Ram Vs Ballista

[Liamwelsh6]

Rams are better early game asnyou really just attack for the cap, however late game in big battles you might want to use a balistica to take down an enemy wear house, to stop them mass producing troops! Hope this helped!

[cvince]

Ballistas can be great in the early game to slow down nearby enemies. Once you get into 75+ cities, ballistas are kind of useless. You shouldn't be attacking unless its a organized guild attack and then you definitely need rams. If someone sends 40 or 50 thousand troops to defend, taking down the wall is the difference between 3 or 4 cities and 10 cities.

[Bash1000]

Just mass produce troops. If you train more lancers, sentries, berserkers, and knights, you can split them up as needed

[Marlo0826]

Apologies if this question has been answered. ***** overall are better defense vs Rams. ***** have a much higher edge over infantry, but a slightly lower edge against cavalry (***** defend 80pts vs rams 10pts against infantry, but defend 40pts vs rams 50pts against cavalry). So overall ***** are better. That being said, rams will hit a wall harder than ***** even when ***** have wall targeted. ***** are mainly used to demo a city or certain buildings. So in all, neither are really great for defense. They each have their specialties.

[MyName999]

rams will defend against other rams attacking so use rams in defense cities to save your wall and troops better

False, use the simulator and attack lv25 walls with 200 rams againt 0 ram and 100 guardians.

Make same scenario with the amount of rams for having same defense as 100 guardians (I did the calc, but don't remember the result X-C) and only defend with rams... You'll see that effect on the walls is EXACTLY the same!!!

So rams don't defend against rams...

CQFD

[DutchDuke]

I'm not quite sure if you misunderstood my thread, asplundh, but Im fully aware of what Rams and Ballista are and what they can do. My questions were from a strategic standpoint - do any of you even use ballista? Is there a clear advantage in general warfare to knock something other than a wall down?

When I attack a city it's to cap it, seems counterproductive to destroy a city you'll have control of soon...

Yep, rams definitely are more important than ballistas overall. You want to cap new cities, so you'll have to break the wall. Rams are better at that, simple. In my opinion the defensive aspects don't really matter that much. The rest of your home army should defend your siege weapons, not the other way around.

However ballistas do have a purpose. They allow you to get creative, so you can toy with your enemies. Aiming for certain buildings can give you an edge, especially when you know what you're doing.

Early game example:
Your neighbour lord produces more resources than you. The world is just a week old, but you noticed he starts training more zerks and knights. He does have some lancers and sentries, but you're pretty sure you can still clear him as long as his walls are low. However you're not even close to building your academy, so capping is not an option..

Basically now you're already in trouble. Unless you spent gold on an InstaReport, you used scouts to find out his situation in the first place. So your neighbour is already aware you might be a threat. If you wait any longer he is likely to take you out instead. That's when ballistas can help you out. Clear his city, break his walls and reduce his farms to 1.

Since his buildings use food too, he now is in trouble. Before he can even think about training new troops or building a wall, he will need to rebuild his farms. So now you can start farming him and each time he rebuilds some farms, take them down again. This way you can change the odds. If you do it well, you can keep him down untill you get nerds.

Mid game example:
You want to cap a lord, but you worry your enemy might dodge your clearing waves and snipe your nerds. He did the same to your guild mate and you have no idea when this guy sleeps..

Ballistas might help here too. Instead of just sending clearing waves and breaking the wall, you can throw some ballistas in. You only need a handfull to take out his rally point. Launch several of these "rally point destroying waves" with 10 seconds in between. By doing so you cripple his ability to dodge, so you create a window for clearing his troops. And if he wants to rebuild his rally point fast, he will need to cancel his current building job and lose the time spent.

End game example:
An enemy player has lots of huge barbs near your lord. You recently scouted his lord city and saw ridiculous amounts of troops there. Scouting one of his barbs showed it has a lot of troops outside the city. You're not really interested in the barbs, but taking his lord down is no option either. So you decide to cap a bunch of these barbs first to withdraw support from them. Their defense isn't a problem, but with their high city halls it will take a very long time to change influence.

Here your ballistas can help too. Clear & break some barbs and take down their city halls as far as possible. It will help you to cap them much faster. This might not seem that important, but now you have a better shot at capping those barbs before their support has returned. If you succeed, all troops outside of the city are yours now.

In a nutshell:
@Fhorar: You say you know what rams & ballistas can do. I tried to explain how they can be used effectively. Rams do a better job with breaking walls. That's always useful to limit your troop losses. Ballistas allow you to target some other buildings. In other words you can create a weakness for you enemy and benefit from it. As long as you keep in mind, that you will have to rebuild that stuff yourself after capping the city, go crazy.

[AnarcNeedsHelp]

rams will defend against other rams attacking so use rams in defense cities to save your wall and troops better

Rams do have a defensive value, and looking at it it does seem high for a single unit.(10 v Infantry, 50 v Mounted) however they cost 4 farm space units per 1 ram. So per farm space a rams defense is something like 2.5 and 12.5. Which isn't a heck of a lot better than a berserker which is 5 and 5. So they do add to a cities defense but not by a lot. And they don't specifically stop rams.