Do they come with the required manpower though?
Crew of 4 for the tank. Crew of... thousands? To move and use 541 trebuchets?
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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Easy, slap an ebike on it and you cut it down to one per trebuchet.
Many thousands if they're traction trebuchets
M1 Abrams: Requires an advanced economy plus an army of General Dynamics contractors for maintenance
Trebuchet: Can be completely repaired by one hammer-wielding villager
Plus, I assume that tanks count as a cavalry archer unit, which means any old monk can start converting them. Meanwhile trebuchets can't be converted until your enemy researches redemption at the monastery.
in AOEIII artillery are siege weapons so I think tanks would count as that, I remember getting my onagers converted in AOE but I don't remember if that's a thing in AOEII
That's correct. Bombard cannons require the monk to straight up whisper in the crouching dude's ear for conversion.
In my headcanon, it's probably because bombard operators are deaf with all that blasting.
*headcannon
Sigh.. missed opportunities
I do, yes.
Why is that? A tank doesn’t have enough ammunition to take out that many trebuchets, but a stone launched from one of those trebuchets could destroy or seriously damage a tank to the point it would be combat ineffective.
It doesn’t matter how thick the armor on any given tank is, you drop a 1000lbs rock on it and it’s toast. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that some trebuchets were big enough to launch 2000lbs rocks, according to the encyclopedia Britannica.
An abrams can travel at 25mph offroad. It'll be impossible to aim to hit it. The only way is to launch all your trebuchets and hope one hits it. If you miss, you're gonna have 60tons with multiple machine guns running you over in a few seconds.
You don't have to hit it. You have 541 trebuchets. When it's totally out of gas and ammo, you still have a few hundred trebuchets.
yes but what if you have 100 tanks? Mobilizing 54.100 Trebuchets will be a funny thing to watch lmao
Also the cap is 500.
I’ll accept your concept if you’ll sell me 200 gold for 11,457 dollars
Risky for you to not include any units of gold. I think I've got at least 200mg of gold around my finger I will gladly trade for $11,457 USD.
Just open chat and type “how do you turn this on” and get the best of both worlds for free*!
Tap for spoiler
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Adjusted for market, 200gold is $8M
In the older civ games, unit stacking was a thing. The maintenance would be costly and you might break the game with some kind of unit cap, but I think the trebuchets would eventually win.
I play freeciv which is civ 3.5. Unit stacking is a thing and a stack of whatever can defeat whatever
Incidentally I like to give competing civilizations railway technology so when I attack them I can easily overrun all their big cities in a single turn
If only ceramic armor had an answer for the minimum damage limit.
What if the trebuchets threw dragons teeth instead of ball shaped rocks ?
Not enough wololo.
If anything there's been too much of that shit lately
bad math, trebuchet is 200 gold AND 200 wood, unless you're in a civ with gold or wood discount
This is a Canadian instance, so I'm pretty sure the wood discount applies.
Uh, yes, actually.
For sure, the unit cap impact alone sells the abrams.
I'm not going to drive a trebuchet to my kids' school to pick them up.
Of course not, that would be silly. You can just launch your kid into the school with a trebuchet and avoid rush hour traffic!
The return trip is more tricky though. Maybe launch a trebuchet for the return trip?
Obviously you are meant to place trebuchets along the route and be shot from one to the next. With exact timing you could even use another trebuchet to slow you down each time.
Wouldn't the Abrams run out of fuel (not to mention ammo) before it could take out all those trebuchets?
I think it would be most effective to drive over the trebuchets with the tank. Simply roll over a wheel or support, and the launcher will be misaligned and unable to fire. Tanks are mobile, and trebuchets are not.
trebuchets are not
We can modernize a little. Let's slap an e-bike on it and get that thing moving!
It could just run them over. Fuel probably depends on how far apart your place the trebuchets.
Or you know, kill the humans under open sky operating trebuchet
If you're close enough to drive through them, you might as well just swing by the camp of personnel operating them and supplying ammo.
At that price, everyone should have a trebuchet!
You mean you don't??