Poll: bombardment

[TacticalGrace]

Some people claim that bombardment is a waste of time and that you're better off just building "proper" units. What do you do?

[alva]

Depends on level...
Emperor or below --> no
Deity --->yes (usually canon and up)

[CerberusIV]

I will use bombardment from catapults on if the tactical situation warrants it. As the game goes on my use of bombardment increases, especially once I get bombers.

Why do things the hard way?

[aaglo]

Sometimes (read: on heavily defended cities/chokepoints) I rely on the power of artillery. And if it's a coastal city, I also tend to use battleships&Destroyers.

[Nym]

It depends on the game's level, the technological advance and the type of bombardement.
I do not bombard cities before artillery (units too weak) and do not bombard them too if I have enough MA to give an assault (it is often useless to bombard in late game, due to the great number of buildings, or it needs lots of time). In the opposite, I find very useful to bombard units outside a city. Furthermore there is no need to bombard in the lowest game's levels as the AI is not very strong.

[Atahualpa]

vote for modded

[latka]

The higher the level the more the game becomes about advatages and disadvantages. Bombarment units add to your advantages in several ways.

1) Good defensive units. As enemies approach, you can get a first attack in to weaken or destroy their units. Of course you can not destroy their unit with your bombardment unit, but it sure is nice to knock a swordsmans down to one hit point and be able to take him out with a spearman or a warrior.

You also get a free bombardment from one of the units when the enemy does attack, thus inflicting more damage to your enemy,hopefully.

2) War is not always about taking cities. Damaging the enemy may be sufficent. After all, the AI or even other human players have to rebuild what is destroyed.

Killing enemy civilians decreases a cities production.

Tile improvements can be bombarded, thus having the same affect or even better. If a critical resourse is taken away, they may lose the ability to defend themselves affectively. This is nice to do with longer range bombardment units.

Destroying city improvements.

3) Going through an enemies territory on a campaign may require breaking up groups of units if you want to do damage to non-critical cities or territories on the way, thus lowering your defensive capabilities if an army or multiple stack units show up. Bombarding, allows one to break up stacks into smaller, but safe groups and still do damage.

4) Weaken those city and mountain units before attacking. I don't have the time or resource to keep rebuilding units that are lost in attacks. Given all Civs being equal, the AI can out produce me and is going to be more hostile towards me than any other civilization. The more civilizations there are, the greater the risk of multiple wars simaltaneously. I don't care about the items lost in a city, if I were to completely destroy the city and build a new one, I would have to build all the improvements anyway. Production and learning, that is what the father land is for.

5) Land and air units can not be damaged. No matter how much a square is bombarded by the enemy, their ability to bombard is not affected. Any units that has hit points are in a sense, because they do not have the luxury of being able to meet their full potential.

6) Keep those navel vessels away from me. I seem to do poorly at naval battles, especially if the units are of the same strengths as my units. When the enemy is going by with units to land on my shores, at least I have the chance of weakening the vessel so that my ships can have a descent chance of destroying them. My best example is when I bombarded a fully loaded aircraft carrier down to one hitpoint and was able to eliminate it with an ironclad. Oh how I needed that.

7) Upgradeable (Catapult->Canon->Artillary). I don't have to wait to build a large number of better bombardment units when I learn the necessary tech. I just have to have cash and then boom, I can have 6, 12, 18 better units. Definately a god send when you are behind in techs and you are in a defensive position.

8) Many would not consider this an advantage, but I do. I have to defend these units, so that my enemy does not get them. Thus, I have to build defensive units to protect them, which in turn requires that I build offensive units to protect the defensive units.

In summary, the low success rate of bombardment units are outweighed by the benefits that are recieved by them, even catapults. It just takes a fair amount of time to reap them. The important thing is to gain advatages over your enemy, so that you can keep them from; destroying, taking things, out producing, or even gaining advatanges over you.

[wilbill]

Prior to artillery, I use bombardment as a defensive device. I rarely build catapults, not because they have no value, but because their truly useful lifespan is pretty short.

[TacticalGrace]

9) enforcing ZOC. In civ2 we used to have ZOC enforced strongly without having to do anything. Now the ZOC is only enforced by fast units taking attacks of opportunity. Placing artillery on the stack strongly discourages any movement through your ZOC.
vs move 1 units, or in "slow" terrain:
catapult/cannon gets 3 shots
artillery gets 5 shots
vs move 2 units
catapult/cannon gets 1 shot
artillery gets 2 shots
vs move 3 units
catapult/cannon still get 1 shot
artillery gets 1 shot

PLUS if you can intercept and halt any units trying to get through your ZOC you can get many more shots on them. Once you've damaged units they might want to retreat back through your artillery fire.

thus it is possible to create a corridor of death which can be effective against a much larger army and especially deadly against slow units. But only truly efficient with bombard units.

[Datajack Franit]

Only and only if I'm defending a very important city near a dangerous border- Russia, Germany, Egypt

[Master Zen]

I find bombardment to be frustratingly useless on cities, too much damage or too many "Artillery bombardment failed". I once had a city bombed by something like 3 BShips, 4 Cruisers, 8 Stealths and 4 MobArty and all bombardments failed. TOTALLY unreal.

They are however, really useful on units outside cities.

I mod the metropolis to have a 50 defense instead of 100 to make it a little easier to capture with ground units.

[Anaximander]

This poll is lacking in one major area...naval bombardment!!! From the moment I get Frigates I build a navy and use it. Nothing quite like 4 or 5 battleships pillaging enemy coastlines and softening up cities for attack. Sure bombarment dosn't always work, but if it worked 100% of the time it wouldn't be very realistic. I am more than happy with the results of my Navy's guns.

[latka]

The failure rate on cities is frustrating, but I do find it to be very realistic to modern times. In the seige of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, during WWII, the Germans bombed the cities heavily. The remaining people in the cities as well as the troops were so entrenched, that it was going to take a lot more than big guns and a few troops to get them out.

I think moding the defense strength down is actually doing an injustice to the game. After all, the cities that are the hardest to get are those that have been built-up by a civilization over a long period of time and the people are going to be more willing to die for their home. This needs to be reflected in the game some how.

Straying off the topic of bombardment a little and focusing on a strategic model, I would like point out another unit that helps me. The explorer is an extremely cheap unit that has the power to pillage (I like to think of them as sabtours). Once railroads are prevelant throughout the world, I find this to be a great benefit to the defense of a newly aquired city or even to my territory. I rush a pair of them to strategic locations in enemy territory and pillage the rails and roads, keeping my opponent from strking back quickly. When the enemy does enter into range of my units, I can then damage them with my artillary, saving any bombers for more critical longer range projects.

Most of the time, my explores do not go far into the enemies territory, thus, I am able to retrieve them. If I lose them, though, no big deal. The AI doesn't seem to want to use them in the same manner and I can replace them quickly when I am ready to move on to another city. It also causes the AI to expend individual units on frivalous things (baiting them), which gives me a chance to weaken their overall strength by taking these sole units sitting in no-mans land.

[Nym]

Originally posted by latka
The failure rate on cities is frustrating, but I do find it to be very realistic to modern times. In the seige of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, during WWII, the Germans bombed the cities heavily. The remaining people in the cities as well as the troops were so entrenched, that it was going to take a lot more than big guns and a few troops to get them out.

I think moding the defense strength down is actually doing an injustice to the game. After all, the cities that are the hardest to get are those that have been built-up by a civilization over a long period of time and the people are going to be more willing to die for their home. This needs to be reflected in the game some how.

Good point

Straying off the topic of bombardment a little and focusing on a strategic model, I would like point out another unit that helps me. The explorer is an extremely cheap unit that has the power to pillage (I like to think of them as sabtours). Once railroads are prevelant throughout the world, I find this to be a great benefit to the defense of a newly aquired city or even to my territory. I rush a pair of them to strategic locations in enemy territory and pillage the rails and roads, keeping my opponent from strking back quickly. When the enemy does enter into range of my units, I can then damage them with my artillary, saving any bombers for more critical longer range projects.

Good idea

[Cyclotron]

As soon as I get artillery, I build large stacks to tote around with me to enemy cities, and defensive stacks too. I only use naval bombard once I have ironclads, and then only against cities or vital rail connections. As soon as I get bombers I build quite a few; they are formidable additions to a tank or MA blitz.

I would like to see catapults and cannons be more useful, and naval bombardment beefed up a bit, but in general bombardment is very useful to me and I use it liberally. It could be the reason why I've never seen this "spearman beats tank" deal: By the time I get tanks, I won't be facing any unit with more than 1 or 2 hit points left.

[Keeper of Hell]

Later bombardment units (re: stealth bombers) are almost completely useless unless you beef them up. Although I generally agree that it's realistic to have an artillery barrage do an underwhelming amount of damage to cites and garrisons, modern day bombers can do an incredible amount of damage because they can pinpoint strikes so accurately. The fact that stealth bombers are weaker than many ground-based artillery units makes absolutely no sense.

[Tattila the Hun]

"A house is a house. When you hit it with 88mm HE shell, it becomes a fortress."

I only build navy because everybody else builds navy and bombs me to smithereens if I don't do the same first.

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Tattila the Hun
"A house is a house. When you hit it with 88mm HE shell, it becomes a fortress."

For those who do not know, Tattila was referring to:
A city that has been heavily bombarded is EASIER to defend. Any people not killed have all the more places to hide themselves in the rubble. The streets are all gone, so anyone not intimately familiar with the area gets lost quickly because maps are useless (unless you have GPS ).

[ruby_maser]

Its unfortunate that the AI doesn't understand/utilize navies as they are in real life. I would like to see a Civ3 naval battle like Jutland.

Anyway, I utilize navies for escorting, armadas, as well as bombardment, but I actually begin to bombard when artillery comes around.

Against the AI, I usually just keep a large stack of Artillery. After railroads, the stack just travels where the action is.

[Theseus]

Ooooh yeah... arty makes my day.

Theseus (discoverer of continuous-bombard... click, click, click)

[Kingof the Apes]

I don't use cannon as much as artillery, which I use a lot. And I never use catapults.

[Stuie]

From Catapults on up.

Shower them with bananas (until we run out, anyway: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...od_banana_dc_1)

[nbarclay]

Let me add a caveat to my "No, never" vote, since although it's closer than any other choice, it's not quite 100% accurate. I'm perfectly willing to use captured bombard units if I can get them to a useful location, and I'll occasionally build a few bombard units of my own (more likely for coastal defense than for anything else). But by and large, in the vast majority of my games, I do my fighting with fast-movers. Also, I like to capture cities as intact as possible. Bombardment units don't fit either of those aspects of my approach well.

Nathan

[bobbo008]

I don't even consider building until at least i have artillery. then, if i do, i'll make at least 15 in a stack and have them well-defended.

[Thrawn05]

Before the Lethal Bombard patch, what I did was remove Bombardment values from the artillary units and made like regular units. The Bombard strength becomes Attack strength and range becomes Defense strength. The AI actualy used these units as well, and it was lots of fun.

Of course now I have SOME of the units with lethal bombardment, mostly the more advanced units.


I don't bother with airplanes at all, I don't like them. I liked the old system. But that's just me.

[latka]

I am curious to know how nbarclay defeats heavily defended cites when behind in advances. In my most recent game, I sent 11 legioneers against 2 pikemen and one spearman. I lost everything. The city did not have walls and was on plains. I did not hardly do any damage to any of the three units. I would have at least thought that 4 legioneers, two elite and two vetern would elminate one regular spearman that was fortified. All I did was make regular units into elite units and got my b*tt kicked

What do you do when you don't have truely superior units, but do have numbers. I finally took the city when I got knights. It took me two attacks with five knights and seven catapults.

At the same time, I lost a city with one fortified elite pikeman to a regular archer. Arrrg!

[CerberusIV]

There are a lot of statements about how useless catapults are and it is true that they don't do as much damage as later artillery units. However they can take a HP off a couple of defenders and make all the difference. In my current game I just took a size 7 city defended by three fortified regular pikemen. A stack of 5 catapults took one HP off two pikemen and I attacked with knights and med inf. I took the city without casualties but the first (undamaged) pikeman fought off a knight and took 2 HP off the second knight. The two damaged pikemen went down without any trouble. For the cost of building them catapults can make a difference and avert expensive losses IMHO.

[latka]

I need more sleep. Substitute Legioneer with Swordsman. I have played way too many civ games. Sorry.

[TacticalGrace]

Originally posted by latka

What do you do when you don't have truely superior units, but do have numbers. I finally took the city when I got knights. It took me two attacks with five knights and seven catapults.

At the same time, I lost a city with one fortified elite pikeman to a regular archer. Arrrg!

When you attacked with the swordsmen you were somewhat unlucky. When you were attacked by the archer you were again somewhat unlucky. What it does go to show is that there is quite a lot of deviation in the results of combat in civ3. This is intended to allow the player who is behind to have a chance to catch up. As you have seen it IS possible for an elite pikeman to be defeated by a regular archer. Therefore build on this and try to get things to go your way. Instead of one archer you need to use 3 horsemen for every defender. Remember that a defeated horseman will often retreat meaning that (a) you are left with a unit to use another day (b) the defender doesn't get an upgrade.

Using bombard units is an alternative way of doing this. Get a few bombard units and keep bombarding. If the bombard isn't as successful as you had hoped then don't proceed with the assault. If you have a lucky round of bombarding then that is the time to go in with your assault troops.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by latka
I am curious to know how nbarclay defeats heavily defended cites when behind in advances. In my most recent game, I sent 11 legioneers against 2 pikemen and one spearman. I lost everything. The city did not have walls and was on plains. I did not hardly do any damage to any of the three units. I would have at least thought that 4 legioneers, two elite and two vetern would elminate one regular spearman that was fortified. All I did was make regular units into elite units and got my b*tt kicked

What do you do when you don't have truely superior units, but do have numbers. I finally took the city when I got knights. It took me two attacks with five knights and seven catapults.

At the same time, I lost a city with one fortified elite pikeman to a regular archer. Arrrg!

Were your legionaires veterans? If not, that could go a long way toward explaining the problem, but even then it sounds like a run of pretty bad luck. (The only non-vet units I deliberately build are normally my first handful of scouting warriors and warriors a city with one food surplus builds while waiting for the food for a worker, although I do occasionally forget to build a barracks before putting a city on building a unit.)

There are two main reasons I don't have any more use for artillery than I do. First, I'm good at the research/builder aspect of the game, so it's almost unheard of for me to be permanently stuck in a situation where I can't get unit superiority. And second, I pick the timing on my wars carefully - for example, if I'm going to need to attack to get more room, I try to make sure I attack before technology reaches the point where my opponent will have pikes. Between those two factors, my skills with "legions against pikemen" type fighting haven't evolved all that far.

I definitely recognize the value of artillery when (for example) taking on infantry before tanks are available. I've even used that type of strategy once or twice when I had a special reason for doing so. But my normal solution is to wait until I have tanks or, more likely still, modern armor upgraded from tanks, and then I can stomp to my heart's content with minimal difficulty.

(I know a lot of players love the thrill of a tough, hard-fought war, but the real fun for me is the economic contest. Quick, easy wars are my prize for doing well in that economic contest.)

Nathan