Units

Siege

The Siege engine is a specialist with exactly one job: taking cities.

Iron first

The Siege engine is a gated unit: with no Iron deposit inside your territory it cannot enter a queue at all. The prerequisite is empire-wide — one deposit unlocks every city — and losing the deposit while the item waits does not delete it, the item waits. The full rule is on The production queue.

This changes the timetable of conquest: deciding to take a city no longer starts with queueing an item, it starts with finding a deposit on the map. And because Siege is the most expensive unit on the board (8), finding iron late delays the conquest twice.

The prerequisite gates the production queue, not ownership: a Siege engine already in the field keeps marching and battering if you lose the deposit — what you lose is the right to build another one.

Against cities

Attacking a city uses the unit's attack vs. city value rather than its normal attack. The Siege engine's is 6; the best any other unit manages is 2 (Spearman and Raider). Because a city never strikes back, the Siege engine hits it safely (Combat).

The same value applies to a neutral village, and there it is sharper still: a village has 8 HP, so a Siege engine drops it in a single blow (Neutral village). That is what being the only city-breaker buys — every other unit spends several turns on the same village.

Against units

Attack 2, defense 1, HP 8. In the field it is nearly defenceless and an Raider kills it easily. Never send it alone — a Siege engine always travels with a Spearman.

It also does not advance into the tile after killing a defender; it stays put. Once the siege breaks, some other unit walks into the city.

What the escort buys

"Never send it alone" now rests on a mechanic: every tile next to a Spearman is a zone of control, and a unit entering one ends its move there (Combat). Keep the Siege engine behind the Spearman and an incoming Raider has to halt in front of the line.

That is not a shield, it is a price: a halted unit loses its movement but not its action, and can attack whatever is adjacent to the tile it stopped on. The Siege engine is a unit too, so its own neighbourhood is a zone of control — an attacker that reaches it still halts, but by then it is adjacent.

So the real rule is: keep the Siege engine far enough back that it is not adjacent to the tiles where attackers halt. The Spearman stops them next to itself; if that stop is also next to the Siege engine, the escort bought nothing. Fortifying will not save a Siege engine. Digging in multiplies defense by 1.5, but the multiplier applies to the defense value — and with a defense of 1 the gain stays small (Combat). Fortifying also burns the turn's action, so you stop battering the city. Keeping an escort is always the better decision.

When to build it

Only when you can actually see a city to take. A Siege engine built without a target wastes 8 production — the AI opponent knows this too and keeps its Siege weight low while no rival city is known.

A rival actually switching to siege production depends on a second condition: once its city quota (6) is full and it knows where a rival city sits, Siege becomes a serious candidate — but the personality that really queues it is the one built around expansion; the other two keep building Spearman or Raider even then (The AI opponent). It is an easy sign to read: a rival with nowhere left to expand starts taking its score from you rather than from the ground.

The numbers on this page are read from the game’s balance tables.