How do you target specific improvements?

Whenever I've used the precision bombing button and then selected the city to bomb, nothing is shown to allow you specify which building to blow up! And even more annoying, is that the blasting program says it missed! Arrghh! :mad:

I'm using v1.21f of Civ3.

Originally posted by MajorFallout

I'm using v1.21f of Civ3.

1.21f was the public beta, find 1.21g on CFC's homepage link for downloads. Or, you can get it through MacSoft's support page.

What does the latest update changes with regard to Precision Bombing?

Actually, Precision Bombing simply does not work as most people expect. IIRC, all it does is target any improvement (i.e. it will not target units or population). Doing a search over in the General Discussion forum should yield more than you ever wanted to know about this.

And yes, this does make precision bombing more or less useless - but 99.99% of games never reach the tech anyway.

Originally posted by Beamup
Actually, Precision Bombing simply does not work as most people expect. IIRC, all it does is target any improvement (i.e. it will not target units or population). Doing a search over in the General Discussion forum should yield more than you ever wanted to know about this.

And yes, this does make precision bombing more or less useless - but 99.99% of games never reach the tech anyway.Not exactly useless. PB hits the enemy civ by taking out improvements like market, university, etc., thus use it as global warfare. Use bombing, if you target a specific city and want to lower its defenses.

Which is not terribly useful - especially given the extremely high defense factor improvements have. If you have enough bombers to actually take out improvements, you might as well just take the city!

I've only reached precision bombing once or twice, and found some value. Under normal bombing, you hit some buildings and weaken some units. Come next turn, you hit more buildings, and those weakened units probably heal. With precision bombing, you can destroy all of the buildings, and then hit nothing but units on the following turn - thereby increasing the odds of weakening the defenders enough to take the city in one turn.

Actually, it was discovered fairly recently (discussed in the Strategy forum) that the idea you propose doesn't work. Essentially, there is a fixed probability that a bombard order (including bombing) will target a unit, or an improvement, or population, or miss. If it attempts to target something where there is no valid target (e.g. if you've blown up all the improvements but it picks "improvement" as its target category) it will generate a miss. Not another attempt that might target a unit. So once you wipe out all the improvements, there is no increase in hitting units - just an increase in misses.

Thanks for clearing that up everyone.

Hmm. So it IS useless. I wonder where those Firaxis guys got the idea to make a "precision bombing" that can't perform a precision attack.