Artillery late in the game obsolete?

[Urban Ranger]

This whole thing just indlcates weaknesses in the combat system that can be corrected in Civ 5 These include:

- No combined arms tactics.
- Armour is very good at taking out entrenched infantry (IRL tanks get destroyed).
- There is no indirect fire (there should be mulitple ratings of strengths).
- Seige weapons are effective at direct attacks.
- Forts and fortresses are worthless.
- The combat model is too bloody.
- The differences between units' strength are too small. A factor of two that separates different "generations" of units is a minimal. For example, if scouts are one and warriors are two, then archers should be 4. This has the happy consequence of placing quality over quantity.
- Strength and hit points are combined (they should be separate).
- Units are the same attacking and defending (although this is alleviated somewhat by some units having defensive bonuses).

[Badtz Maru]

Originally posted by spammurabi
I've personally never had to use artillery very much, but if I was at technological parity with my enemies (as I might be as I progress upwards in difficulty level) and I needed to bombard enemy cities to have a decent chance of winning combat in their city, and they had a big nasty air force hovering about, I'd probably use artillery.

Bombers get shot down, and the AI sure does like building fighters and SAM infantry. When that happens I typically just roll over them with Modern Armor, but if they had City Defender Mech Infantry, that'd be a problem.

You can get Arty pretty quick though, if you try. City Raider Arty fare decently enough against Infantry after bombarding the cities, and the collateral damage they do can be very valuable for the units they're working with.

This is a big part of the usefulness of Artillery in late-game warfare. Even my Stealth bombers have to spend 2/3 of their time on auto-heal instead of actually doing damage, and the various complications of maintaining air superiority in wars that are NOT pushovers can make the reliability of Artillery useful.

I still use air power when I can. I probe at the enemy to see if any are vulnerable to softening up prior to big battles, I may knock a few percent off the defense of a city, and stealth bombers are great for knocking out strategic resource access for a couple of turns, but when it's time to knock the defenders out of a city I'm usually going to bring Artillery for the tough cases.

A few old City Raider 3 Mechanized Infantry w/Pinch are handy too, if you have them.

[Son of David]

I usually use nukes to soften up enemy cities at this stage of the game.

[Brizey]

Like I said in another thread, there should be missile based artillery like the MLRS with anti-personnel and anti-armor upgrades. And it should have a two-square bombard range, move two, and be weak on defense. Maybe a strength of 28 so that an upgraded version can give mech inf a battle in a city.

[PaganPaulwhisky]

I definitely agree about the cannons. I can often take on civs with much larger military and more advanced units by massing cannons and grenadiers. I often have found myself still using cannons when others have converted to artillery just because I have so many leftovers.

However, sometimes I will skip cannons and go straight for artillery which are ultra powerful if amassed before anyone else gets them. By modern age though they are obsolete. I just use a combo of collateral damage tanks, city attack tanks, and some bombers mixed in if I have them.

[samspock]

Add a promotion for armor for ranged bombardment. You can get it if you have bombard2.

[Vynd]

I don't think there's anything wrong with the Artillery unit. It stacks up OK against the other units you can build at a similar technology level, like Infantry and early Tanks. Complaining that it's not very useful when you can build Modern Armor, Mechanized Infantry, and Stealth Bombers is kind of like complaining that Catapults suck against Riflemen.

A better case can be made that there should be a very late-game seige weapon that artillery can upgrade to. Myself, I think this is kind of nitpicky. I mean there are already more different kinds of units to choose from in the end-game than at any earlier point. Is it really that important to include a super artillery unit?

Personally I think the complaints in this area are due in part to Catapults and Cannons being too good. As has already been pointed out, you can get to cannons early if you try and then use them to kick a lot of tail. Consequently people (myself included) build a lot of them. Plenty are still around when we hit the modern age, and people are disappointed that their replacement doesn't rule the battlefield the way the cannons did.

[Fallenhero]

One advantage of artillery over bombers is that if you're going for a space win it's right on the main path to rocketry but flight doesn't lead directly to any space componet techs. (weird when you think about it).

[Boppo]

Artillery is not very useful for that period of time where you have Bombers/Stealth Bombers and before the AI has SAM Infantry. SAM Infantry can quickly make Bombers less than useful. Then the Artilllery is needed again to knock down those high City Cultural defensive bonuses.

[Shaka II]

The first mistake is to let the game get as far as artillery. Nip it in the bud before infantry hopefully. If it gets to artillery, it usually drags out into the modern era. Flight becomes necessary to defend against fighters destroying your infrastructure. Bombers are pretty useless for assuming the function of artillery, as fighters are quite good at shooting them down. I build very few bombers, but lots of fighters to defend my airspace, while the ground troops do the heavy lifting. I'll have 3-4 fighters per front line city.

The most important task for artillery is to take down city defenses. After that, tanks with barrage can do the rest. I like to give half of the tanks barrage and the other half city raider promotions, or some combination of the two. Early on, its a few barrage tanks that get used (scarificed), while the city raiders take care of the last few strong defenders.

Artillery is slow, but so are SAMs and marines.

They're great for defense too. Every front line city should have two to greet the stacks of doom that show up, and some of the rear cities with coastal access should have one (with rails to allow backup) to prevent the rear surpise attack.

My favorite are city raider III canons.

[spammurabi]

Of course, it could be said that we don't use very much artillery nowadays anyway, so it's fairly realistic. We just bombard with planes and missiles. I guess we could see the return of the cruise missile unit, but I'm not sure how it would best work in Civ IV's game mechanic.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by samspock
Add a promotion for armor for ranged bombardment. You can get it if you have bombard2.

Huh? Armour units don't bombard.

[unamablebuiler]

tanks can and do bombard . its just not their main role.

some tanks notably the russian T76 have 200mm cannon similar to a modern howitzer AFAIK.
the main benifit of the tank as a gun platform is its armour though with mordern air power able to neutralize it somewhat. Air units can't hold ground quite like ground troops, it was true in WW2 and its true today and its likely to be true for a while yet.

Artillery as the exist are under powered in Civ4 maybe that will be remedied in the Xpack or a patch

[Hermann the Lombard]

Mostly off topic, I'm not familiar with a T-76 tank. The T-72, T-80 and T-90 carry 125mm smoothbores, distinctly not bombardment weapons even with HE rounds.

On topic, depending on the scale (how many km per tile) a bombardment range of 2 probably doesn't make sense, though it was fun in Civ3. I do think that artillery is underpowered and in particular that it should cause casualties rather than just reduce city defenses. After all, artillery is the big killer on the battlefield, not armor or infantry or air.

[axisworks]

Indeed. One would think that an artillery unit would decimate an infantry unit, especially one that's dug in and has been sitting there for a while (like in WW1), but instead the artillery gets crushed. It just makes me want to throw my hands in the air...