[AI] Gilden sending wave after wave of catapult stacks of doom

Because it wants to hammer down the walls of your cities in tactical combat!!!

Huh? What do you mean we don't have walls in tactical combat?!?!?!?!

......

The tactical maps aren't really even big enough to have city walls.  The combat area is tiny. 

That can be fixed very easily actually. The value for the size of tactical maps is in the Xml. We can make tactical maps of any size really.

Yeah. Catapults are a great idea when there are fortifications that need catapultin'. But until we get some of those, they're pretty terrible

Yeah, what he said 

That bugs me (too?).  AoWSM has walls in tac combat, right? (at least when walled cities are the battle scene...)

I was pretty floored when I saw no walls in city siege Elemental tac battles.

Yes I've noticed this as well... no real epic battles when maximum has only 12 unit types stand on each side.

What's worse are the fixed battle maps of different tiny sizes.  Sometimes the enemy is 2 squares away(1_movement_turn) and sometimes 6 squares away(3_movement_turns).

 

We should have randomly generated battle maps which can then increase/decrease in size based on the number of units traveling.  It so much better having an epic battle with 50+ unit types fighting the enemy with 70+ unit types.

The catapaults I see on ridiculous are pretty effective with a meager 32 attack. They can miss 1/3 but attack 2-3 times each per turn doing 30 damage per hit. This includes highly defensive units such as a squadron of elite dragons. Since there are usually 3-4 stacks they do around a 100 damage per turn if not more.

This is with the ogre tanks in front with 4000 hp and 300 attack with various other archers etc.

Not to mention I get attacked by 2-4 armies per turn I'm finding it pretty effective.

Edit: To give myself a harder time I'm playing on a small map with a 1 city policy. Thus the other races have become exponentially more powerful. Oddly with this my game isn't crashing. I believe the crashed might be related to the player's field of vision/cities?

That reminds me -- some of my tactical battles start with some of my units standing next to the enemy, widely separated from my other forces.  It's not 'my guys on one side and their guys on the other'.  It's 'most of my guys on one side, their guys on the other, and some of my guys jumped the gun and are now adjacent to their guys'.

No real rhyme or reason to it that I can see.

Also, sometimes I have multiple guys in the same 'square', especially those guys that 'jumped the gun'.

I had an issue with the catapults in a city I assaulted. It was a stack with a Hp of 573 and it just stood there. It would get 4/5 the way dead and the game would crash.. I tried to auto resolve and every1 died...