Artillery is USELESS!!!

[Cthol]

Artillery is USELESS!!! i dont know anything good you can do with it exept destroying enemy road or something.. if you bomb enemy troops with armor 3+ they get pratically no damage!
do you know some good way to use artillery?

[Timexwatch]

Put a stronger weapon on.....

Now in SMACX, artillery has a function and in my experience, uses it to counteract shore bombardments by the player.

But as for uses, here are some:

1) Destroy roads.

2) Destroy infrastructure (mines, sensors) at a distance.

3) Weaken native life forms.

4) Bombard sea colonies close to the shore without risking ships.

5) To prevent enemy units from healing during a siege

6) To damage enemy ships....


The list goes on....

[AlexanderIII]

In SMAC 3.0 Artillery works fine, eg. causes damage to all units in a square. In SMAC 4.0, there is a new glitch that makes artillery do damage only to the top unit on the stack, rendering artillery practically useless, in my opinion, except to destroy terraforming infrastructure. One of the best uses of artillery was to break a siege by bombardment, ie. weaken your enemy with battalions of artillery and them hit 'em with regular units for a final strike. that strategy is right out now, if you want to use 4.0, which personally annoys me to no end.

Have to wait till 5.0, or get SMAC-X, I guess. Not sure if SMAC-X addresses this bug. Anybody have experience with this in SMAC-X?

[AlexanderIII]

Another thing I've done to compensate for this bug is to make artillery more powerful. I do this by substituting the following line in alpha.txt:

#RULES
3, ; Movement rate along roads
2, ; Nutrient intake requirement for citizens
5,2 ; [!]Numerator & Denominator for artillery fire damage [default 3,2]
...

It is a poor compensation, but at least it gives you more bang for the buck.

[AlexanderIII]

Actually, scratch the bug report. CORRECTION: the artillery stack bug seems to be in SMAC-X, not in SMAC 4.0, as far as I can tell.