Stack Bombardment Command

[granville]

I posted some time ago wishing for an automatic bombardment command for artillery, naval ships, and bombers. Someone told me that this wonderful feature would be included in Play the World. When the game came out last month, I bought it almost immediately mainly for this feature, only to find out that the so-called automatic bombardment wasn’t what I am looking for.

I’m sure everyone is making good use of artillery pieces for both defensive and offensive operations. I normally have a stack of about 30 artillery pieces to do the prep work for me. It has become quite a tedious process to keep hitting the “B” key to do the manual bombardment for each artillery piece for a number of turns. On top of that, since the failure rate of artillery bombardment is quite high, I am definitely not fond of this operation.

With most of the interface issues cleaned up in Play the World, I hope Firaxis could implement the stack bombardment feature as soon as possible. It would be even better if Firaxis included some pop-up notes telling us the hit rate (success rate) of all bombardments. Am I dreaming?

Please share your thoughts.

Granville

[Willem]

One tip with the auto-bombard, in case you aren't already aware. If an enemy unit comes alongside the stack, the auto-bombard orders are cancelled. To get around this, you have deselect the preference that cancels orders when next to an enemy unit.

I agree that it's not what I thought it would be. I hope they at least fix that problem with the orders being cancelled. But it would be really, really nice if we had both stack-bombard and auto-bombard. Maybe a Ctrl-Shift-B command for stack bombardment. It would probably be difficult to include both options in one shortcut, but at least it would be nice to have an option.

[TacticalGrace]

The annoying thing is that they implemented the less useful one.

Large, fast moving wars are typical of successful players. For this you have a stack of 10, 20 or more arty bombarding a target for one go before capturing the target and moving on. This is when you need stack bombard.

small, slow moving wars are less typical. This is when you have just one or two arty and leave them to pound away at a target for several years. For this you need the auto-bombard. The only time a decent player would do this is for strategic bombing (targetting an uncapturable capital city for example, in the hope of reducing it capacity to manufacture wealth and material). This is a sign of limited war which I suspect really good players never go for (war weariness means that short-lived total war is better)

[Shr3dZ]

There was a way to stack-bombard, you could hold down the 'b' button and keep clicking on the enemy the number if times you wanted to bombard (assuming you had enuf units to do so) and would bombard automatically, but I tried it the other day and it wasnt working, maybe that has been removed with the ptw patch, dunno....