July 14th, Jicheng.

The moat outside the city has been completely dried up, and the walls and pits of deer antlers have long been completely destroyed.

The city wall, which was as high as five feet tall, was smashed by a catapult and was damaged everywhere. Large tracts of collapsed rammed earth formed a pile of soil under the base of the wall, making a gentle slope, which facilitated the attacker's footsteps.

The female walled walls on the top of the city were damaged on a large scale, and most of the city towers collapsed, and the defenders no longer had a systematic shelter.

There were only temporary piles of soil and haystacks wrapped in sand to provide protection for crossbowmen on the city and soldiers who threw wooden and stone rolling.

These haystacks wrapped in sand play a role that is equivalent to those used to build bunkers in later generations.

After all, burlap is still relatively valuable in this era. The temporary facilities used to defend the city can afford burlap sandbags. It is already very good to tie the clay bundles and decorate the clay.

As for whether the straw bundle container is more likely to catch fire than the burlap sandbag and is more likely to be ignited by the siege rockets, it is no longer enough to care about it.

The only thing that gave the defenders some comfort was that with the popularity of trenchers, the defense would at least build as simple as possible and cheap leveraged trenchers as possible, and then throw them into pieces of gravel bombs to fight against the enemy outside the city.

This tactic was not just invented by Jicheng's siege. It happened a year or two ago. Even if it was necessary to talk about a large-scale confrontation between the siege, in the Battle of Kunyang more than half a year ago, Guan Yu also used a siege to suppress Cao Cao.

Yuan Xijun was just a rare success in picking up someone and refuting his life.

However, Liu Bei's camp dared to show off his powerful weapon and tactics to defend the city, which means that there must be a way to restrain himself.

Just as Zhuge Liang dared to expose the cross-observation method of the Lookout Tower during the siege of Chang'an, it must have left behind the defensive countermeasures "large-area hollow corner tower".

Similarly, Zhuge Liang dared to expose the more exquisite tactics and formations of the catapults to the bomb in the battle to defend the city, so he must know how to restrain this move when his character is replaced to the attacking side.

Yuan Xi couldn't even learn the trick of "protecting the fence rope" to prevent the city wall from being smashed by a catapult. He could only learn that little bit of three-legged cats and be subjected to targeted new tricks, which was extremely miserable.

Of course, Zhuge Liang was not on the battlefield in Hebei this time, so the strategist who used the new anti-crime tactics was not Zhuge Liang himself, but Pang Tong, who had consulted Zhuge Liang for advice before the war.

Although Pang Tong had no friendship with Zhuge Liang in this life, the relationship between the two was pretty good after all. Moreover, Pang Tong was very observant and noticed the exquisite combat methods of many of the city guards exposed by Zhuge Liang during the Battle of Kunyang at the end of last year, so he asked him "how to restrain these newly emerging ways of restraint."

Zhuge Liang didn't say much about the leak, but he also mentioned some things, and Pang Tong quickly realized it himself.

This time, Pang Tong used the technique to restrain the "Yuan Xi, who was defending the city, also built a leverage catapult to bombard the enemy", and the technology used was an auxiliary measure for siege in the city called "Z-shaped trench".

To put it bluntly, it is a kind of trench that is rummaged from the top of the city to 50 steps from outside the range of the heavy crossbow at an angle of 60 to 120 degrees.

This kind of trench earthwork is actually similar to modern trenchwork. It is a two-way use of the one-way sheep and horse trench that Zhuge Liang invented during the Battle of Kunyang. One is used for defending the city and the other for siege.

Of course, since it is just a trench, not a real work, it is impossible for this thing to dig down the city wall, and it is even more impossible to attack and penetrate into the city directly. It is made public and has much weaker effect.

The greatest value of Z-shaped trench is to provide a safe output environment for crossbowmen on the siege, and can shoot arrow rains at the city without being shot by fire from the city.

Originally, when the defenders did not use leverage catapults to smash the stone rain, the attacking crossbowmen had to ensure their safety, mainly carrying some huge and heavy rattan cards to the city and blocking the guardian arrow rain.

Or use wooden boards to build a structure house and a shelter like a wall. Those with high requirements can also bury rammed earth in front of the wall of the array house overnight. In this way, hiding behind thick wooden boards and mounds of soil will definitely be foolproof.

However, after the defender used a catapult to wash the floor under the city, this simple fortification was completely invalid.

Because whether it is a giant rattan or a wooden wall, it will be hit by a catapult and it will be split into pieces. The bursting fragments may turn into shrapnel, killing the crossbowman in the siege who is hiding behind it.

The original temporary bunker fortifications of the siege became waste instantly under the catapult.

When Zhang Fei came to attack Jixian this time, he also encountered this trouble at the beginning. He was very disadvantaged when shooting with the city wall. He was always suppressed by the catapult array.

This is really not a suggestion that Liu Ye gave to Yuan Xi, but there are so many people around Yuan Xi who have made friends with Liu Ye and can always learn some trivial insights. It is not surprising that they are forced to come up with new insights by actual combat pressure in the bloody battle.

Talents are all improving in actual combat.

Fortunately, Pang Tong immediately came up with the aforementioned strategy and then countered it. Although it took a little longer and took more than twenty days to complete the main traffic trench in various attack directions of Jicheng, the results were indeed outstanding after the situation was completed.

A trencher can smash flatten shields and wooden walls, but it cannot collapse trenches, right? Moreover, the traffic trench is in a Z-shaped and winding forward, and no section will be parallel or perpendicular to the direction of the defenders on the city wall.

The stones thrown by the stone trencher in the city will be almost impossible to fall directly into the trench. They can only be further compressed from "line strike" to "point strike", and the hit rate will be greatly reduced.

In addition to communicating with the front and rear traffic trenches, the trenches extending to a distance of 100 or even fifty steps below the city wall, there are also two horizontal trenches, both of which are twists and turns, and are not completely straight, and they are protected from cross-fire fire at the top of the city.

In this way, the efficiency of the crossbow shooting between the siege and the defending party was almost flattened, and the advantage of the defense being condescending is no longer obvious (only when we are in close combat, we still lose wood, stone, and gold juice, but not obvious when we are long-range combat)

Seeing that the siege party had so many fancy tricks and was useful, and he had never seen before, the defending army could only do nothing.

In despair, Yuan Xi's only ability to do is curse:

Cursing Liu Bei's army is so shameless and always relies on updating military science and technology to gain an advantage. Then when their move is learned by the enemy, their advantage will no longer exist!

Technological progress is always a double-edged sword! Others can copy it even if you make progress! Unless you keep updating and iterating!

However, there is no doubt that Yuan Xi's curse will inevitably fail.

Because Liu Bei's camp was not afraid of the reversal of the technical advantages of this round of offensive and defensive city, which would retaliate against Liu Bei's army.

First of all, Liu Bei's army did not think that they would need to fight a city defense in the war of unity in the future. They surrounded the six dangerous places in the Kanto region and completely won over. In the future, only Cao Cao was passively beaten, and Liu Bei still had to worry about being beaten?

Finally, the trick exposed by Pang Tong today actually has great limitations in use, that is, any offense and defense method that requires huge digging of trenches and soil work actually depends on the geological conditions of "land is easy to excavate and groundwater is not rich."

In other words, only a geographical environment suitable for "siege of the cave" can be suitable for matching this trick.

As we all know, Yuan Shao's army was the best at siege and siege. Gongsun Zan's Yijing Tower died on siege and siege. This is because the softness and dryness of the North China Plain is highly consistent with this tactic.

In the future, the siege method to use this tortuous trenches to cover the output of long-range troops will only be applicable to about two states, including Jizhou, northern Yuzhou, and western Yanzhou.

And these areas are all things that Cao Cao wants to defend Liu Bei and attack. Liu Bei is still worried about "siege technology leaks"?

Therefore, with the unscrupulous technical reserves pouring out of Liu Bei's camp, the most technical occasions such as offense and defense city battles have obviously become a key node for Liu Bei's side to expand its advantages.

Yuan Xi's troops were killed in battle every day with hundreds or thousands of regular troops, and they could not take advantage of the long-range firepower bombing and firing process.

Even because the crossbowmen sent by Zhang Fei generally had helmets and breastplate, and Yuan Xijun had experienced crossbowmen who suffered a lot of losses, the more they fought, the greater the advantage Zhang Fei had.

Now, the elite soldiers in the city have dropped from 30,000 at the beginning of the siege to more than 10,000. A considerable number of the responsibilities of crossbowmen have been replaced by melee troops that have never used crossbows.

Because the demand for melee combat in the Ant Support City is relatively small, Yuan Xi's melee troops were originally responsible for throwing wooden rocks and grey bottles of gold juice under the city.

Now the gray bottle and hot oil have been used up, and even the troops who threw the wooden and rocks were replaced by temporary force-pulled civilians in the city, and their combat effectiveness has become increasingly difficult.

The people in the city had a good impression of the Yuan family, mainly because Yuan Shao killed Gongsun Zan and avenged Liu Yu.

Moreover, before the war, Yuan Xi repeatedly advocated that "Gongsun Zan was Liu Bei's senior brother, and Liu Bei ignored his kind-hearted master Liu Yu's support to him and was ungrateful." This city, which was once Liu Yu's base camp, was temporarily fooled by Yuan Xi and helped him stay for so long.

However, with Yuan Xi like this, he forced the people to fill the front as cannon fodder and threw wood and stones to resist, and gradually lost all the kindness and people's hearts accumulated by the Yuan family in Jicheng over the past six years. Jicheng would fall within a month.

Most people have gradually awakened and began to hide their only food rations, hiding from all over the world to avoid the search of Yuan's soldiers, and are unwilling to be taken to be cannon fodder.

Many people gradually learned about Zhang Feijun's propaganda outside the city, and learned that Liu Bei did not oppose Liu Yu, nor did they recognize Gongsun Zan.

What Liu Bei opposed was "Liu He was unfilial to his father. He was arrested by Yuan Shu and his colleagues were ill-behaved, which caused Liu Yu's reputation to be damaged. Later, he was killed by Gongsun Zan. After his father's death, he was harassed by Yuan Shao and caused trouble in the world."

Under such propaganda, some people gradually believed that Liu Bei "only opposed Liu He, not Liu Yu, and even promised that after defeating the rebels of Han in the future, he would let Liu Yu's other sons inherit the position of King Yan, and promised not to kill Liu He and be named Marquis of Violation."

This propaganda caliber that distinguishes Liu He and his father finally gradually disintegrated the people's hearts of the last Liu Yu base camp in Youzhou.
Chapter completed!