I spent about 8 hours on Saturday refreshing siege in Eternal Battlegrounds. It was not exactly what I would call “fun”.
It was, however, valuable. Several times, our towers were attacked, and we were able to drive off the attackers because we had plenty of siege ready and waiting and enough time to get people on them.
“Time” is the key thing there. It doesn’t matter how much siege you have if nobody shows up in time to defend. And nobody is going to show up to defend if they don’t know there’s an attack underway. To ensure a successful defense, you either have to have guards stationed at each objective, or you have to have people patrolling so that when there’s an attack, your team hears about it.
The people who are guarding or patrolling might as well refresh the siege while they’re there. But refreshing siege needs to be a secondary task for them (ideally, a task they should get some small reward for); their primary task should be checking the area for enemies.
Other secondary tasks for your guards or patrollers: identifying useless siege and deliberately not refreshing it so that it goes away, and building extra siege if you think an objective doesn’t have enough. A side bonus of building extra siege is, you get first dibs to use it if there’s an attack (which means more bags for you).
One other thought: if you’ve been refreshing the siege you will know how much is at each objective. So if an attack is reported, tell your team how much siege is already there ready to use. Your defenders are more likely to show up if they think the defense will be (a) successful and (b) profitable. Having siege ready makes both (a) and (b) more likely. During one attack we had problems getting enough defenders to show up, but when I announced that we had 3 unmanned arrow carts available for bag farming, the response was immediate.
-ken
The Purge [PURG] – Ehmry Bay