Kingdom of Mercia (Age of Charlemagne) Faction

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Kingdom of Mercia (Age of Charlemagne) Military Tier 6

Improved Siege Engines

Cities are larger, walls are higher. It follows that the means of their destruction must be also.

The established norms of siege warfare changed during the Middle Ages. The same general principles of starvation and destruction applied, but as cities became larger and more fortified, the method of cracking these increasingly daunting defences also had to adapt. The onager and ballista were still common sights in a siege engineer's arsenal, but so too were newer, more adventurous weapons like the trebuchet and mangonel. Enormous, beam-sling weapons that hurled rocks (or whatever the general chose - even enemy prisoners!) in gigantic arcs before releasing them, created enormous amounts of force with which the attacker hoped to smash down walls or fire over them to destroy the city beyond. However, not always were these weapons the key to victory - at the Siege of Pavia in AD773-4, Charlemagne failed to bring siege equipment to his assault on the Lombard capital, and so the Frankish king was forced to starve the city out. This, combined with a Lombard failure to adequately prepare for the siege, resulted in their capitulation in June of AD774 - such tried and tested methods of old rarely fail, it seems.

Effects

Enables construction of medium siege engines (faction_to_force_own_unseen)

Requires
Requires Technologies	Call on Vassals Militia

Enables
Enables Technologies	Siege Techniques

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