I decided for "only in Strategus battles".
- You can't use ladders in battle, because they offer an advantage only to certain classes, while offering a huge disadvantage to other classes. The reason for this is that archers can become invulnerable to melee attacks during 90% of the time. The mere existance of counter measures (hide, use shield, use own ladder, wait till end of the round) doesn't make it balanced.
- You can't use ladders in siege either. The reasons for this were already told. In siege mode the map is far more important than in battle, so the maps need to be balanced carefully, which happens by the ladders, gates and gaps, creating a certain amount of bottlenecks about which holding or taking them the gamemode is. (Weird sentence
). If you implement ladders, there are not bottlenecks any more, and thus the enemy can come from everywhere, which usually results in the defenders camping the flag. Implementing ladders would be like turning every enemy in a tower defense game to a flyer, spawning from everywhere around the map. You couldn't do anything else but ignore the initial path leading to your object you want to defend and place all towers close to it, hoping they will fend all enemies off. And the next map you do the same, just like the next map and the map after that. Great fun and tactic decisions. Really interesting how the different maps affect gameplay.... NOT...
Just leave it for strategus, clans should be able to deal with it, and even then I would suggest to make strategus maps without any "natural" bottlenecks except of the main gate. Everything else would mean you can lose your fief easier than how you conquered it.
Poll