bombarding a city with walls

[guermantes]

Hi,

If I take a trebuchet to a city and start bombardment of its defenses, then the treb will bombard 16 percentage points each turn. A city with 85% cultural defense is brought down to 69% after one bombardment with a treb.

But if said city also has built walls this increases it's cultural defense with 50%. So it shows up in the game with 125% cultural defenses.

However, when I take my treb to bombard that city it only reduces the defenses with 4 percentage points to 121%.

What is going on here? The walls bonus is reflected in the higher starting % of defenses, isn't it. So why is the bombarding of my treb on top of that crippled to 4 percentage points?

Granted, I have not run tests in world-builder, but based on experience, when there are walls around a city it seems to take me 4 times as long to bombard down to zero as when there are no walls.

Is my,
1) logic completely flawed,
2) math skills evidently lacking, or
3) have I completely misunderstood everything?

[Slade Wilson]

Walls decrease the effect of bombardment

[guermantes]

Originally posted by Slade Wilson
Walls decrease the effect of bombardment

By a function of 4x?

And is that an undocumented feature, since the civilopedia says it only increases defenses with 50%?

[Slade Wilson]

the civilopedia IIRC mentions it reduces the effects of bombardment

[guermantes]

I went back to see and you are correct, -50% from bombardment (except gunpowder) and +50% defense (except gunpowder).

But unless I am really daft there is still some wierdness going on:

The treb bombards with 16%. If against walls then with 8%, right?. So when my treb goes up against a city with walls and a total of 125% defense, should it not do more damage with 1 bombardment than 4 percentage points?

[DirtyMartini]

I've noticed this too -- wall effect against bombardment seems to be greater than advertised. Anyone have an answer?

[snoopy369]

I'd run the test in world builder to make sure there's not some other factor affecting it. That said, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if something is up here; doing constant bombard damage instead of % damage is a new thing (it used to be, cats do 15% damage off of the orginal number, so you always need 7 to take it all the way down no matter what it started as). It's certainly possible some calculation there is incorrect.

[guermantes]

I tried to experiment in world builder but when I added walls I would get no decreasing of the defenses no matter how much I bombarded. It kept saying "Your treb has reduced the defenses to 100%" after every treb I brought to bear on those walls.

Without walls it is still as you mentioned. Three trebs will each do 16% calculated against the defense value before the first treb strikes, and the next turn each does 16% calculated against the new defense value at the beginning of the current turn.

But with walls everything seems weird. As in I could not even devise a functioning test situation in world builder.

[snoopy369]

Are you talking BTS or pre-bts?

[guermantes]

I am currently using BTS 3.13 + Bhruic, but I noticed the high cost/difficulty of bombarding cities with walls already in Vanilla 1.61.

(The world builder experiment I referred to was perhaps not correctly done. I simply opened a savegame file when I was at war and positioned 2 trebs outside an enemy city with 50% culture. Then exited WB and bombarded. Then I loaded the same save again and in wWB also added walls to the city, and now I could not get the defense decreased at all. Perhaps one should start from scratch with a clean map, but i find it a bit confusing to keep in mind all the things that should be present in a city and assign cultural value etc, that's why I opened a savegame. Come to think of it, that save was from before 3.13 so perhaps that screwed things up. But that only applies to the WB experiments.)

[snoopy369]

WB test would be:
Open a new game in WB, clear the map.
Place a city, give it a size of 8 or something and a culture of 5000 or something. Give it city walls.

Place a few dozen trebs outside. See how much each treb takes down, and how many trebs it takes it to go down to 0.

Also create (either later, or at the same time as the first) another city, same exactly as the first, give it same population and same culture. No walls this time.

Place same trebs and see what the numbers are, both per treb (and if that number changes as it goes down), and total count to remove all defense.

Then place a third city. Give it enough culture to have the same cultural defense as the city with walls+culture, or as close as you can get. (You may need to modify the original culture number on the first two cities to make this possible.) Do same test again (no walls). What's the difference between a city with 120% (70%+50% walls) and a city with 120% (all culture), or whatever.

The point of a WB test is to test with all possibilities of differences controlled - so don't use a real game where things could be different for other reasons (say, the city already has been bombarded once before, or has other buildings protecting it somehow, a castle or something).

I'd also be hesitant to use Bhruic's patch on this test, as it isn't as 'pure' as testing the firaxis (standard) 3.13 first. If there's a difference w/patch and w/o patch, then he introduced something; if there is no difference then it's all firaxis.

[guermantes]

Oh boy, how embarrassing!

I have never built either walls or castles in any of my games and that shows. It is the presence of both walls and castles that bring the original 16% down first to 8 (walls) and then 4 (castle). Which explains why the first treb against the 125% city merely brought it down to 121%.

I guess I learn things every day (which is nothing to be surprsed about when it comes to Civ4).

Sorry to have wasted everyone's time. Hopefully someone else will learn from my mistake.

[wodan11]

Walls and Castles also affect the Power graph calculations, which make the AI less likely to declare war on you.

Wodan

[DirtyMartini]

I learned something. I never build walls or castles either.

[realpolitic]

When walls and castles are plentiful, it may be time for more peaceful persuits.