Jason,
Don't be arbitrary and take things out of context. I keep reading your posts and seeing you take the absolute position against lethal bombardment and
it is fairly clear that you have done no experimentation or testing to verify what impact these factors have on game play.
If one artillery piece could always be lethal to one defender I would agree with you, but this is not even remotely what we are talking about here.
We are talking about cases of where you have a stack of 5 or 6 infantry men engaging a fortified stack of a couple of infantrymen with 5 or 6 artillery pieces. In these cases, what are the chances that the artillery pieces would not kill one of the infantry attackers? If you answer the questions that the artillery would never be able to kill even one of the infantry men then you clearly do not understand the dynamics of the game, or the real world examples, or the impact of how the CIV3 engagement rules play out.
If a stack of 6 veteran infantry men moves into your territory they would each have 4 hit points at a 10 defensive value. With the minimum defender bonus of 10 percent this would make each advancing unit an 11. Each artillery piece would get an attack from bombardment at 12 strength with rate of fire of 2 under the default rules. Even with lethal bombardment engaged, it would be impossible to kill any of the advancing units if you did not have more than 6 artillery pieces.
The actual way that these engagements play out in test games will show you that with 6 veteran attackers the number of kills by the artillery would look like this:
with 6 artillery pieces --- zero kills
with 9 artillery pieces --- maybe 1 kill on the average
with 12 artillery pieces --- 2 kills on the average
with 16 artillery pieces --- 4 or 5 kills on the average
These figures are on open terrain and not the effects that you would see in cities or defensive terrain like hills, mountains or forests. When these terrain bonuses come into effect in CIV3 the current bombardment rules render it almost impossible to score a hit of any kind on the attacking units of the same era.
The lethality issue is also one of balance and inclusion.
I say again, that a reasonable and coherent person who had tested the bombardment units in the current CIV3 release could not possibly say that they were correctly implemented for a perspective of historical accuracy, technical function, game play balance, or cost benefit.
Think about it for a minute before you continue to defend an untested position by asking a half focused question to an academic.
In the current game, bombardment units can never hit artillery pieces or air units on the ground no matter how many shots are fired. You can have 20,000 bombers and send them against a city and the result is that all the civilians (except 1) get killed and all the buildings get destroyed but the defenders cannot be killed and the artillery, air force, and naval units can never even be hit.
With lethal bombardment, military defenders continue to remain targets as long as they exist so they continue to impart defensive value to the citizens and improvements as long as they defend the city.
You also have to look at bombard vs defense ratios. A catapult in CIV3 cannot reduce a defending cities defensive capacity even if lethal bombardment is engaged because the bombard versus defense values are so skewed. It takes on the order of 6 or 8 catapults to have a chance of destroying just one city improvement and/or killing one improvement.
Lethal naval bombardment is also a critical part of the game that is missing because when it is impossible to sink naval units by bombardment there is absolutely no incentive to engage the enemy units. Witness the current game winning strategy where battleships hide out in cities where they are immune from attack and only pop out of the coastal cities to engage an occasional enemy before retreating back into the city.
The undefended galleon or transport that pukes up obsolete units into your territory is also a direct result of lack of stand off lethality is also a direct result of lack of lethality. If you can never sink the attacking vessel what is the incentive to provide escort vessels. The transport will always survive the run to shore and will always succeed in landing the troops.
The test results clearly show that you are not in the game with respect to trying to understand the impact of artillery units. When you build and implement large numbers of artillery pieces or bombers, then some units ought to be able to be killed on the other side.
If we can get past this arbitrary and uninformed position that you have taken, then we can begin to focus on the real issues of expected casualty rates of units of different defensive strengths when they are engaged by different types of bombard units.
The answer is just definitely not ZERO, as in the case of 10,000 artillery pieces cannot kill at least one of the 10,000 attacking units in an open field.
I think the historical examples of artillery decimating attackers with lethal effect far outnumber the examples where artillery never had a lethal effect (Let's see: Balaclava Heights, Picket's charge, Austerlitz, and so on.)
Trench warfare examples are not good examples because a different set of defensive factors applies. Between the trenches was no mans land because the machine guns (read this as little heavy weapons) and the artillery (read this as big heavy weapons) were lethal in about 50% of the engagement cases.
I would add that I also think you need to have somebody shoot an artillery piece at you. I'm am not joking or being evil here, it is just that being shot at with an artillery piece really will kill you or one of your buddies, and in most cases you may even think you have been killed even when the shell just lands near by. The concussion will kill you even if you don't get hit by the weapon of flying debris.
