Interesting question from Discord:
Any tips on how to win a siege? playing on difficult difficulty, and now I find that my besieging army just starves before the defenders do. Also my fleet begins to starve on the 2nd turn at sea, so I cannot keep them off shore for siege bonus. Even with only lvl 3 fortifications, the defenders hold out.
Cranky Corvid response listing official mechanics:
[*] Armies can draw food supply from adjacent regions you control, or from adjacent fleets (by consuming the fleet's Effectiveness, so it will reduce the fleet's time on station).
[*] To maintain a constant naval blockade, you need to rotate multiple fleets.
[*] Units have a Siege Value that determines how much they contribute to siege rolls. You can check this in the unit's stats. Most light and medium cavalry contributes nothing, while missile troops tend to be above average. You should aim to have a positive score for the roll, the more the better (it's capped at +50, off the top of my head). A leader with a good Offense Rating also helps, and there is a leader trait (Siege Expert, with a trebuchet icon) that gives every unit in the stack a big boost to siege value.
[*] If you need to boost your siege rolls cheaply, Peasant Militia are dirt cheap and do the job (recruitable by any faction after building the Peasants Roundup).
[*] High-quality stacks (heavy infantry, knights, crossbows/archers in the backline) can successfully assault most low-level fortifications. This becomes easier as the defenders take damage from siege rolls.
My own response digging into specifics and exploity tactics:
So one thing you should remember: its rarely worth it to besiege sub-lvl3 walls as long as you have 3 rating supports, just assault straight away even with medium infantry. You can go assault lvl 3 walls with cavalry/heavy infantry str8 away. Assault action is very few places where you actually must have 2 Attack rating General.
For Naval interventions you typically want to exchange/buy out a single region just for the food source OR get passage rights & above from the overseas faction OR attack unfortified/lightly fortified regions from the get go.
As for the big fortified settlements there are two main options except besieging:
1) Wait until they gain 1 more POP before starting the blockade, which gonna be way more efficient due to the small carry over food supply;
2) Multiple attacks per round. Its harder to stagger your armies compared to previous games where you had generals with bonuses/maluses to entire stack movespeed. Now your options are starting from the different positions and using Force March order. If move out of the region takes exactly 1 MP assault command won't go through if its part of the move order.
Typically you want heavy hitters to connect last. Usually you have mercs stack backed up by archers for the initial damage, potential RGD stack created in one of their occupied regions backed up by archers followed by the main heavy infantry force backed up by archers. That last hammer blow connects against heavily depleted garrison or low quality troops that replaced Palace Guards or whoever in the center.
