Promotions for suicide artillery?

[popejubal]

Originally posted by DrSpike
It's perfectly sensible, otherwise CR would be terribly imbalanced, affecting the chance of winning against the top unit in the defensive stack and being better than the collateral damage upgrade for damaging other units anyway.

Quoted for truth.

Late-ish game, Tanks (and later modern armor) are the supreme City taking units. City Raider 1, 2 and 3 push the attacking strength up 75% and a few bombers or artillery to soften up the city's defensive rating means that you can take cities for almost free if you have an appropriate tech lead and can defend your stacks.

Tanks tend to kill what they attack if the thing they're attacking has been wounded. Send in a single tank with a City Raider promotion or three and he'll bust up that unit, but come out fairly wounded. Send in a single tank with a few Barrage promotions and he might die, but he'll make all the rest of the tanks chew through that city like it was defended by Spearmen.

And I mean CivIV spearmen, not the mythical CivI spearmen that killed tanks on a regular basis.

[Diadem]

Hehe, I remember in civ1 one game where I had conquered the entire world, save for one city. That was a city on a mountain, with a city walls, defended by a single fortified phalanx (2 base def strength). I wasted more than 2 dozen cannons on it before it finally fell

But back on topic. I know the CR promotions do not actualy increase the attackers strength, but rather decrease the defender's strength. But is collatoral damage not dependent on both attack and defender strength? Does a catapult do the same collatoral damage against an archer as against a Mech. Inf? That'd be silly.

I guess I have to do some testing on this

[VoiceOfUnreason]

[SIZE=1]
But back on topic. I know the CR promotions do not actualy increase the attackers strength, but rather decrease the defender's strength. But is collatoral damage not dependent on both attack and defender strength? Does a catapult do the same collatoral damage against an archer as against a Mech. Inf?

The calculation for collateral damage uses CvUnit::baseCombatStr of the defender, baseCombatStr and CvUnit::collateralDamage of the attacker.

Note that the current hit points of the defenders plays a role in determining which defenders suffer the damage.

[Quillan]

The impression I get is that units that cause collateral damage cause a percentage of the damage they would normally do every round they win. Units with the City Raider promotion tend to win. If you give a catapult City Raider III and send him in against a fortified longbowman on a hill, he might win the fight, he'll almost certainly win a few rounds, and each round won causes damage to everything else in the stack. If you give the same catapult Barrage III instead, every round won will cause more damage to everything else, but the chance is that it won't win more than 1 or perhaps 2 rounds of combat. It's debatable which will cause more damage to the stack as a whole. However, from my personal point of view, I'd rather have the damaged but intact artillery pieces left afterwards to heal.

And on the tank deal, one common version of mine is what I rename the City Buster. They start with Barrage I, then fill up with City Raider promotions until the promotions are all used up.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Diadem
I guess I have to do some testing on this

Well, you can if you want, but the combat model is pretty well documented already, especially at the civ site that cannot be mentioned.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Originally posted by Quillan
The impression I get is that units that cause collateral damage cause a percentage of the damage they would normally do every round they win.

Have you tried checking that? count the number of units suffering collateral damage
(and the extent of that damage), check the combat log to see how many rounds of combat your disposapult won, and see if they match up consistently? You can run that test even if you don't read the SDK.

[Diadem]

I did some checking and:

Collatoral Damage indeed only depends on the base strength of the attacker and defender. Barrage modifies this, any other promotion is irrelevant.

The collatoral damage is already pretty impressive even without barrage, by the way. You need only 6 catapults to beat a longbow to 50% health.

[DrSpike]

Which brings us neatly back to why CR is ftw and barrage is mostly ftl.

[Arrian]

My rules of thumb (right or wrong):

vs cities it's clearly city raider. Second promo depends... accuracy or city raider II. Accuracy is one I might put on catapults that I no longer intend to use to actually attack (having trebuchets for that). Trebs/Cannon will get City Raider II and, if they live, III. City Raider III cannon are beautiful things.

For "in the open" battle, I generally go with combat promos, sometimes utilizing combat 1 + shock if I'm fighting against melee units almost exclusively (rare).

I have occasionally played around with barrage... but I ultimately go back to the combat line, seeking better survivability for my units - even "suicide" arty.

-Arrian

[Krill]

What about Barrage 2 and 3 when put of arty and tanks? How does that affect the discussion?

[Quillan]

They do more collateral damage when they win, but aren't any more likely to win than a unit with no promotions at all.

[joncnunn]

Actually weather the unit wins or loses, in a given combat, barrage 2 (and 3) increase the colaterial damage done.

That's the whole point of sucide art type attacks; damage a lot of units at the cost of losing just one.

Of course a unit with colaterial that wins (or at least retreats) gets to colaterial damage again another day.

Way up on the thread on bombardment of city and the bombardment advance, say you have a unit with unimproved is 15% bombardment against a city with a castle so 100% protection of units inside. Bombarard once and it's now 85%. So a stack of 7 such units would totally negate the protection of units inside in one turn. With the 10% bombardment advance, then your doing 25% each bombardment so only 4 such units are needed. This percent scales to the city's total potential defensive bonus so you still need the same same stack to totally negate a city defenses that is only protected by 20% culture as you do a 100% castle.

[Quillan]

I don't mean win the combat, I mean win a combat round. I don't think collateral damage units cause any damage at all when they lose a combat round. It's rather rare to fight a battle where the defender wins every single round of combat, but it happens every now and then. Has anyone actually tested a single catapult vs a stack of say 3 mechanized infantry?

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Originally posted by Quillan
I don't mean win the combat, I mean win a combat round. I don't think collateral damage units cause any damage at all when they lose a combat round. It's rather rare to fight a battle where the defender wins every single round of combat, but it happens every now and then. Has anyone actually tested a single catapult vs a stack of say 3 mechanized infantry?

If you run this test for yourself, you'll likely want to have at least 7 Mech Inf, because UNIT_CATAPULT/iCollateralDamage = 6 (CIV4UnitInfos.xml).

Have a good time.

[joncnunn]

I dought the Col damage has anything to do with the combat rounds against the main unit myself. I think it's first units get inflected one round of colaterial damage based on the col damage ability of the unit. (Some formula involving max strength of the unit, current strength of the unit, col damage% of the unit) Unit being directly attacked immune to this and I think one of the higher drill promotions also gives immunity to that particular unit.
Then after the col damage, the (normal) combat starts against the unit being attacked.