City attack in BNW

Falconiano

Prince
Joined
Jun 6, 2013
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433
Location
Italy
I just had a 23 Strength Mecca deal 82 damage to a catapult with Morale promotion.
The city religion didn't have the 30% atk bonus to cities, just the 50% from tradition.

Ain't that a bit OP? One kill every attack basically, on a low level 23 strength city with no walls.
 
I feel the same. An Impi catapult rush is almost pointless for example. 2 catapults 3 impi and a warrior can't even take a 21 city. I think this is mainly the AI going Tradition more than Liberty though.
 
I managed to grab Mecca by exploiting i.e. sending melees with lower health so they would be targeted and cats could shoot safely.

It's true btw most civs seem to go tradition now... even a low lvl city is a pain!
 
It would be stupid that a city can't kill catapult in two hits, city itself is generally weak in attack. What you need is some distraction to save catapults from fire, cities will prefer to attack wounded units over healthy catapults for example. I prefer cities to be a bit stronger, its kinda lame to capture cities without any loses.
 
I like high powered city defense, but I would prefer a hybrid with the old system where city bombard would only do 10% health damage to siege. That way, the city is extremely effective at killing melee and ranged, but if you wanted to kill a siege weapon, you had to kill it with your army (1 bow in the garrison can kill 1 siege unit easy enough, but if they bring more you'll need to actually win the battle and not just use Turtlepower. It massively favored the unit-spamming A.I., but it was nice to get promotions on well zone-controlled siege. Nowadays they are disposable spam units, bring a half dozen because you'll lose a couple taking a backwater outpost city.

I'd be interested to hear what the reasoning was for the change.
 
I have the feeling that the amount you take in losses in "distraction units" often outweighs the usefullness of war. So far in BNW when I went for war early (before cannons, or even artillery) I only fell behind in everything else. Maybe catapults should also have an alternative "cover" promotion-path to higher tier promotions like logistics, making them good city attackers but bad against units.
 
It would be stupid that a city can't kill catapult in two hits, city itself is generally weak in attack. What you need is some distraction to save catapults from fire, cities will prefer to attack wounded units over healthy catapults for example. I prefer cities to be a bit stronger, its kinda lame to capture cities without any loses.

No it won't be stupid, catapults are supposed to counter cities, cities killing them before they deal enough damage is plain stupid. Imagine you send 4 horsemen to kill 4 composite bows & all of them got shot down before they even kill 1 bow, how would you feel about that?

I think this needs a fix, siege units should have very high resistance to ranged attacks. Their counters should be infantry & cavalry units, not archers & cities.

And another important point. This makes human cities unsiegable because you can simply 1 shot early siege units while enemy melee units won't be able to deal enough damage. So if catapults/treb/cannons actually resisted city & archer attacks, suddenly high difficulty levels would become much more challenging for the player.
 
No it won't be stupid, catapults are supposed to counter cities, cities killing them before they deal enough damage is plain stupid. Imagine you send 4 horsemen to kill 4 composite bows & all of them got shot down before they even kill 1 bow, how would you feel about that?

I think this needs a fix, siege units should have very high resistance to ranged attacks. Their counters should be infantry & cavalry units, not archers & cities.

And another important point. This makes human cities unsiegable because you can simply 1 shot early siege units while enemy melee units won't be able to deal enough damage. So if catapults/treb/cannons actually resisted city & archer attacks, suddenly high difficulty levels would become much more challenging for the player.

I completely agree with this post. I remember well the dev reasoning behind vanilla, that the switch to 1upt should facilitate that battles are now not only fought at cities but also between them, and you need to take down the defenders to win. Now it seems we are back to old habits with the AI hiding behind his city and the player waiting outside of its range. Or unopposed small-medium forces can not take a city because they get shot down by the city.

Make the City attack marginal (bonus to barbs maybe) but increase its HP. Sieges would become actual sieges and are not over in 3 turns but maybe seven, and force/encourage the forces to meet in the field, where it matters how well you can protect your catapults from flanking horseman for example. It will also value actually having a unit in the city more because it would get more attacks of.
 
OK, I guess that approach makes sense. Maybe it was too strong to just place units in front of catapults and pawn cities while enemy can't get close, and archers and cities are ineffective. I don't think they are able to or that they will want to change this now.
Anyway sending 3-4 siege units at the same time in range works nicely.
 
I believe the way it used to work is that ranged attacks against a ranged unit used their range strength for their defense, and melee attacks against a ranged unit used their regular strength for defense.

Now, the regular(lower) regular strength of ranged units is used for defense against melee and ranged attacks.
 
It would be stupid that a city can't kill catapult in two hits, city itself is generally weak in attack. What you need is some distraction to save catapults from fire, cities will prefer to attack wounded units over healthy catapults for example. I prefer cities to be a bit stronger, its kinda lame to capture cities without any loses.

No. We shouldn't be required to "trick" the AI in order to take a city, that's horrible game design. All siege should get the "cover" promotion by default (maybe even cover II). The point of siege is to be anti-city. If the city can simply kill siege all by itself then siege isn't a counter at all.
 
It is a little ridiculous, if you've defeated their army and can safely bring in your siege units then it should just be a matter of time before you win. If cities did less damage, archers targeted siege units first and mounted units attempted to flank you and attack the siege units directly things would be a lot more interesting.
 
No. We shouldn't be required to "trick" the AI in order to take a city, that's horrible game design. All siege should get the "cover" promotion by default (maybe even cover II). The point of siege is to be anti-city. If the city can simply kill siege all by itself then siege isn't a counter at all.
True. I was brainstorming about this issue and thought what if all siege units have 3 range & a new concept of armour/city rating is introduced. this city rating would reduce all damage taken from melee attacks, only siege units would be able to reduce it. Once it is sufficiently down (a breach) then you can use melee & other ranged units more effectively. It will also give the defender some time to make haste & assemble an army to meet the enemy on field. Thus city sieges would become more dynamic instead of 4 ranged units + 1 horsemen to conquer an empire. I'll post this idea in more detail when I'll get some more time. :)
 
No. We shouldn't be required to "trick" the AI in order to take a city, that's horrible game design. All siege should get the "cover" promotion by default (maybe even cover II). The point of siege is to be anti-city. If the city can simply kill siege all by itself then siege isn't a counter at all.

Especially with the setup penalty. One archer inside the city, and you lose one catapult per turn, and if you had 3 at the beginning, you get only 3 shots at all per 3 turns of "siege". That is, you built 3 units and got 1 shot per unit. A single catapult cannot even touch a city defended by an archer.

Add to it that when you do get the city, it's +5% tech cost penalty outright, while it doesn't produce anything due to unrest. All the while you invested in a truckload of units, and the enemy lost as little as a single settler plus an archer. Oh, and your trade routes can suffer too.

War is heck in BNW.
 
True. I was brainstorming about this issue and thought what if all siege units have 3 range & a new concept of armour/city rating is introduced. this city rating would reduce all damage taken from melee attacks, only siege units would be able to reduce it. Once it is sufficiently down (a breach) then you can use melee & other ranged units more effectively. It will also give the defender some time to make haste & assemble an army to meet the enemy on field. Thus city sieges would become more dynamic instead of 4 ranged units + 1 horsemen to conquer an empire. I'll post this idea in more detail when I'll get some more time. :)

If I understand this idea properly, couldn't we achieve identical effect by allowing siege units to damage not just city health, but their actual defensive strength value? That way no brand new value would need to be introduced and is more 'patch-viable'.

Edit: Or have cities have greater cap to strength loss from hp, like up to 75% or something unlike 33% for units?
 
I agree that abusing an AI trick is not good game design. The siege weaponry should put a clock on how long a city can last, and shouldn't die in one hit to city bombard (or take more than 50% hp in one hit, meaning you can never set up and fire before having to go back to heal, or shoot once & die). I'm fine with cavalry one-shotting them, I'm fine with iron units one-shotting them, I'm fine with a range garrison and city bombard two-shotting them, but a single city bombard shouldn't be killing an entire siege unit - their counter -every turn. If they didn't want highly promoted siege messing with the defensive clock late game while their ideologies come online, a better way to do that is to remove range and logistics and give them similarly awesome, but defensive alternative promotions that don't tamper with the speed of city transfers.
 
That is pretty similar to GnK. That's why you don't go for logistics/range with siege, but take cover instead. Once you've got an armoury down they're good to go. Also the AI still falls for the decoy trick I find. Or you could just be Persia :).
 
That is pretty similar to GnK. That's why you don't go for logistics/range with siege, but take cover instead. Once you've got an armoury down they're good to go. Also the AI still falls for the decoy trick I find. Or you could just be Persia :).

Personally, I disliked the G&K changes to siege. I find that even with a cover promotion from the armory, my trebs and especially cannons still get one shot from full health by city bombard, though admittedly, sometimes they need to have any crossbow inside to deal 100 damage in one turn if it is a small city. It's also a little weird that I need to bait the AI with a weak melee or instead build an armory in every city that I want to have a semi-functional siege unit spawn from. They should be effective if you protect them from any and all defenders trying to wrap around to get at them, and in the meantime be relatively resilient against the city bombard & its garrison, imho. You may need to lower their damage against cities to provide more time for army versus army counterplay, and that, too, is fine by me.
 
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