3.14.1 Siege Tower doesn't get 300% bonus against cities.

As the title states, the Assyrian UU doesn't get the 300% city combat bonus despite having a promotion and it being in its' description. It only gets the +50% combat bonus, which is also given to other nearby units.

Was really surprised when my Siege Tower could barely hurt Gandhi's city more than a Spearman, after which it got two-shot.

Hmm...

Very strange. One first glance this must be due to a change made to one of the default promotions applied to the unit as we haven't made any specific changes to it, only an overall strength increase to all catapult type units.

There definitely is a reduction in strength compared to vanilla, as the screenshots show.

Vanilla:


Here the vanilla 12 is trebled to be 36

CEP:


Here the modded CEP version shows 15 gains only 50% to 22.5

It appears the vanilla promotion PROMOTION_CITY_ASSAULT which gave a 300% boost to has been changed to a -50% penalty.

CEA_Attributes.xml, lines 395 - 397 have made changes to this promo also, adding it to the Domains section of the promotions.

I think the actual culprit though may be the fact that this unit, despite being a catapult replacement, is classed as MELEE by Firaxis. Changes to boost siege units made in the mod aren't being applied as they are classed as SIEGE.

I think the promotions it has other than +1 Sight and Sapper also don't work.

My Siege Tower, after receiving ranged fire from Gandhi's Chariot Archer (13 ranged strength? Or 12) and his 17 strength city, received 33 and 34 damage from each, leaving it with 33 hp.

I realise Siege Tower, unlike other Catapults, doesn't get -50% ranged fire like other siege units and instead gets -25% from Cover, but it just doesn't seem to work. Same with the thing in civilopedia which claims it is supposed to make it receive less damage from cities.

By the way, the Chariot Archer was pretty much unupgraded. It had Rough Terrain bonuses while my Siege Tower just stood on a regular grassland. Gandhi had no great general or anything.

I've started an issue over in GitHub to address these things.

There are just too many changes at play to be definitive where the action needs to take place. It comes back down to the fact that Firaxis made this a MELEE unit despite it being used as a SIEGE unit. Therefore global changes made to either class cannot be assured of adjusting the correct unit.

Watch this space, it will need a bit of balancing discussion before we will proceed.
Pity, the vanilla Siege Tower is an awesome unit.

It sounds like we would need a couple of special promos for the UU as with the battering ram (and/or remove promotions that aren't intended on this unit only).