Is there any reason whatsoever to attack cities with melee units?

I find that promoted melee is good against cities. Specifically, siege makes your units do a lot more damage while taking less in the process, and cover keeps them alive.
 
None of those are particularly good at taking out cities. Im not even sure if the impi spear throw affects cities. City strength appears to scale per era based on the seige units strength vs cities, which makes attacking them with anything else inefficient. Theres no point attacking a strength 40 city with strength 20 Mandekalu cavalry when you need trebs to do any decent damage.

The most efficient plan in the absence of special units (like seige towers, keshiks, etc) seems to be to just bomb it to pieces with ranged units and then move in one unit to take the city. Before you get range 3 units, that means using a melee shield to hopefully distract the AI while your seige units bomb the city to 0 hp.

I think a mod that lowers city strength would really help here, with a corresponding reduction in seige unit bonus vs cities. Anyone know of one? "Weaker cities" on steam workshop isnt getting any useful results...

Ranged naval excels against coastal cities because they have no setup time, no terrain movement costs and generally, no terrain blocking direct fire. Before you get frigates, it can get really annoying because galleons cant go into ocean tiles though. However naval units cant get seige bonuses so that kind of balances it out. I think one flaw of the core game is that land seige units dont get indirect fire till artillery, so that means before then a city in hilly terrain is near impossible to take. I had a city once in the middle of a large patch of hills + forest and the AI couldnt take it despite surrounding it with tons of units. But thats easy to fix with a indirect fire mod.

As it is, it can get really difficult to take coastal cities. Lets assume this is a intelligent player with his own navy + one land unit + one naval unit in the city. The city and its garrison should be enough to take out one frigate per turn alone, and in city strength scales MUCH better than naval strength. Arsenals come out a lot earlier than battleships and make large cities immune to frigates basically. For some reason there is a massive tech gap in naval units between frigates and battleships...i think it would really help if there was a ranged iron clad unit at the same time as you get melee ironclads.



Or you can bombard the city to 0 hp by firing on it every turn at 3 tiles with your artillery at no risk to yourself. Theres no reason to waste time healing unless you have extra tanks sitting around who could use the xp.

Also not really related, but i just saw a mod on the workshop that claims to fix a cover bug where it doesnt work for ranged units. Does anyone know if thats true for BNW?

I can take 20 turns to clear an entire pangaea with lightning warfare tanks. Good luck doing it with artillery.
 
In the sub t200 SV thread I tried capturing Venice with just infantry and it worked quite well. In fact the AI usually does just that, melees your cities to death. To answer the OP if you're miles ahead in tech and can pump out a million units you don't need any skill for a domination victory.
 
It's a little known fact that scouts get a huge bonus against cities. One will cap a city in two turns. Try it.

Try it...
 
Killlbray,

2: Nahh, it works fine for me to have more melee than ranged so that way I never have to worry about withdrawing when an unexpected
large group of units show up out of no where.

3: I will conquer whenever I want to, not when someone wants me to. None of this sissy researching wait. AI is weak at war.

4: It really depends on the lay of land for me.

5: Clearly I can see that you never had a horde of german panzers before. You will roll anything with while ranged
units struggle to keep up XD

6: Huge multi front battles won't wait for your ranged to be there.

7/8: Entire empires has fallen in few turns to heavy melee spam too. And being heavy on units allow you to intimidate major ais easier.



Anyways, I really hate how Civfanatics forum posters on average act like Ranged unit is the one and true god.

Both units is perfectly viable.

And by having great number of melee units, you can really push the enemies to their limits and make them get overwhelmed and collapse. And remember, pillaging hexs give ur melee units extra 25 hp something which i abuse very heavily with my panzers.

And you don't have to attack one tiny specific part for the AI to throw everything at you in one place. You can attack everywhere if you have the strength.

Don't get me wrong though, I do have alot of ranged units, its just that the melee units form the majority of my armies. Probably something like 60% melee and 40% ranged.

Sure, ranged unit rise in importance if you're fighting against Deity AI but Deity AI is just a bunch of cheating losers that can't fight without obnoxious amount of advantages over players anyways.
 
I can take 20 turns to clear an entire pangaea with lightning warfare tanks. Good luck doing it with artillery.

5: Clearly I can see that you never had a horde of german panzers before. You will roll anything with while ranged
units struggle to keep up XD

When you get tanks you also get bombers. With the first being penalized against cities and the second having bonuses against them and a decidedly better freedom of action I don't see many reasons to spam tanks instead of bombers, especially when they both require oil. I only need about 3 tanks in total.

Of course at that point land based ranged units become pointless, but the melee units' role doesn't change.
 
Hmm i see. Is there a list of bugs out there that we need mods to fix?

Feel free to rummage in the Bug Reports forum, but you might browse the C&C forum before doing so. Some bugs are fixed with mods and word never gets back to Bug Reports or GD.
 
<snip>

Anyways, I really hate how Civfanatics forum posters on average act like Ranged unit is the one and true god.

Both units is perfectly viable.

<snip>

Sure, ranged unit rise in importance if you're fighting against Deity AI but Deity AI is just a bunch of cheating losers that can't fight without obnoxious amount of advantages over players anyways.

That's why Civfanatics act like range is best because most people here try to move up in the difficulty. Everyone knows the computer gets insane advantages, but the point of range effectiveness doesn't change. If you can wreck a computer that has a 10 fold build advantage because of range then against a normal human player that range unit will be just as effective.
 
When you get tanks you also get bombers. With the first being penalized against cities and the second having bonuses against them and a decidedly better freedom of action I don't see many reasons to spam tanks instead of bombers, especially when they both require oil. I only need about 3 tanks in total.

Of course at that point land based ranged units become pointless, but the melee units' role doesn't change.

The AI builds antiair units because if you guys and ignore the antitank units due to firaxis reading the forums here. :3

Plus Bombers kinda suck anyways and is effective when you have the advantage.

And bombers can't protect your cities directly, they have to smack the enemy units apart. Something which Panzers can do in a pinch.

And Rathelm it just means the military balance in Deity is just out of whack.

And personally I don't find cowering in a tiny part of map fun while I find epic slugfests really fun. That way it looks like there's a couple of empires duking it out. Well Mostly me beating the AI up.
 
I do it if I have my melee units surrounding the city. They weaken the city faster.
 
When you get tanks you also get bombers. With the first being penalized against cities and the second having bonuses against them and a decidedly better freedom of action I don't see many reasons to spam tanks instead of bombers, especially when they both require oil. I only need about 3 tanks in total.

Of course at that point land based ranged units become pointless, but the melee units' role doesn't change.
Tanks over bombers any day. Tanks have no city penalty, no stacking limit, and can attack cities far away. Bombers are limited to range, number, does less damage to cities than tanks and cannot capture. You can win a domination game much faster with tanks than bombers. I think there's a guide somewhere in the forums that teaches you just that.
 
When getting ready go on the Warpath; 1) build an affordable army/navy suitable for the target(s), be prepared to USE and/or lose this strike force to accomplish your goals; 2) NEVER leave your home defenseless, you could be backstabbed; 3) be ready to pillage PAST the target(s), to better position your troops about to dog-pile the city, so everybody is in range at the same time; 4) bring friends, LOTS of 'em, as casualties are expected; 5) post a few cavalry to keep foe away from main force; 6) take city(s); tasty, filling !!
 
One of reason why tanks could be better then bombers are:

Tanks are faster to produce, with 50% production bonus.
Tanks take cities faster, it take only 1-2 turns to take city with tank with propers surround.
 
Top Bottom