Promotions for suicide artillery?

[rah]

I've had many attacks where the primary defender took no damage at all but I guess I should have checked to see if they had bombardment immunity.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by 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.

IIRC this is not how it works. The adjusted strength is compared with adjusted defence, then, win or lose, the collateral damage is applied along the lines of that described above.

[joncnunn]

If you watch the display carefully in combats involving an attacking col damage unit, first the units damaged by colterial damage go down (just once), then there is a series of animations involving the attack itself, then the combat resolution animation runs, the killed unit (if any) eliminated and the surviving unit(s) strength adjusted

[DrSpike]

Well I'm not going to argue about that as I turned those off about a year ago.

[kittenOFchaos]

Online I'd say the promotion depends. If you're in an era where you and your human opponents are both using catapults as a fair proportion of your stack then it makes sense to use the combat 1 promotion rather than collateral damage. Reason being your collateral can hit everything non-catapult pretty well, but in Warlords 2.08 catapults and artillery don't take collateral damage. Therefore once their catapults are the strongest unit you'll not be killing them with a decent ratio of attack to loss unless you're attacking with greater strength or firepower promotions.

[khumak]

I build 2 types of cats, one for cities, one for everything else. City cats get CR, all others get barrage. The only reason the City cats get barrage is that they have a good shot at survival whereas the other cats are almost guaranteed to die unless they pull off the lucky withdraw.

If I survive long enough to get bombers I usually just start over because the AI is totally braindead about defending against bombers. "Playing it out" is just validating a foregone conclusion at that point.

[Godel]

I actually think Drill2 is a good promotion in certain circumstances. Facing a couple of City Garrison Longbows on a hill city can be tough to crack. I've had sitautions where CR cats hardly deal any damage. I have found drill cats to be more effective in this sitaution.

[Berzerker]

usually the primary defender wont be hurt by a cat seeking to cause col damage because the odds of the cat on that unit were ridiculous. I'll send in cats at less than 1% odds of winning just to nail the other units, may take 1 or 2 more after that but the city will fall to my main attackers without loss. If there are any weak survivors I'll save 1 or 2 cats for mop up and easier promotions.

Not that I really know how to play this game

[couerdelion]

Basically, I’d agree with the general idea that CR works well if you have a decent chance of winning and where the attack strength of the attacker is not too much higher than that of the defender (unlikely with siege weapons). Where the attack strength of the defender is a lot higher than that of the attacker, CR also gives added bonuses.

In particular, I think Trebs almost always deserve CR because the bonuses really hurt strong defenders. I got particularly hurt by this in my latest war when enemy Trebs beat my Grenadiers/Knights holding a city in resistance simply because of the +100% bonus wiping out any defensive bonus I might have had.

[ZEE]

Originally posted by Berzerker
Not that I really know how to play this game