact that they're trying to come up with these more dynamic ways to change up the momentum and really reflect the sort of unpredictable nature of historical battles. Uh, and then finally at the end here, I was very proud of this. They had a section that said, "What is the most essential battle mechanic needed to create an authentic representation of land battles? " their answer was cohesion. And so I was like, "Oh, cohesion. That's a term I'm familiar with. " And then they went on and they directly said that sort of my post about cohesion uh actually it seems to be changing the game. So I'll read you their direct quote here cuz I'm quite proud of it. So they say here at 20 minutes, quote, uh we had a lot of internal discussions around discipline and then seeing the discussion on the forums and Invicta's proposal on cohesion, we're like, oh yeah, maybe we should look at it more from a cohesion angle. and we saw the benefits and we sort of merged our approach. So to me that was really awesome. I spent a lot of time thinking about the implications of cohesion, trying to make it both grounded in history and also thinking about the gameplay implications and trying to make it something that could interact with other mechanics that are already there and just trying to my intent was it to be digestible and it seems like that was true and I'm really happy to hear that it seems to be something that they were inspired by and are finding ways to build it into the system. So happy to have left my mark on Medieval 3. And the main thing to say here is that they're always looking for other people. It doesn't just have to be someone with a platform like myself. They do invite all people to go to the forum and make their own post. So they said they've seen things about ammo, supplies, uh camp followers, things of that nature. They say, "We read it all. " So a call to action there. Uh then they go over their vision for sieges. In this case, they say they want sieges to be the climax of the campaign war/pace cycle. They recognized that in the past there were sort of too many sieges and people got bored and skipped over them and yeah the auto resolve was at an issue. So they say you know now we want sieges to be rather more rare and not something that you have every turn but rather it's the culmination of a long sort of series of battles that have run up to the final uh siege that takes place. Um and then they also wanted to say that a core part of these sieges they wanted again window to the world. They want the campaign city improvements to show up in the sieges. So walls, for instance, are a function of well, have you invested in walls on the campaign map? To what extent have you built up that wall building chain to get better walls? To what extent have you invested in improvements or perks to those walls to include things like bastion artillery or moes or other things that will actually feature in the battle map? Uh then they went on and they said that this was a piece of art that they had found that was kind of like a guiding principle for how they wanted to look and feel the battles. Um so this is um the siege of roads and essentially they thought that it was evocative of the feeling they wanted the idea that there's a lot of carnage here when it comes to the walls that you have the emotion of the soldiers. So yeah I mean if they can get anywhere close to these very evocative ancient paintings of sieges then we're really you know we're cooking here. Uh another vision that they had for sieges is that they committed to having 360° sieges being

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mE7c_fdxxc&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

back. This is the idea that as opposed to Warhammer 3 or the, you know, the Warhammer series essentially where you're always attacking the front of the city, a slice of the city, um they are now committing to going back to how it was in the past, which is you can attack a city from all angles. That's the 360° idea. But they do admit that yes, while in most cases you can go all the way around a city, there are some restrictions. But they want those restrictions to be not arbitrary, but rather a reflection of true limitations. So like campaign features the instance uh for instance they said like you know is your city abudded against a river or an impassible feature of terrain or is it a such a massive city that really practically it only makes sense for you to be exposed to you know one quarter of the city and we do see that historically when you're attacking these major cities you can only approach it from one side and yet it involves redeployment to attack it from another. So uh I really like that direction and next here we can get into the development tools. So, I swear we're getting closer to the gameplay. Uh, but we're really showing the work that CA is putting into this. And they were very proud to show a lot of the retooling they've done to allow them to move faster, to prototype faster. And for me, it was really fascinating to see how this game development works. So, in this case, they were showcasing the tools for authoring settlements. Uh, lots of ways to customize your uh your cities, and it all ties back to the, you know, what you've done on the campaign then trickles down into this tool. So they wanted the interplay and they wanted it to be quick, dynamic, and something that was scalable. So just zooming in here, what does this mean? Uh you'll notice that this is all within a the same city map. So here is an early level city with um you know, you can toggle different settings here on the level of development, the walls, and all that stuff. This is that same city now that it's been expanded. And they were emphasizing that this is what they want to have happen in your campaign where if you return to the same city 200 years down the line or maybe even after a particular uh intensive period of urbanization, you do want to be able to recognize aspects of your city, but then it dynamically to grow out from there. So these are the screenshots that I captured showing the small city, the large one. And again, this they also said that this was sort of indicative of the scale of the battle maps you can probably expect. Uh it is notable that you can see here that these cities are a little bit smaller than some cities we've seen in the past, but they said that this is more than made up for by the fact that these cities are more detailed where each and every small avenue is something that you can traverse, the multiple levels of um walls are things that you can fight over. So although technically the square footage of these cities are a little smaller than other cities we've seen in the past, the actual um playable space within the cities is far larger. and as is the dynamic nature of them. So, I really like that. I tried to do some zooming in that they were saying that people were going to do inevitably. Yes, I did this and I zoomed in and I just tried to capture sort of what were the little kind of menu options. So, you have stuff like here where you can say, you know, what battle type is this? So, we're probably a siege. Uh and then there's drop downs for, you know, what is your castle wall size? So, to have no walls, small walls, medium, large. So, you can control the size of your city. And again, this is a reflection of on the campaign map. Have you invested in this? Uh, and then your wall level. What level of wall, you know, how many walls do you have? Uh, how developed is your settlement level? So, presumably you could have a combination of these. You have a vast settlement that's at level three, but you've just built no walls, so the wall would be level zero. So, you can have all sorts of combinations here. Uh, that's really great. And then in addition to that, you might have a very high settlement level, but then beyond that, you can then refine in and dial in the city level density. How many structures are going to be in here? How crowded are the avenues? So take that all together and I think it's going to be really rich. Layered on top of that obviously is going to be the cosmetics of uh what culture, what part of the world are you in? And then sort of what are the hero buildings that you can build on the campaign like a big cathedral and things like that. Uh then down here they showed an important part of all this was revamping the wall authoring tool. This allows them to make very detailed walls and we'll be seeing that in the siege where walls are a lot more uh interactable. Uh and in this case they are saying hey with this new tool it's easy to make walls of any shape and size which lends itself to this dynamism where now you're not going to break it if you make a custom wall. So that's good to see. Uh they're also rethinking the width of walls to make it more realistic. So they were saying for instance recently in Pharaoh walls were these giant platforms that were you know 8 11 m uh thick so that you could fit a whole unit versus now they're actually trimming down walls and getting them down to a more realistic 3. 5 m. That's awesome. It makes sense. That's the way walls were done. Uh maybe in the future there will be ways to expand the size of your wall to host more troops. But yeah, I like that they're just kind of leaning into the realism and trying to find functional ways and build it into their tools where they can make it work. Same thing goes with smaller streets. Uh and all this has implication for reworked pathf finding. Uh they're saying that they're more broadly having to rework the AI obviously to deal with the level of complexity that they're baking in here. So they went into some uh nuance about that. Uh, and they said pre-production right now is mostly focused on honing in a lot of the

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mE7c_fdxxc&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

mechanics and sort of fleshing out, well, what are the problems that the AI has to solve. So, they're setting up the environment that they have to master before they just go mastering the AI without having the environment sort of and the rules of what is meant to be um kind of what is the the environment within the AI within which the AI is playing, which makes sense. Don't put the cart before the horse in this case. and they're saying they're having a lot of iterations on this, refining the AI slightly, seeing how that plays out. Okay, maybe this is working, not working, going back and forth. So, just good to get that clarity from CA. And then finally here, we get into the gameplay section. This is all very early stage placeholder, and they walk us through these three sequences. The first one is going to be a wall assault. So, they say, "Hey, here's a playable version of the siege. " Uh, they showed us the map itself. So, they said placeholder UI, art, models, animations, textures, you have it. It's all placeholder. Um, but it's meant to actually just, you know, allow them to toy with ideas. Uh, they're working here. They said on unit behavior, the path finding to and from settlements, the sort of squishiness and fluidity of the units. Uh, I was excited here where it looks like there's a little bit of my kind of cohesion idea coming to play. Um, and then they want to see, well, how do units interact with each other and the environment? uh that's going to be impacted by the upgrades made to the war forge engine. The idea that if a wall is collapsed and becomes royal, they want the unit to actually be able to flow over with it and interact with it without freaking out. Uh we got a couple other things that they're playing with. One is going to be this suppression mechanic. They showed archers firing upon other archers at the walls. Uh in this case, when range units do take archer fire, they get reduced accuracy and defensive capability. And you would assume that the same type of suppression would be uh affecting foot troops, mounted troops, and the like, but have different kind of uh results from that. So, I like the idea that they have suppression in there. Uh and then they did show ladders. How do we climb upon the walls? Uh no siege engines, no sapping. They did mention these offhand in the sense that yes, they'll be there, but mechanically they're just not in this test build. So, right now they have ladders. They did show big caveats that while in the video it was showing pocket ladders in the sense that the ladders disappeared out of nowhere, they said that was just the um a shortcut that they took to make it easier to test. Later in the game, they're going to focus on the animation and the rigging to have their characters actually carry real ladders and they're committing to having real ladders, but the pocket ladders is just a shortcut to get through the testing phase. Um and they are actually considering the idea that well if ladders are mounted to the walls, can they be pushed off? Can they be destroyed? They very much want to at any turn of this development dial in the realism. Uh, talking about walls, again, we said that they were narrow. They are actually 100% destructible. So, no longer will there be like um parts of the wall that are indestructible. That's because of the way walls are generated. No, we're new. We're modern tech. All parts of the wall can be destroyed. Uh, and troops can fall off both while the wall is being together and also when it's destroyed, there'll be a collapse and there'll be damage. Then they showed off the towers. Uh towers I think are really cool and it's emblematic of the upgrades overall to the engine here. Uh so they're really leaning in hard to the simulation nature of this. These towers are open environments in which troops can flow. Once they're inside, the troops themselves will pathf find within the structures. They'll go up dynamically the different levels of the tower. So yes, troops go inside. And they showed the camera flying around to show that there's actually combat taking place inside. So very much leaning in on the simulation. I really like this. Um, and yeah, they said towers are no longer these sort of automated machine gun things. If a tower is shooting is because you actually have troops deployed in there. They said that ranged units can shoot out of them. Uh, and that if melee units go in, they will be able to sort of pick up ambient bows and fire from within the tower. So, I like this. Again, very cool. Um, but they did say they're trying to work out how do you make it where it's kind of visually intuitive that stuff is going on within the tower. Um, maybe there'll be some sort of proximity that sheds the walls of the tower so you can what's going on inside. Maybe it's going to be a debug view for you. They're still working on that, but they are committing to the fact that stuff is going on in the tower. And they alluded to the idea that if the tower gets destroyed and let's say a wall collapses, you would still be able to see that fighting. So, I think that's really cool. And it ties back to that uh illustration that was their inspiration here. That's kind of what we're going on here. The fighting is taking place within the tower even though the sidewall has completely collapsed. So, I really like that and you can see how it's guiding them. Uh, next they move on to the street combat gameplay. The big intent here was to show how streets are much more narrow. So, they said it goes down to 12 m as opposed to past titles which had these large avenues. So, down to 12 m means that there's a lot more um nuance to how you want to move around your city. Uh, urban density is key. Uh, and they said here that obviously this poses issues for path finding that they are very much early on wanting to resolve. So they showed units moving around, wrapping around the corners

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mE7c_fdxxc&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

moving through small streets. Uh, they showed here when you do your deployment, when you do the preview, it pre-clipips itself around the building versus in kind of older Total War titles, it just wouldn't allow you to place your unit there. And so they're yeah, they're trying to build in a lot more of this dynamism. Uh, another thing that I had thought about was garrison buildings. You know, it looks like if they're leaning into the simulation that maybe troops could go inside and garrison buildings and fight within buildings. Uh, there was no mention of that when it came to regular buildings. Uh, only for walls, towers, and castles, but we'll see if they explore that. I could imagine that could be a cool thing in the future where you would have to go house to house clearing out troops or potentially maybe just your iconic units. What if there's like the Cathedral of Notam where troops could actually come inside and brawl within the church? It would be very cool. Uh and then later on they said that hey for all these sieges again were open to player feedback. Uh they want generally speaking to avoid a sense of slog and they want it to be closer to Shoguns 2 uh pacing where you had these different layers and once you took a layer it really felt like you kind of had the breathing room to rally yourself, reform and prep for the next stage of the attack. Same thing from the defender. you could fall back and really have that sense of progression. So that hearkens all the way back to sort of the medieval 2 era. And then finally, we get the last little scenario which is going to be the assault on the keep and the defenses here. So zooming in here, they did show that yes, uh there's going to be a layering of the city. Part of that is going to be the walls, but a big part of it is going to be just the nature of the city layout and having natural barriers and fortifications. So things like rivers, choke points, bridges, and the like are all going to be important. Uh fortifications can be things that you have upgraded for your, you know, campaign level that show up here. Do you have a moat? Do you have bastion artillery? Do you have reinforced gate defenses? Things like that. But then they also said when you go into the battle during like the setup phase, you actually have control as a defender over improvised fortifications. So it's described as an evolution of the barricade system. Uh, and they said that it is not going to be like Warhammer 3 where uh you would invest in these barricades live and that towers would pop up using magic. They said no, this is very much a pre- battle thing, but that you still have control over where you place these. Uh, and this was all to reinforce the idea that the defender has the advantage here. They want the defender to be empowered and that you should be able to hold out, you know, one to two with a 1:2 person ratio. So 2:1 odds as a defender, uh, you should be able to fight that off. But again, it depends on the fortifications. Uh, as for the fortifications, I zoomed in and showed some placeholder examples here by the keep. Obviously, this is this the fixed stuff, but then down here on the bottom, you can see the temporary fortifications that have been set up. So, it's again placeholder, but they're showing that it's a mix of platforms that really helps your range units have better line of sight, more effectiveness. And then in terms of your ground troops, they would then be able to sort of butt up against these crates and other things that are put in place here that would limit the uh ability of the attackers to press through. So it might blunt charges, it might slow them, it may decrease their stats, and presumably it just lowers the surface area available to push through this killing field while range units in the surrounding area um snipe them and take them out. And then the coolest thing for me was that they showed off the final storming of the keep as the last bastion point. In the past in Medieval 2, you could stand by the keep but never go inside versus now with their um kind of commitment to simulations. All of the inside of the keep is fair game. They said that you could put your king at the very top tower. He would be firing out versus uh you know and as he's up there, the rest of your troops could be falling back, taking position within the keep. And they really showed that live as troops were storming up through the different plazas, making their way through the murder holes. They showed how you could see the different levels, the sightelines, all the while your troops are going to be fighting hand to hand, shooting arrows and all that. So that is going to be very epic. And I hope that in the if they dial this up in the future and really figure out these sort of close quarters pathf finding and animations could make for some absolutely cinematic uh and breathtaking and memorable engagements in these keeps. Maybe even to the point that if they open up the floor for modders, I could definitely see um modders having a field day with actually designing nice interiors for these, maybe even making mini games with defending the castle and all sorts of cool stuff. So, this has a lot of promise for the future. Uh but that's it. So, this is going to be my recap of this live stream. There's going to be more to come from CA. I very much approach their sort of open kimono style um approach to development. We've never seen this before. It gives me a lot of uh hype for the game knowing that they're not just selling us smoke and mirrors. They're engaging before the marketing team is engaging and selling us uh you know a lot of hopes and dreams. We're actually seeing it being developed. And even more than that is you know the concept that when we do give them feedback like when I gave them the feedback on cohesion and presented it they actually took it in stride

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mE7c_fdxxc&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 35:00)

discussed it and said oh yeah that makes sense. Let's merge it with our own approach. So, you know, all this to me is a step in the right direction and it's already bearing fruit. So, let me know what you think in the comment section below and head on over to the forums to leave your own ideas and feedback. I will see you in the next one. Peace out.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/40498*