POLL: Do you like the change to bombardment (never hits city improvements)?

[notyoueither]

Actually, it is true that taking cities now is not so easy as it may sound.

Used to be we would blow the hell out of the barracks, the walls, and drop a city of a million people down to a couple thousand or so and then send in the troops to mop up the goo.

Destroy the barracks and the units no longer heal between turns. Drop a city from 13 pop to 12 and the defenders lose a 50% strength bonus. Drop it to 6 and they lose another 50% bonus. Add in the losses of defence bonuses and the loss of healing ability and cities were pathetically easy to destroy with arty. Attacking ground forces could then take most any metropolis with ease.

Try taking it with ease when the 13 pop doesn't drop and the infantry are 22.5 defence and you can't take away their defence bonuses or their ability to heal.

My limited experience so far leads me to conclude that the new way does not make it much easier to dig defenders out of cities. Yes, my hits only go to units. However, my hits are fewer and further between because I am not reducing pop and the defenders are not getting any weaker in strength.

[notyoueither]

btw, Inf in Metro would be 23.5 defence. I forgot the base 10% bonus for sitting on grass. Increase that to 27.5 if the metro is on a hill.

On grass, one-third of arty shots would hit. That means to reduce 2 vet Inf in one turn to 1 pip each you would need 18 arty parked out front. And then you would still have a 15% chance of losing a fresh vet Tank to eliminate each of the 1 pip Inf that are left.

[Jaybe]

Ahhh, the elegance of it all! Military Great Leaders have fewer things to do (such as no hurrying GWonders). So now they are needed more than ever -- knocking out those metro defenders!

Keep those Armies empty until you need them! (Ahem, not referring to the 1st Army, of course).

[Jaybe]

Okay, I finally voted: Yes, I like it as it was changed for Conquests.

I will like it even MORE when they fix the "Collateral Damage" setting bug in the Editor ...
by making it work in the game as advertised in the Editor help!
... or at least explaining why they CHOSE not to do so.

[dexters]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Actually, it is true that taking cities now is not so easy as it may sound.

Used to be we would blow the hell out of the barracks, the walls, and drop a city of a million people down to a couple thousand or so and then send in the troops to mop up the goo.

Destroy the barracks and the units no longer heal between turns. Drop a city from 13 pop to 12 and the defenders lose a 50% strength bonus. Drop it to 6 and they lose another 50% bonus. Add in the losses of defence bonuses and the loss of healing ability and cities were pathetically easy to destroy with arty. Attacking ground forces could then take most any metropolis with ease.

Try taking it with ease when the 13 pop doesn't drop and the infantry are 22.5 defence and you can't take away their defence bonuses or their ability to heal.

My limited experience so far leads me to conclude that the new way does not make it much easier to dig defenders out of cities. Yes, my hits only go to units. However, my hits are fewer and further between because I am not reducing pop and the defenders are not getting any weaker in strength.

I think this is the best written defense of the new system I've seen. This is precisely what I'm talking about.

Unless there is a tech disparity where you have Cavalry going up against Spears, even pikes can put up a significant defense in a size 10 city, as I've found out tonight.

[player1]

So, it's not too much in favor of player against AI, and makes Catapults better.

[Panag]

Originally posted by Jaybe
Yea, panag,
Collateral Damage looks great in the Editor. Too bad it's broken. It doesn't work in the way that the editor help says it does; in fact, it seems to do nothing at all.

hi ,

dont worry , a patch shall be made before X-mas , ......

have a nice day

[Fosse]

notyoueither,
You make good points, and I'm less stalwart about hating the rule now than I was before...

However... won't this just make the artillery stack of two dozen (or more) more commonplace? Now you you have to get every defender down to 1 HP in ONE TURN before you send in the attack troops.

Maybe that's why they didn't add stacked bombard.

And just to be clear... will bombard NEVER EVER EVER hit walls or barracks now? Or is the chance just greatly reduced?


Fosse

[alexman]

Ground bombard units have to destroy walls before they can hit anything else. Naval bombard units have to destroy coastal fortresses before they can hit anything else.

My proposal to make the current system even better (and can be implemented in a mod, by the way):

Triple the bombard defense of coastal fortresses.
Ironclads will then have just 20% chance of destroying them, which they must do before they can harm any units.

Give naval units lethal LAND bombard.
Currently units are targetted first, but can't be killed. The AI still attacks cities though, even when it doesn't follow up with a ground attack. With this change, the AI will have a chance to kill some units when targetting cities, and it makes taking steps to counter an enemy navy more urgent (by building a navy, coastal fortresses, and/or air force).

Give the civil defense a bombard defense of 48
Artillery will then have to destroy the civil defense improvement (20% chance) before it can hit units. Currently the civil defense has no bombard defense, so it's not targetted before units are redlined. Before artillery, it doesn't seem that the new power of ground bombard units is unbalancing because the player usually doesn't have the time to build up a massive army of ancient/medieval bombard units. After artillery, the modified civil defense makes it possible to simulate the old system where you had to destroy some of the city as you target units.

Edit: The last part won't work due to the fact that any city improvement with a bombard defense is considered walls and will not work for cities over size 6.

[Catt]

Originally posted by dexters

It is infact not easier for the human players, unless you consider cracking a size 12 city with entrenched defenders easy.

Taking a large city whole has few benefits. First few turns it's in chaos and resistance with be significant, forcing large number of troops to stay back to quell resistance or prevent flips.

Yes, you get lots of pre-builts buildings, but it's a trade off, not an advantage. Previously, you can just station artys on a hill to bombard a city to size one, and divert a cavalry from another stack to give the city a final 'coup de grace' kill. That's no longer possible pre-flight.

Originally posted by notyoueither

Actually, it is true that taking cities now is not so easy as it may sound.

Used to be we would blow the hell out of the barracks, the walls, and drop a city of a million people down to a couple thousand or so and then send in the troops to mop up the goo.

Destroy the barracks and the units no longer heal between turns. Drop a city from 13 pop to 12 and the defenders lose a 50% strength bonus. Drop it to 6 and they lose another 50% bonus. Add in the losses of defence bonuses and the loss of healing ability and cities were pathetically easy to destroy with arty. Attacking ground forces could then take most any metropolis with ease.

Try taking it with ease when the 13 pop doesn't drop and the infantry are 23.5 defence and you can't take away their defence bonuses or their ability to heal.

My limited experience so far leads me to conclude that the new way does not make it much easier to dig defenders out of cities. Yes, my hits only go to units. However, my hits are fewer and further between because I am not reducing pop and the defenders are not getting any weaker in strength.

You guys make good arguments, but the arguments rest on incorrect facts. Land-based artillery (at least the "Artillery" unit that I used in my tests) can and in fact do destroy improvements like walls and barracks, and also reduce the population of cities, you just have to first redline all the defenders. Once all the defenders are red-lined, you are free to attack the intact metro with a goal of taking a large intact city, or you may continue your artillery assault taking down the pop and destroying improvements.

Put another way, if you want to reduce population and destroy improvements before taking a city, the only change to the earlier versions' approach is that you first must redline all defenders and then move on to other targets; i.e., you can;t get lucky with a first shot that drops a city from size 13 to size 12 and decide to attack without further barrages.

BTW, I didn't think to accurately test the "improvements" bombardment actions to determine whether the bombards would still "target" an unavailable target (like redlined defenders) resulting in an automatic miss. But it is possible that after all defenders are redlined that the artillery targets exclusively pop and buildings.

Catt

[Arnelos]

I've always been a big arty stack of doom type player. I used to build sizable stacks of catapults to accompany my ancient and middle age forces. The whole point of having a catapult stack of doom to me was that you wear down the defenders' 4/4 spearmen or 4/4 pikemen to fewer hitpoints each, making an assault far more likely to succeed with far fewer losses (which means you suffer less attritrion, which means the war is less of a drain on your economy back home and the war can generally move faster... or at least as quickly as your catapults can keep up).

By the industrial age, I typically built very very large stacks of artillery for the same reason. The whole point is to knock down the hitpoints of defending units to reduce your own force's attritrion while it is invading an enemy city-by-city.

When I was beta testing for C3C, I built ENORMOUS stacks of trebuchets (my favorite new unit!) and that worked very very well. It still works well with the release version. Since the trebuchets (even more effective than my old catapults) hit the units first, you can use them to wear down pikemen or sometimes even musketmen defending cities in order to rush those cities with knights, medieval infantry, and longbowman... and actually have a chance of beating them. Given enough pikemen on defense in a hilled city, it would take god's own stack of doom worth of knights, MI, or longbowmen to storm a city and catapults, even in huge numbers, would be of limited use. Trebuchets and the new bombardment rules mean you can AT LEAST knock down each defending pike by 1 or 2 hp, making an assault far more likely to succeed (though you will certainly still suffer attrition to your attacking force and even units that succeed with be wounded).

I happen to really like the change, but then I've always been into building artillery stacks of doom... so perhaps I'm biased

[notyoueither]

can and in fact do destroy improvements like walls and barracks, and also reduce the population of cities, you just have to first redline all the defenders

That's true. I forgot about that. However, my objective would be to take the city, so once I got the defenders to 1 pip each, I'd be using the bayonet.

But no matter how you cut it, it is going to be harder to dig the enemy out of cities since until you have practically destroyed all of the defenders, the city itself with its defence bonuses for the defender will remain intact.

[alexman]

Nevermind...

[notyoueither]

OK.

[RobC]

Basically, in PtW, civilians and buildings protect military units from bombardment while in C3C, military units protect civilians and buildings from bombardment. So:

1) If your goal is to take the city intact, with as many pop and improvements as possible, the new C3C bombardment rules make it a lot easier because you won't accidentally cause collateral damage as you weaken or even redline all the defending units. To do this in PtW, you couldn't use artillery for fear of killing all the civilians and destroying all the improvements before weakening the defenders, so you would be forced to amass massive numerical superiority on the ground to overcome the defensive bonuses of city defenders, particularly in large cities.

2) If your goal is to eradicate civilians and infrastructure (e.g. so you can just culture flip them eventually without fighting or just to slow them down so you can win a tech/space race or something), the new C3C bombardment rules make this hard, since you have to redline all of the defenders before civilians and improvements are targeted. To old PtW rules, on the other hand, make this extremely easy, since you hit civilians and improvements almost exclusively.

However, in general, I think the typical civ3 player just wants to take the city as quickly and 'cheaply' as possible, without too much concern about what's left in the city. In this case, C3C is easier, as you can weaken defenders with artillery right away and even if you don't have a large stack of artillery. The argument that PtW is easier because you can take down the city walls and barracks first assumes that the player has the patience to wait several turns until s/he is lucky enough to eventually hit the desired building(s). If you have enough artillery to have a good chance of taking out any/all improvements in 1 turns in PtW, you probably also have enough in C3C to redline all the defenders in 1 turn anyway (which is the point of destroying the barracks in the first place).

Ultimately, this boils down to whether you think easier/faster human victories with modest artillery stacks is a good thing or a bad thing, and that's really a play style and personal preference kind of decision. Personally, I can understand why you favor either of these if they were the only two options, but IMHO it would be best for both realism and gameplay overall if you always had some chance of hitting something you weren't trying to -- there should always be a non-trivial chance to hit military, civilians, or improvements whenever bombarding a city, and ideally, you should be able to specify what you are aiming at and the better your tech (the more advanced the artillery), the better your chances of hitting your target.

Oh, and precision bombing should allow you to even specify which building or which unit (like land stealth attack) you want to target, too.