Siege Weapons - somethings wrong

Is it just me or is there is something wrong with the way siege weapons work.

I very much like the idea that the siege weapons can bombard the city defence but...

How the hell does a cannon or catapult attack alone and do collateral damage. A siege weapon is a support weapon that does not attack another unit alone an get lost in the attack (except if hit by other siege weapon). This is to weird for me an spoils some of the fun.

Shouldn´t it just be like the bombers that can chose to bombard units or 'improvemnets'?

Yeah its a problem because its not how siege weapons works in real life.
Maybe patch in future will fix this

I doubt that Firaxis will change this since they like how it works.

The reason siege units don't work like they did in Civ 3 is because Civ 3 combat became too ridiculous.

4 swordsmen with 12 catapults could defeat 4 riflemen, without even taking damage.

Civ 3 was much worse when it came to realism. And strategy.

I disagree with the realism. If you have 14 catapults (or 14 groups of catapults lets say 10 each so 140 total) and pound the tar out of a group of 4 rifelmen (lets say 100 each so 400) it makes sence that a group of 400 maniacs with swords could sweep up what remains of a battered and demorlized rifle unit. What evens the odds is that if the riflemen CHARGE and go out to attack the catapults... those swordsmen wont be able to defend the siege units forever and the catapluts are threfore venurable and easily destroyed (or captured- I REALLY LIKED that part of CIV III).

It makes no logical sence that you send in a siege unit without support to get demolished. I REALLY HATE THIS ABOUT CIV4. What would be better is if the bombard option came back and the siege units cost more. Siege units are powerfull... BECAUSE THEY ARE SUPPPOSED TO BE... right now they just bite!

Here is hoping aginst hope that it DOES get fixed in the patch(or at least an easy to load mod)

And that is my two cents Fraxis

I also liked the siege weapons of civ 3, but they were overpowered. You just needed some catapult on a mountain, some defense with it, and just bombard the defending units. When all the defending units were almost dead, just one or two guys could beat them.
So I think if they do apply the old bombard system, then there should be a limit for building siege weapons, but this wouldn't be realistic. So the canon would be once again overpowered.

I couldn't agree more with ScooterB.

A change is needed. The present way spoils a great deal of the realism and hence the fun for me.

JadeDragon87 said:

I also liked the siege weapons of civ 3, but they were overpowered. You just needed some catapult on a mountain, some defense with it, and just bombard the defending units. When all the defending units were almost dead, just one or two guys could beat them.
So I think if they do apply the old bombard system, then there should be a limit for building siege weapons, but this wouldn't be realistic. So the canon would be once again overpowered.

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This would not be a problem if the AI built Barracks in all of it's cities. Since a Barracks heals all units in 1 turn (does it still do that in Civ IV? ), after your Catapult did it's bombard, the next turn, the enemy is back to full strength again. The only way for this to work then would be to have massed catapults, and as mentioned above, I would expect a lot of Cats to win over one or two units defending a city. Also, it would help if civs actually tried to defend land outside of cities, instead of just sitting there in the city and letting the invaders take the high ground next door.

Also, think about the classic bombardment of a fort, like durning the American Civil War. It was the almost sole purpose of Cannon (artillery) to pound the hell out of the fort and weaken it's defenders before sending in the troops. I would like to see a system brought back where siege weapons cannot "attack", but rather bombard, as in Civ III. I would like to see this coupled with the current bombard system of hitting a city's defence bonus, but also doing damage to the units residing in the city. And allow this to be done on any unit, not only in a city. The defence bonus damage would only apply when attacking a city or a fort.

Also, I think the idea of non-leathel bombardment is good, but only in certain situations. Something like artillery or catapults attacking a ground unit should never be able to kill the unit all by themselves. They should require another ground unit of some type to complete the job. However, if they are bombarding a ship, then leathel bombardment should be there.

One thing that might be nice to counter the problem in the quote. What if a city's defence bonus applied to all adjacent tiles, instead of just the city itself. Think about it. At least since the industrial age (Napoleonic warfare) most battles at a city are actually fought on the ground surrounding the city, and rarely within the actual city. Applying the defence bonus to the adjacent tiles would provide more incentive for the defender to try to hold the high ground that may be around the city.

JMHO

n003lb said:

What if a city's defence bonus applied to all adjacent tiles, instead of just the city itself. Think about it. At least since the industrial age (Napoleonic warfare) most battles at a city are actually fought on the ground surrounding the city, and rarely within the actual city. Applying the defence bonus to the adjacent tiles would provide more incentive for the defender to try to hold the high ground that may be around the city.

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Not a bad idea although I would like to comment that a lot of battles in modern times have been fought in cities, Berlin, Stalingrad and Baghdad to name a few (though the entire Iraq war wasn't much of a fight anyway)

Back to siege weapons, yes I really liked the CivIII variant though CivIV has some gameplay balancing advantages. My suggestion would be to give them bombard ability Civ III style (with a bit of collateral damage CivIV style) along with the bombard city ability of CivIV but countering it with something limiting the number of artillery used. For instance if the stack contains more siege units than other units then they cannot be properly protected while the stack is defending and they might be destroyed in the fighting as collateral damage, alternatively allowing fast moving units like cavalry the chance to do raids against artillery units to attack them directly while hidden behind other units, though dangerous such an attack could destroy the siege-unit directly without having to destroy the defending stack.
Think something like the charge of the light brigade during the Krimean War.

Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Lord Tennyson

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Has anyone realized that there is no defensive benefit from having a siege weapon in a city? Your only choice to damage units is to kill it off by attacking. All the attacker has to then is wait for his units to heal and he can bombard your city defences to zero while he waits.

Siege weapons in cities should modify the defensive values of a unit, an artillery in a city should give a 50% defense bonus to an infantry, or 2 first strikes (reasoning with artillery support, advancing units have to wait till they are very close to do any damage). And it should have the option of bombarding the forces sieging the city without sacrificing itself.

I agree that the siege weapons in Civ4 have taken a step backwards........the first time i used a catapult to bombard an enemy city that was defended by a single unit of warriors, the defenders ran out and destroyed my catapults!!! I accepted this due to the fact that a catapult has a short range but the spearmen that were placed with the catapult should have been defending it!! I suppose they were busy at the time...........but when it comes to artillery which is long range it should have the option to bombard in the same manner as civ3. This game has just gone backwards in so many respects............If the combat of civ3 was mixed with the political and diplomacy of civ4 this game could have been awesome......

I really dont care if the stupid AI can use them half decent. I liked civ3s units a tad better however the AI couldnt use them. That makes combat a clinic in abusing the AI. I much prefer simplified units if the AI uses them effectively.

So this could go either way but more important then the actual decision is what can they get the AI to handle.

Actually what would probably be good is if siege weapons could
1. Bombard as is
2. be 'attached' to a unit and attack/defend with that unit, allowing that unit to do collateral damage (based on the siege engines strength rather than its own) (of course then Collateral damage should work both for offense and defense)

I don't like the way they made catapults either, but it is too late now. They would have to rebalance and retest all the other units to change it. Hopefully they will fix it in Civ 5.

The solution for this would be new mission type in Civ4MissionInfos.xml but the problem is that you have to describe new mission in a mystic file "CvEnum.h" what i could not locate even when searching inside the files.

I discovered this problem when i wanted to creat new unit B2 (bomber with nuke)

Another complaint about siege weapons is that they are the most cheap unit you can build. Historically, siege weapons are the most expensive and time consuming units to manufacture and people didn't suicide them on barrage missions. I alway resent the idea of suicide tactics, yet that is what siege weapons are meant to do in Civ IV, after bombarding the city ofcourse.

Saad said:

Another complaint about siege weapons is that they are the most cheap unit you can build. Historically, siege weapons are the most expensive and time consuming units to manufacture and people didn't suicide them on barrage missions. I alway resent the idea of suicide tactics, yet that is what siege weapons are meant to do in Civ IV, after bombarding the city ofcourse.

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They're not suicide units! After bombarding the Enemy AI city move them on to the next City and level it before your shock attack troops arrive to mop up the last of the resistance.

I couldn't agree more about the stupidity of Civ4 artillery. It's unrealistic and unfun! I'm looking for a way to mod Civ3 style artillery back in, but I'm afraid it can't be done without extensive Python scripting and/or SDK.

Anyway, artillery isn't called the Queen of the Battlefield for nothing. With a range of over 40 km there's no way a group of infantry could fight back to modern artillery. Catapults and other ancient short range artillery devices are another thing, and the cIV system is slightly more justifiable for them, but it still isn't right that artillery attacks alone.

If the combat of civ3 was mixed with the political and diplomacy of civ4 this game could have been awesome...... This is an excellent point Aetheland Unreal. The diplomacy and political content is much more realistic and involving, but the combat has gone backward in a lot ( not all) area's. I like the one strength ranking, but bombardment really sux. And don,t take even talk to me about Naval bombardment, my favorite part of the game (late game naval domination and warfare) all but gone.

I always thought there should be more to attacking a city with walls than ther was in civ3. I mean, since when did cavalry ever run over a 25ft high wall and attack the archers inside? The 50% defense bonus never seemed to do the trick. I never liked how even with artilery, nothing seemed to happen to the walls. Faraxis touched on that in civ4 with the city defenses being weakened by bombardment, but we're still left with the idea of cavalry and horse-archers stumbling over rubble heaps and chunks of stone to get at the defenders. Even riflemen and infantry would need a little bit of prep work before storming the city (unless of course they wanna go medieval and climb ladders). The Romans took months to breach the walls of Jerusalem before entering the city, and all the people were dead by that time.