Re: The Bible: Real, Fiction, or somewhere in between?
My experience in BTS is different on both points.
Yes, IV is different. I was speaking about V.
In IV you can create an enormous stack of any siege unit, throw in some defensive units for transit and some aggressive melee to clean up the debris of the city defenders. I like to use a good mix of collateral damage and deeper damage siege. As long as you can patrol the route to your target and pick off any stacks coming to hurt you (including the inevitable barbarian mounted stack that spawns at exactly the wrong moment right on your flank), you can win by pure attrition. After a while this got boring to me.
In V, without stacks, arty becomes comparatively weak* in the middle game. V siege units of range 2 (catapult, trebuchet, cannon) also have line-of-sight limits -- you can't shoot over interposed higher terrain. (I love this, since again it complicates attacks). Combined arms attacks can become very tricky depending on terrain. I really enjoy the combat part of V, and since combat is always the least interesting part of the game for me, that helps give me a "least worst."
* the
Hunic UU battering ram is the shizzle in the opening, though. I had never employed one because their defense is hot garbage and they are non-attacking except for city walls. I finally built a couple and was going to use them in combination with trebuchet. The treb unit, whose base D is stronger, was good for about 25 damage. Then I used the ram. 147 damage. Uh, excuse me? There's also a UU siege tower for somebody (Assyria, maybe?) which basically works like a GG except it exclusively amps siege damage, but it's not nearly as fun. Cool looking, however. Kind of an
ancient era Dalek.