Catapults and Artillery

[Quillan]

When you can build tanks, there is a promotion called "Barrage" which will give the tank a 20% collateral damage. They have enough strength to win the fights, and make great city busters.

[MattPilot]

Tanks/Panzers/ modern armor should all get a negative modifier if attacking Cities.

Urban warfare was not their thing. Instead, i think they should be the unit that kills stacks in the open.

[Fried-Psitalon]

Matt - this is signified by their inability to get a defensive bonus, which keeps them from being all-purpose units; the last thing you want is a tank defending a city.

[ac_snowman]

I'm a little confused about cats. I've got one sitting in a city about to be attacked. The attack comes and there's no defensive first strike from my cat. So I look for a way to bombard before he attacks, but nothing.
Is the only way I can use my cat for city defense to attack the enemy with it and sacrifice in the process? I thought the whole point of having one sitting in a city was to get that first strike. For that matter I thought that was the point of the first strike?!?
If there's no way to bombard an enemy sitting outside the city gates, that's kind of lame. I mean, it not like the cat's going to go charging out onto the field of battle to attack. Historically, the whole point of having an artillery piece like a cat or trebuchet inside your city was to rain all kinds of hurt down down on the enemy before he gets inside your gate. I'm thinking Return of the King trebs raining big ol chucks of grade A pain down on the orcs outside the city.

[DeepO]

If you want to attack, simply move your cat onto the enemy stack. It will do collateral damage even if it has a good chance of getting destroyed.

Whether that is realistic or not is besides the point, it does make for an interesting gameplay element.

DeepO

[ac_snowman]

Okay, thanks. I really just meant to ask the question to figure out how it works and somehow ended up on a soapbox. Hate it when that happens!

I read your post on first strikes in the the combat system forum and it is my understanding from that that only the specific unit being attacked in a stack or city will use it's first strikes. A catapult in a city won't take a free shot at an attacking unit unless it is the specific defender (must resist soapbox!) Is that accurate?

BTW..thanks for all the great info.

[Jon Shafer]

That's correct... there is no defensive bombardment like in Civ 3 (that confused me the first time I played Civ 4 as well, all those years ago ).

[mountainlion2]

Does anyone know why they took out the defensive bombardment and the regular bombardment for arty pieces?

[Fried-Psitalon]

Regular bombardment was something the AI could never master, and honestly, the concept of "reprecussion-free" combat is always a very dangerous notion, from a balance perspective. As for defensive bombardment, dunno. Maybe Castles should give the defender 1 free first strike...