When I first started playing Fire Emblem, the pathetic idiocy of enemies defending castles struck me. A boss standing at the castle gates, just waiting for you to kill him. Castles have big reinforced doors! You could just stay inside and close the door! In many games such as FE4: Genealogy of the Holy War, killing the boss at the gate counts as capturing the castle. This is understandable from a game design point of view, but patently ridiculous otherwise. I want my game to be more believable in that respect.
Now, games need not be realistic at all to be fun. I simply think making castles actually close their doors makes villains less hilariously incompetent. I hate the “idiot villain” cliché. Also, sieges exist and make more narrative and strategic sense. Incorporating sieges in the game also feels more interesting and varied to me: the player will probably get his turn in defending a castle from an enemy invading army. Maybe the performance of the player army in defending will decide if the castle door falls or not, and if you have to defend the throne.
If the castle’s front door is to be closed then, how can a castle be captured in my game? I think this is a three step operation. First, rout the field army to get to the castle. Secondly, siege the castle and destroy the reinforced gate. This necessitates the construction of siege weapons, such as rams, trebuchets, ballistas, catapults etc. by the assaulting army to destroy the reinforced gate during the chapter. Third, the assaulting army must storm the castle and seize the throne. This necessarily means that capturing castle in my game will be rare, and hopefully more significant.
Since flying units exist in this fantasy universe, castles must pay particular attention to their anti-air defense with ballistae and archers. This also provides a very nice narrative justification for armies never really employing some kind of “air assault” to fly an army inside the walls to invade. Castles in this universe must defend against air pretty well using ballistaes, archers… I also think that these kind of long-range siege weapons should be limited to these chapters, to make more sense. At least, I think long range weapons shouldn’t be shooting thought walls, except those that are explicitly shoot through (murder holes).
The fact that Pegasus knights can assault castles by air at night must have been a pretty good motivator for the development of ways of illuminating the night sky. I think these ways must be magical, but always backed by conventional methods. As such, even if the magical night light orbs or whatever get taken out, fires can be lighten up. Redundancy is good in this context. Also, this sounds like a good way to make a naive army fail a night air invasion plan: make them take out the magical night lights but still get taken out cause they are seen by fires. Maybe this happened in the past? Maybe this will happen during when the player has control and be remembered during the game?
Average Bear's GameDev 