Some qusetions about game mechanic (Soren, you could help)

[player1]

First topic: BOMBARDMENT

When hitting unit on open wich chace is that bomb will unit or tile improvment.

I now how to claculate bombard itself. I just don't know how it chooses unit insted of tile or somthing similar.

When hitting unit in city wich chace is that bomb will unit, tile improvment or maybe population.

What is defensive vaule of tile imporvments?
Maybe same as for Buildings (16 with 1.17f patch)

What are chaces for retreat? (I know about 50/50 for same level of expirience, I need rest of info)

Does bombard ignores city wall (50%) or metropolis (100%) effects or not?

Is bombard defense value for buildings static (16 always) or is multiplied by metopolis or similar bonuses?

What happens when Jets intercept Stealth Bombers (5% chance). Is bomber automaticly shot down (defense of 0).

What is city walls or coastall fortress bombardment defense bonus? (8 points)


Second topic: SEIGE

Since bombardment doesn't kill units and units heal completly in cities with barracks, why bother with bombards.
In 1.07f it was possibile to take out barracks (building defense of 4), and make thing easier.
That had also sub-effect of bomb to 1 pop point.

To remove that effect Firaxis chaged defense value to 16.

Now is almost imossibile to knock out barracks, and thus to damage units.

So is there any way to chage things so bombers more often hit Militaristic buildings.

Same thing could be added to Precise bombing. Since this way in oreder to take out barracks with precise bombing you need to take out about 10 other builidngs. Is that "precise bombing"


Some soultions:
Hitting miltary buildings should have higher priority (chance), next should be Industrial buildings, with rest buildings lower on list.

Maybe units should not heal in cities striked with bombs last turn (1hp heal for those with barracks)? That whould make siege effect.
Not sure if this is difficult to implement.


P.S.
Firaxis should make some sort of advanced unser info in civilopedia like it was in SMAC.
So I would need to ask about "basic" combat qusetion in Civ3 forum.


P.P.S.
Soren, Dan, I realy need info from first question.
Please respond.

[Arrian]

Ok, so I'm not Soren, Dan or anyone else from Firaxis, but I wanted to bring up one thing:

I have noticed that although bombardment fails much more often with 1.17, the thing I hit most often is the barracks. In fact, I find destroying the barracks is easier than damaging the defending units. For example, I used 12 artillery on one AI city last night. First shot destroyed barracks, second shot killed 1 pop point. All the rest missed. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that my experience with bombardment (at least w/regard to barracks) was a bit different.

-Arrian

[player1]

double post

[player1]

Originally posted by Arrian
Ok, so I'm not Soren, Dan or anyone else from Firaxis, but I wanted to bring up one thing:

I have noticed that although bombardment fails much more often with 1.17, the thing I hit most often is the barracks. In fact, I find destroying the barracks is easier than damaging the defending units. For example, I used 12 artillery on one AI city last night. First shot destroyed barracks, second shot killed 1 pop point. All the rest missed. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that my experience with bombardment (at least w/regard to barracks) was a bit different.

-Arrian

Hey, I have idea.
Maybe 8 defese value for costal fortress or city walls is some kind of bombard modifier.
Maybe it gives additional protection to buildings or maybe that's particular defese of that building.
I don't know.

I am still confused.

Soren, plese give us bombard mechainc!

[player1]

Ahem, ahem...

Does ANYBODY (exept maybe Soren and other Firaxis personnel) KNOWS ANYTING about bombardment MECHANIC (those question in first post)?

[Hurricane]

Here is a test I did (under v1.07). They changed the bombardment modifiers for cities since that, but what I´d like help with here concerns the random numbers, which I guess have not been altered in any patch.

I had 8 pieces of Artillery and bombarded different cities and terrain tiles. I made 3 reloads to compare results, but I only came up with one clear answer, that terrain does not affect the chance of damaging a tile improvement (i.e. equal chance of destroying railroad in mountains as in grassland). All shots were made directly after each other, so there are no random events in between the shots. However, as you can see in shot no 7, I hit terrain on reload 3 but not reload 4!

My conclusion is that bombarding cities uses up more random numbers than bombarding terrain tiles. I didn´t come up with any certain numbers, though. If any can see the pattern (or if Firaxis just would say it), I´d be very happy.

About the barracks thing, I have also no problems in destroying those even under v1.17.

[player1]

I assume that first RG (randomGenerator) decides will it bomb building, pop or units (I think that similar goes for unit on tileimp.) then it bombs that aprticular objects.

Now that makes bombing something with catapult very little usefull.
For ex. if chane for bombuing units is 40% (and 30% for getting building or pop) that bombing fortified Spearmen in 5pop non-walled city on grasslad would be:

0.4 * (4/(4+2.5)) = 25% chance to hit unit,

0.3 * (4/(4+16)) = 6% chance to hit building of pop

So that gives 25+6+6=37% chace to do anthing in such city.

Bombing cities with barracks is useless (auto heal next turn), since there is just 6% to hit "some" builidng.


P.S.
Artilley is still good unit since it get TWO HITS

P.P.S.
What is city walls or coastal fort. bombard defense rating?


P.P.P.S.
I am not sure what action gives bombard fail message.
Does it happens when bombing unit on open non-impoved tile?

If not, maybe it means that it tried to hit building, pop or tile but didn't succeded.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Arrian

I have noticed that although bombardment fails much more often with 1.17, the thing I hit most often is the barracks. In fact, I find destroying the barracks is easier than damaging the defending units.

I'd agree with you there, one of the first things to go under my bombardment attacks lately are the Barracks.

[korn469]

player1

i posted this in the blitz mod thread but it deals with the same subject, and although i have made changed in the blitz mod, an F-15 is 18.18.3 15[5]8 {a.d.m bmdstr[RoF]rng}, the same game mechanics should apply

__________________________

my basic strategy was to make it fairly intact until the modern age, then use F-15's to seize control of the skies then to pound civs from the air and then let my ground troops follow close behind

well that was what my strategy WAS going to be until i found that there is something very wrong with airpower, it seemed like i was getting WAY too many "air bombardment failed" messages, so i went into the editor and changed the bombardment value of a F-15 to 1000 i changed its RoF to 10 and i lowered the building and citizen defense of the city to 1...even then i still had way too many failed airmissions

my first little test was this, i had five F-15's in a city that was close to a size 1 city that didn't have any building in it and it had three military units in it: one elite infantry unit, one veteran infantry unit and a damaged partisan, but you cannot bomb a partisan since it is invisable, though i would imagine if you had a unit that could see invisable units then airpower would be able to attack it

out of my 15 bombing missions, 12 of them failed...and this is with intentionally overpowered air units used as a test
i cannot explain why this happened, except that something is amiss with the air bombardment system in civ3

i then rebased those 5 F-15's to a different city, and then attacked a size 7 city that had two infantry units and an aqueduct in it (i investigated it before i bombarded it) 10 times with the following results

*killed citizen
*killed citizen
*no report (probably damaged a unit)
*no report (probably damaged a unit)
*killed citizen
*failed mission
*failed mission
*failed mission
*failed mission
*killed citizen

again this is with 1000 bombard strength 10 RoF F-15s attacking 1 defense strength buildings and citizens, so i should have experienced a failed air mission 1 time out of 1001 tries, instead of 4 out of 10 tries

now i have a feeling about what was happening in the size 1 city, air bombardment can target units, citizens, or buildings; however it cannot damage the last citizen since air units cannot kill cities, since this city didn't have any building and it was only size 1, the air units were most likely trying to attack buildings or citizens, yet since they couldn't inflict any damage on these it gave the bombardment failed reply; however, this is a very poor implementation of bombardment rules, all bombard units should always attack targets that can actually be damaged first, my F-15's should have attacked units until they were down to 1hp first, and then the best implementation would be that since aircraft can't damage 1hp units, nor destroy size one cities without any buildings in it that those targets shouldn't be targetable, but even barring that, actual targets (building, pop, units with more than 1hp) should always come first

however the second situation i cannot explain, statistically the attack should not have failed that many times unless something else determines the success of an air mission, and if something else determines the overall chance of having a successful air attack then that should be in the editor

[Bleyn]

Actually, I find ground bombardment quite useful. Here is the tactic I use. Maybe it will help.

1. Pick a city to go against. For our example, lets say its a size 10 city with 3 full strength veteran defensive units in it.

2. Mass a mixed group of offensive, defensive and artillery units. Say 3-4 offensive units, preferably ones with 2+ movement points. 2-3 defensive units. And 3-6 artillery. (these are just minimum numbers. More is better.)

3. Manuever those units up to the city, obviously picking the best defensive ground around the city to mass the units in. If your artillery units are range two units, mass them and 1-2 defensive units in a picked square 2 squares from the city. It will take a little less time to get them there, and I see no reason to move them right up next to the city unless you have to. The rest of the units should be massed a square next to the city.

4. When all of your units are massed up, feel free to begin bombardment if you so choose. Even if your offensive units are still not in position, bombardment might get a lucky hit on a barracks or temple, or get rid of a few of those pesky foreginers, and may also give you some intel on the actual numbers and strength of the defensive units.

5. Continue bombarding for the next turn or two after you have your offensive units in position before actually attacking. The key point to my strategy is right here. What I am looking for is for my bombardment to weaken at least two of the enemy defensive units before I attack. If I am using fast offensive units, I also want them to have all of their movement points available to facilitate retreats.

To get back to my example city. If they have 3 veteran defenders and I can knock two of them down to 1 or 2 hitpoints before I attack with my offensive units, I find that I stand a much better chance of taking the city that turn. If I attack with my strongest offensive unit first, they will at least knock that first unhurt defender down a few points. Then the rest of my attackers stand better chances of killing their already-weakned opponents.

Of course, I try to avoid serious combat until I have the ultimate combo of Modern Armor, Mech Infantry and Radar Artillery, but the principle applies throughout the game.

[Unregistered]

Some interesting observations here. If in a size one city w/ no improvements left the bombardment routines still try to hit population or improvements & automatically fail every time it 'picks' one of those two catagories to shoot at, well, that doesn't seem right. Small villages/towns without much in the way of buildings shouldn't provide that much cover. Better than open country, but not that much better.

It does seem like there are a lot of 'bombardment failed' events. It takes a lot of artillery or airpower to actually hit something. Given that I think of a bomber as a bomber group & an artillery unit as a division scale asset, I would assume that they'd hit something more often than they do. I will fairly often get strings of 'bombardment failed' messages. I haven't really been keeping track, but I'd say only around 10 - 20% of my attempts actually hit something. Which is probably fairly accurate. Most artillery barrages accomplish very little real damage against military targets. Aerial bombardment causes a lot of collatoral damage, but again, not always a lot of damage against military targets.

It would be nice to have a little clearer picture of how it works.

Cheers,

[korn469]

If in a size one city w/ no improvements left the bombardment routines still try to hit population or improvements & automatically fail every time it 'picks' one of those two catagories to shoot at, well, that doesn't seem right.

agreed, bombardment should target things that can actually take damage first

I will fairly often get strings of 'bombardment failed' messages. I haven't really been keeping track, but I'd say only around 10 - 20% of my attempts actually hit something. Which is probably fairly accurate. Most artillery barrages accomplish very little real damage against military targets.

this seems indicative of what i've experienced and i would say that there is some kind of bug or rules inconsistancy at work here

in the case of my attack on the size 7 city, it had 6 pop that could have died, it had 2 units that could have taken damage, and 1 aqueduct that bombardment could have destroyed, so that means out of my 10 attacks 9 should have accomplished something, since only 6 accomplished something this probably means that their is possibly another value besides population, buildings, and units, and that is bombardment failed, if that is so there could be an equal weight in the random number generator given to all categories, so that on average 25% of all bombardment fail against cities no matter how powerful bombarment units are, and against a size 1 city that doesn't have any buildings just units then the failure rate would be 75%
both of those percentages are closer to what i experienced than what i should have experienced without an automatic failure in the system

[player1]

And question stays open (Soren, Jeff, Dan, anyone?)

[player1]

Does anybody have so called "Strategy Guide for Civ3"?

Maybe there is some sort of HINT about bombard mechanic.

[korn469]

i decided to test and see if there really was a bug associated with bombardment

there was a size 1 city with 2 infantry units and no buildings, so i made the following changes

i increased the bombardment strength of my unit to 1000 (editor max) and changed the RoF to 1, i then lowered the defense of the units to 1 and increased their hitpoints to 20 each (editor max), i then gave my air unit 100 movement and tested

in all i had 67 bombardment failed messages from those 100 attacks

so what appears to be happening is that as mentioned above a random number is rolled before the attack to determine if the bombardment attacks buildings, population, or units; however since size 1 cities can't die, a size 1 city with no building means that 2 out of three attacks will fail against units in that city, if so this is a bug and firaxis needs to fix it, and if it is a rule then firaxis needs to change it

[Arrian]

Good work, Korn. I wonder, though, if it should be changed. Part of me says that a city that you have bombarded down from a size 12 to a 1 will be a big pile of rubble (ala Stalingrad) offering the defenders all sorts of cover from your bombardment. Another part of me says, yeah, but what about a city that is size 1 prior to bombardment (a small town)? Why should it be hard to hit the defenders there? It shouldn't, it should be easier.

-Arrian

[korn469]

Arrian

remember though in a size 1 buildingless city 66% of air bombardment will AUTOMATICALLY fail, then the 33% of the time that the bombardment doesn't automatically fail, then it will still have to go through normal combat proceedures

for example:
a jet fighter in civ3 would have about a 14% chance of damading a fortified spearman in a size 1 city on grasslands while it would have about 43% chance of damaging a fortified spearman on a normal grasslands square

and in case your wondering it has about a 4% chance of damaging a fortified infantry man in a size 1 city no buildings city

[Arrian]

Hmm... that does seem to be a bit off, doesn't it. Well, personally, I'd like to see bombardment be adjusted to a spot halfway inbetween 1.16 and 1.17. It was a bit too easy to break things with artillery in 1.16, but the failure rate is too high in 1.17.

-Arrian

[player1]

Originally posted by korn469
Arrian

remember though in a size 1 buildingless city 66% of air bombardment will AUTOMATICALLY fail, then the 33% of the time that the bombardment doesn't automatically fail, then it will still have to go through normal combat proceedures

for example:
a jet fighter in civ3 would have about a 14% chance of damading a fortified spearman in a size 1 city on grasslands while it would have about 43% chance of damaging a fortified spearman on a normal grasslands square

and in case your wondering it has about a 4% chance of damaging a fortified infantry man in a size 1 city no buildings city

What about Spearmen on irrigation?
Is there a 50-50% (tileimp or unit)?

[player1]

What would I like to see:
-to have bombardment automaticly aim unit, if it's not hit then calulate collateral damage (50-50% pop or building)
-exept for barracks, then they should be targeted first, before units (if not hit target 33:33:33% unit, other building or pop)

I don't think that tweaks like this would be problem.


Just becuse artillery was hitting buildings and pop too often, Firaxis incresed bombard defense for them 4 times (from 4 to 16).

That's not the right way, they should have chaged probablities for chooseing a building or pop.

IMO.

[korn469]

personally, I'd like to see bombardment be adjusted to a spot halfway inbetween 1.16 and 1.17. It was a bit too easy to break things with artillery in 1.16, but the failure rate is too high in 1.17

Arrian

until a city runs out of buildings and pop (when the bug occurs) the bombardment success rate in 1.17 is half of what it was in 1.16f, which is half of what it was in 1.07f, so until you run out of a class of targets the success rate seems fine, only then does it go from good to outrageously low

player1

i'll do more testing and see if i can find out for you

[Bleyn]

Originally posted by player1
What would I like to see:
-to have bombardment automaticly aim unit, if it's not hit then calulate collateral damage (50-50% pop or building)
-exept for barracks, then they should be targeted first, before units (if not hit target 33:33:33% unit, other building or pop)

IMO.

Hmmm.... I dunno. Early bombers weren't exactly that precise. Even with the Norden bombsight, Allied bombers in WW2 couldn't reliably hit small targets. I seriously doubt they would have been able to reliably target military units in urban environments. Its too easy to for them to spread out over an entire city and effectively present no real target to bombardment.

And despite the improvements of the last 50 years, I'm not sure modern bombers could do much better.

I will give you however that fighter-bombers, even in WW2, proved to have a much better accuracy than the larger bombers. Though in urban environments, they would still run into the problem of ground units presenting very little in way of good targets. IIRC, the only force in WW2 to come close to solving this dilemma was the US Marine Corp, who perfected close air support to a high degree.

I would say that the best compromise would be to have fighter units acting in a bombardment role target units by first preference, then buildings, and have bombers targetting buildings first, maybe with some collateral damage potential to units if a building is destroyed.

It would also be nice if when using the precision strike option we could actually select a targetting preference. As it stands now, I haven't ever really seen precision strikes to be of any use. And I am one who does find bombardments to be quite handy at times.

[player1]

Remember that this logic is bad:
X chance to succesfully bombard unit on grassland

X/3 chance to succesfully bombard same unit in unwalled city on grassland.

That makes the Catapult & Cannons better as field units instead of Seige units.

Neither to say that city with barracks makes units INVUNERABLE to SEIGE (bombardment in multiple turns).

Pretty unhistoric.

I liked CTP model more:
Bombard targets unit (noone said it will be hit), but there is always small chance to do collateral damage.

[player1]

Hmm...

I'll ask this again:

Is there anything about bombard in so called "Civ3 Strategy Guide"?

What is bombard defense bonus (City Walls and Coastall Fortress)?

[Gen.Dragolen]

Player1,

Look in the Rules in the Civ3 Editor. Everything you ever wanted to know but didn't figure you would find.

D.

[player1]

???

I don't think that editor gives any answers to asked questions.

It just gives even more unanswered questions.


P.S.
Soren said in one of recent chats that chances for targeting untis while bombarding city is 50%, 25% for pop and 25% for buildings.

At least that's something.

[The Eliminator]

If you knew the answer, why did you ask?

[player1]

Thread was started at 1-03-2002

I didn't knew anything then.

Now I know A LITTLE more.

I know that 50/25/25 thing and retreat chances

And still need other answers.

As anybody else on these forums.