Bombardment Targets Units in Cities First?

[ChrisiusMaximus]

On the point of attacking cities with huge stacks of Arty, if it is working more effectively for the human player then you wont need so many units as before.

Player1 I like your suggestion, but the real crux is does the AI know how to offensively use its Artillery ? If it does then it sunds like a great tweek, but if not then yes its too powerful for the human.

[WarpStorm]

Well, let me know the first time you see the AI use a big stack of Arty.

[Xorbon]

I don't know if I like how the new bombardment rules sound. I didn't like how I needed huge stacks of arty to be effective (before Conquests), but this seems like an 'over-fix'. Maybe they should come up with a compromise between the pre- and post-Conquests rules in one of their patches.

I always thought a player using surface (i.e. not air) bombardment should get a choice of whether to target units or improvements. This would increase your odds of hitting the desired target, but you would still have a chance of hitting an undesired target. Once all possible targets of a certain type were eliminated (i.e. all units destroyed or reduced to 1 hp; or all improvements destroyed; or city down to size 1) then that target-type couldn't be targetted in that city.

[Jaybe]

According to the C3C Editor, bombardment units with Collateral Damage enabled does the trick:

With a successful bombardment on a unit (unit takes damage) in a city, there is another throw to see if damage is taken by improvements or citizens.

The problem seems to be that for some reason, Collateral Damage was not enabled for anyone (that I could find).

[The Kaiser]

I agree mostly with what player1 says. When an army approachs an enemy city they would target the areas where troops are. This is where the first calculation must be. Destruction of buildings must be a secondary consideration.

If they have line of sight, Artillery is more accurate than WW2 era bombing so that adjustment sounds correct.

Maybe if the AI can't be taught to use Artillery the only option is to perhaps make it more expensive or lower the attack rating a little.

[WarpStorm]

Originally posted by Jaybe
According to the C3C Editor, bombardment units with Collateral Damage enabled does the trick:

With a successful bombardment on a unit (unit takes damage) in a city, there is another throw to see if damage is taken by improvements or citizens.

The problem seems to be that for some reason, Collateral Damage was not enabled for anyone (that I could find).

And if you do enable it, it doesn't work on bombardments. Counterintuitively, it only works when units do a regular attack and not bombardments. It is used for barbarians in the Fall of Rome conquest.

I've thoroughly tried this already.

[Jaybe]

Now THAT's some yucky documentation! Unfortunately, probably easier to change the docs than the game.

[Tiberius]

Originally posted by player1

Old system was too random.

Basicly thing to be bombed was choosen before calculating hitting chance.

Totaly illogcial. It should be other was around.
Not to say that it added extra 50% miss chance.

For example let's assume that main purpose of using artillery is to breach enemy defenses (units).

So Atrillery tries to hit unit.
But it misses.

Now since shell needs to be somewere then add chance to hit building or population.

Sounds much more resonable.

I didn't say the old system was good. But turning 180 degrees and simply reversing things isn't good either.

What you are suggesting sounds good: target units, and on miss add chance to hit population or buildings. However, from what I am hearing, this is not the case.

Hitting exclusively units until there isn't anything left to hit and targeting population and buildings only after that is untrealistic and unbalancing.

Wrong solution

[player1]

Originally posted by Tiberius
Hitting exclusively units until there isn't anything left to hit and targeting population and buildings only after that is untrealistic and unbalancing.

Wrong solution

Still, I think it's lesser evil then the old way.

[Tiberius]

Still, I think it's lesser evil then the old way.

It may be, but why can't they do it right? Why do they choose always extreme solutions?

[player1]

Maybe it's limit in the engine (I hope not), who knows?

[alexman]

I have no problem with how they changed bombardment, because it's consistent with how bombardment of tile improvements has always worked: units first, tile improvements only after all units are at 1HP.

More effective bombard units means more military options, which is fun. I do agree that the AI is at a disadvantage with this change, but the AI is terrible in all military tactics, so what's new?

[dexters]

A question.

How in particular is the AI more disadvantaged now than it was previously? The old method always allowed for rather frequent hits on structures. Knocking out marketplaces, libraries and barracks.

If the enemy has a stack of 8 units in the city, you need at least twice as many artys just to get all eight units down to manageable HP, and because city pop are rarely (never?) reduced before hp goes to 1, a size 12 city is going to be an even tougher nut to crack.

I think we need to move away from the "we can wheel in 60 artys" talk, because quite frankly, if you have 30, 40, 50, or 60 artys lying around, you've already won.

There will be games, where it will be a tough go. Maybe no iron. Or a poor start. And I say this having felt that resource allocaiton appear to have been tweaked in C3C to make getting domestic sources of key resources harder, at least on pangea.

I am currently finishing up a hopeless island start. No iron. No coal. I decided to send a bunch of troops over the Greeks. 3 cities, and they have iron and coal. Easy pickings for my cavalries? Well, for one, I didn't know a 3 city civ could afford to garrison so many riflemen units in their cities. This was in Monarch only too. And that's another aspect of the game that's also been improved. AI money management.

In anycase, it was tough going. I moved in artys to speed up the process. I had 3 artys and 3 frigates bombing away for turns on ony city, hoping for a lucky barracks hit and then I'll just whittle down their forces and move in. After about five turns. I kinda figured out it was only hitting troops and after each turn, they healed. Even with a good 15 cavalry force, it wasn't enough to take down their size 8 city on a hill.

My point really though is, if you have a lot of artys, no amount of tweaking is going to matter. I feel having the bombard hit troops first actually gives AI advantages since cities won't go into disorder by losing a marketplace and if they have barracks and a stack of tough defenders, you WILL NEED, that big stack of artys to make a dent. That's a luxury not all of can afford in all games.

[SirOsis]

I've witnessed destruction of walls using trebuchets in the middle ages tutorial. There is some chance to destroy walls at least. Generally I hit units but once the walls fell I moved in.

[dexters]

That's nice. I rarely build walls, neither thus the AI in the standard games.