Suggestion: Partial Destruction of Choke-points.

As a three-time Siege test participant, the current map would not work for this in any meaningful way long term.

Current Siege is like playing a MOBA with less rules, and while I personally feel that it might benefit from either being considerably more like a MOBA or considerably less like one, the destructibility of chokepoints would encourage an attacker tactic that already seems quite strong (from the perspective of someone who has never played on the Attacker side, as I was gathering data).

The gates being knocked down is a thing that actually helps and matters if your mages are competent enough, so the only thing that seems to be needed now (and might be already implemented, I didn't fully check) is that your character's respawn time should be inversely related to their distance from their spawn point when they die.

This way, both teams are encouraged to push forward at least a bit, and they 'arrive back at any given point' at about the same time (there's some teleportation options that add to this, but I can't be sure enough of the exact mechanics to give a full description here - treat everything in the Spoiler tag as conjecture).

What I 'assumed was happening/intended' was that you could teleport to whatever Control Point (tower) you controlled, and that if you just burst through one of the three(?) paths all the way to the Throne Room door, that means you left one open for the defenders to use to teleport out and flank you. If you hold them all, there's still a back way out that they can take if they have faith in their ability to hold off your forces at the gate.

If the terrain itself was destructible, it wouldn't change that much right now except making things even more chaos, as I see it. We saw this in a recent siege where the Attackers actually held control of the Throne Room gate and were mostly filling the room, and defenders would just push in from the two sides and try to stop them from taking it directly.

In short this would reward you for zerging/pushing more than it would for holding, but holding (as an Attacker) might already have big enough rewards that it would just be punishing the Defenders for splitting their forces or 'not having enough scouts'. Attackers would simply bring Damage Dealing mages whose only intention was to burst and use all their mana on widening the doorway, and the advantage of the Trebuchets would be balanced only very slightly by some other mechanics.

This one's already too long, so tl;dr, the way chokepoints help defenders is countered heavily by Mages, both while the gates are up, and after they fall, and it looks like this is so innate to sieges that it can't be changed meaningfully.

After participating in another two sieges, I think I can finally articulate what is 'wrong' with Siege as it is now, but I don't know what they'll do about it because it would be a pretty big departure from what we've already got.

The 'problem' with Siege as it stands is either that it has too many defined paths once you get close to castle, making it more MOBA, or that it doesn't have enough prep and tactics required on either side, which means it isn't MOBA enough.

If we wanted it to be more MOBA, three things would need to be different:
1. The Dragons or any other similar boss type triad, should be 'in the way' more than they are now, and therefore 'define the lanes' unless you choose to fight through them, and they should probably attack trebuchets and other siege engines, while also being more likely to drift toward the castle over time.
2. The Ballistae need to be destructible.
3. The respawn time needs to be tied to your distance from your base camp, increasing (but not too much) when you die closer to home base, to encourage 'use of the Control points', as mentioned (Attackers might need to spawn on an unreachable ridge that they can jump down from)

If we wanted it to be less MOBA, three other things would need to be different:
1. Instead of the gates being destructible easily by players, the entire top of the outer wall including the Ballistae should be destructible and able to collapse down to about half their height or lower, and in return the gates would be harder to destroy.
2. A siege engine that would allow people to be protected while climbing over those destroyed sections should exist (think a big box that you climb up the inside of), and so should ladders (much more open and easily countered)
3. Mages should be able to destroy the walls as well, but retain their current 'reduced' effectiveness once inside the courtyard (so it's good to bring mages for the walls, but then you get stopped inside if you bring too many, if you're concerned that this will make mages too good, there's no real reason why they aren't 'too good' right now)

It might be my group being nitpicky, but the novelty of the current implementation has waned already, and I don't think it is because of the lack of classes available or the TTK shift.

Of course, this is just from Siege testing and none of this might be relevant, but we were already discussing 'the current implementation', so here it is.

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To start from my own side, a correction. I've been told by my team member that the Ballistae are destructible, or at least definitely were in the first sieges and there's no reason to assume that's changed. But she also said she 'had to wait a few minutes for them to respawn', whereas I was talking about 'that whole section of the wall collapses'.

Whether they 'respawn' or not, patching or rebuilding the wall is good, though I'd leave the holes broken if the attackers managed to make a proper one.

The inner walls, I feel could get a similar treatment, even if you limited it to only the Ballista mounts there. Wreck it so you can climb up. I can't say fully though because there is a way currently for Attackers to bypass... the entire thing. They can get to the Throne Room gate via specific pathing right now (can't say if that's intended, though the terrain implies it) without dealing with any walls. It's just easy-ish to defend and inaccessible from any courtyard control points.

Technically the only reason that isn't the First Order strategy now, is that it takes long and is very defensible so it's a worse chokepoint than the inner gate itself, but you can definitely use it as an alternate once you've got enough done, to make the opponents not defend it.

I assumed that the wall being 'a defense that is intended to eventually fall' was part of the design, since it would feel unrewarding to the attacker side, otherwise. If you aren't 'guaranteed' to be able to eventually break down a meaningful part of the wall, it would be similar to if it was easy to repair the gates. Battles would almost always just stall at the wall because the defense would have stronger ability to attack from the wall or behind the gate, down at the attackers, than the reverse. I would worry that it would become a numbers tweaking game from the Devs side instead of tactics, and they'd probably still have to tweak it so that the gates would 'eventually always fall', which has some... issues, if you crunch the numbers.

Yes, it's entirely because this is a 'numbers game intended to simulate a siege' that it needs to have a lot of design 'conversions'.

The idea is that the defending force can't hold out forever and 'has to send out forces to push the attackers back' eventually or they lose, so I'd assume that this is represented by 'unless you're quite powerful, the wall will fall eventually'.

The dragons, or whatever other large bosses, I saw as a reactive force meant to accelerate everything and add interest, so I figured they should 'move toward massive concentrations of battle, death, use of weapons, or magic', while still just 'attacking anything that passed their way'. Like, conceptually 'the reason the dragons are there' is because they are intelligent and 'know a siege is coming' and are there to get easy pickings.

This is also the reason (other than development strain) why tunnels and caves weren't a thing I figured they would go into, because the effect of having the tunnels is equivalent to having the Control points. An accelerated way past a defensive line, which the defenders would then need to deal with.

A lot of the times, game design ends up working like this. You can't make an engaging version of the real-life form of something, so you look at 'what effect it has' and do the equivalent of that. Changing the Control Points to 'Tunnel Exits' might work, but I worry that it might be confusing.

I don't think the balance of the Ballistae specifically is currently part of the main test, in terms of closing space. This is because the regeneration rate when your weapon is sheathed is so high that you can just walk casually through Ballista fire. It's not nothing, but it's definitely 'Cleric ignorable', and I say this because I ignore it for up to 30 seconds at a time.

I'm not claiming this is a good idea, but rather that Ballistae are probably meant to help in battles or hold off some siege engine we haven't seen yet.

It might be cool if they had a DoT though.