Yeah...I can see an overwhelming army winning.
But..30k defenses versus 30k to maybe 40k attackers does not an overwhelming attacking army make. Especially when the defenders are behind level 5 walls.
That makes them a suicide squad, not an overwhelming army.
Remember the standard rule of needing DOUBLE the CS to take a city.
If your alliance of four or five nations has to take advantage of weaknesses in the combat AI and rains of magic to wound the defending nobility and stop their players from being able to play the game at all, just to beat a single nation, then you need to find a better way to play the game.
(Though I will grant once again that Oligarch was receiving support from outside which allowed us to work at a higher peak efficiency than a single nation, truly alone, could have. That did make us much more resilient to the normal attrition of war. Also, only one of Sirion's allies had a truly impressive mobile force. The others were also rans which wouldn't have meant much on their own.)
But you are making a statement based on a flawed assumption. You don't need x2 to siege a city. That is to siege a city safely and that tactic was used when people mostly fielded infantry. Like I said multiple times (yet you don't seem to understand why your statement is flawed), we no longer have enough people to field 60k CS. Even with many realms putting together their armies they can hardly field anything close to it. Yet it is easy to put 20-30k CS of militia in a city granted the city is rich enough. That is why we are having this discussion of fixing the problem. From Anaris' comment, he clearly understands the flaw of the current system and will most likely work on a solution that will at least lessen some of the issues. You are constantly talking about how Oligarch's fall was unfair but it is the other way around. It was unfair for the realm to last so long behind the walls relying on militias. It was okay when Oligarch had 20+ nobles, fielding 20k CS army but once the realm was down to 12 nobles with 10k CS, it should have fallen relatively quickly. Yet thanks to the broken militia system and the addition of poorly thought out peasant militia system in an attempt to forcely keep realms alive, it just turned the whole thing into a !@#$ show that dragged on for too many months. I am just grateful that all the problems are finally being recognized and will be worked on. Maybe by the time this year, we will no longer see people relying too heavily on militias to keep them alive.
Oligarch was sending a 10k to 20k army into the field during the Sirion Civil War.
Sirion could normally deploy a 10k to 20k army of their own, which Oligarch handily trounced again and again.
Epollyon could do 10k to 20k as I remember when Sirion called them in and made it a more general war.
The rest maybe provided 5k or 6k each.
It was enough to push Oligarch back, but it wasn't an overwhelming advantage when the city walls were factored in.
Now once again, I do agree that militias need to be toned back. Right now they are handled, and recruited like, standard military units. They simply don't have leaders. They cost a similar amount to train and deploy as noble-led units. They are...the same. That makes it easy for a very small realm to deploy a lot of militia to hold city walls.
That is what kept Oligarch longer than it should have. Hopefully this problem will be fixed so small realms die when they should.
What if, instead of treating them like organized, and trained soldiers that simply act like normal military units, we treated the militia as a more untrained reserve? Remember that the modern militia idea of trained soldiers with firearms that can fight and win against a trained military is...well...very modern American in style. But in the medieval world, no peasant had the time to learn how to use a bow and arrow. Only trained men at arms did. And they followed a noble, or were lesser nobility themselves.
What if we treated militia units more like peasant armies? Make them based on the population of the region, with each region lord able to increase or decrease the size of the militia by shifting a setting that would increase or decrease their impact on the economy, but with a finite limit to how large they can be based on that population. And limit them to more infantry-style tactics. Like the peasant armies.
Also, we already have the peasant armies in the code, so I'm thinking that might not be too difficult to implement as coding goes.
I think units set to militia should be treated like retired soldiers. Maybe they should become weaker every passing weak and after about 21~42 days (which is a year in BM time) they all disappear. But until they disappear, they are paid the same despite them becoming weaker over time to discourage people from putting too many of them. Or maybe there should be something like CS limit based on your mobile CS or noble count.
If devs really want small realms that are active and full of people, basing it on # of nobles will certainly help them survive. But again, militias need to be weakened considerably.
