killing units with bombardment

[Dimension]

The datalinks very clearly says that the disadvantage of naval bombardment is that you can't reduce a land unit to below 50% health with bombardment.

This is obviously not true. As I'm sure everybody's noticed, naval bombardment doesn't do a lot against the units in a base, but with enough ships you can kill land units easily.

Last game I was playing, I had a fleet of six (13)-<6>-6*2 battleships roaming around taking over sea bases. When I ran out of sea bases to take over and coastal sensors to destroy, they worked just fine killing the defenders in land bases.

But as I think back, I remember originally learning the 50% thing without ever looking up bombardment in the datalinks. I was attacking a coastal base turn after turn with a ship and gave up, because once the defender's health got down to 50%, it appeared to be healing as fast as I was damaging it.

So, how does bombardment actually work? Once the defender is down to 50% health, does it heal as fast as a single bombardier can damage it? That would explain how six ships can kill but a single ship can't. Is this just a difference between SMAC and SMAX that I never noticed before? Or is a Shard Battleship just strong enough to kill land units and weaker ships aren't?

I know this wouldn't take much testing to figure out for myself, but I'm sure there are plenty people on here who already know the answer, so I'll just be lazy :P

[johndmuller]

From Alpha.txt
3,2 ; Numerator & Denominator for artillery fire damage
50, ; Combat % -> Land based guns vs. ship artillery bonus
25, ; Combat % -> Artillery bonus per level of altitude
50, ; Maximum % damage inflicted by arty versus units in base/bunker
99, ; Maximum % damage inflicted by arty versus units in open
100, ; Maximum % damage inflicted by arty versus units at sea

You can make of that what you will, laziness apparently being fair game in this thread.

If the target is an artillery unit itself, then things may different - sometimes to the death.

[Avenoct]

As far as I know the 50% rule only applies to units in a base or bunker. otherwise it should be 99% (which is silly).

-S

[Blake]

I understand that any unit in/on the sea can be fully destroyed. Seeing a garrison in a sea base is technically on a sea tile it could be completely destroyed by bombardment. (That's just hypothetical by the way, I havn't tested it)

I have destroyed lightly armoured land units in a heavily armoured transport by bombarding, without actually sinking the transport.

Also I believe aircraft can always be completely destroyed by SAM arty.

[Dimension]

Well then maybe this is something people don't know about, because you're all missing my point completely.

I destroyed three land units in a land base by bombarding it for about four turns with a group of six (13)-<6>-6*2 AAA Shard Battleships adjacent to the base.

[Blake]

Hmmm, the only way that should happen is if the land units were artilliry, in which case the ship and arty unit engage in a duel, and after a number of turns the artilliry could get destroyed...
If the defenders had missile weapons, to your shard, and your reactor was higher, then the ships would take none to completely minimal damage... and the land units would get wasted.

Ship / Artilliry is the only way it can work within the game rules, ofcourse that doesn't eliminate the possibility of a bug.

[CoffeeBreath]

i tried this before, but i never seems to work.

[Dimension]

OK, now I'm going to have to try to make it happen again and get the .SAV file ... It might be awhile though.

[Cybergod]

Hmm.. Did you tweak the alphax.txt file by accident before?

[Sarxis]

Since you brought this up:

I remember a long while ago an instance where a land artillery unit actually DID kill another of my land units. It was a glitch, and I am 97% sure that this actually happened. Seriously!