Catapults.. City Raider or Barrage?

Gorey

Gorey

Prince
Joined
Oct 11, 2008
Messages
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Location
New Orleans, LA.
Up until now i've always gone with half of them barrage I & II and half of them bragge I & accuracy.

but this last game i went City Raider I & II on almost all of them. seemed like more of them survived.

am i just finally figuring out the obvious?
 
am i just finally figuring out the obvious?
Click to expand...
That's correct.
It's basically a matter of what you want: survival or barrage effect. CR promos are not necessarily the right choice.

Of course, for DEFENSIVE purposes one would want a combination of First Strike or Barrage.
 
Generally you want CR vs cities. Barrage might win when you have low odds against a LOT of troops ----> not a situation you want to be in. If the AI has that many troops, it's probably a SoD, and most of the time you'll do better killing that in the field or in your territory as possible.
 
CR does more damage to the unit that it's fighting, but barrage does more collateral damage to the one that it doesn't fight.
 
If there are longbowmen on hills, I use the drill promo. Anything else, and you risk wasting a catapult without producing any damage to the main defender.
 
I usually use Barrage on the first few catapults that I know will die anyways. And City Raider on the ones I want to survive.
 
I use barrage on siege units that I keep in my cities to fight off invasions and then CR on siege that I am taking to war. When I get new units and don't want to promote my siege, I take my barrage units to combat cities and throw them in first to soften up the forces. This keeps my stronger CR promoted siege units alive and I widdle down the city defences. Then lay in with my troops to rack up exp.
 
In general, CR is possibly the best across the board when you're attacking a city. However, taking all CR is a huge risk because you will be less able to defend against counterattacks to your stack. I like to take a few with "barrage" in case the enemy has a stack that's not in one of their cities. Of course, the nice thing about it is that you can promote them on the fly.
 
City raider when the odds are half-decent. I'm risk-averse, and returns on extra percentage points get higher and higher as the probability of successful retreat approaches one.

To take the two extreme cases (just to illustrate):
  • If CR increased your odds of surviving from 1 percent to 2 percent, it's trivial. Better to cram in as much collateral damage as possible when you're throwing a unit away.
  • When CR increases your odds of surviving from 98 percent to 99 percent, it literally halves the chance of losing what is probably a very valuable unit.
EDIT: I realize that this is pretty much just statistical sorcery, but when you factor in the costs of building and training up trebuchets and getting them to the front line et al., anything you can do to avoid disaster is a must. Other stock traders might be able to back me up on this. /EDIT

Basically, collateral is the realm of cats that you wish to throw away on the field against the SoD. Like TMiT pointed out, it's sort of bad to force an encounter with the big army while it's cooped up in a city, but if I absolutely must do it, then that's when I'd consider collateral on trebs.
 
I remember reading about a bug with Barrage promotion not working properly a long time ago. If such a bug still exists, or even existed in the first place, I don't know, but since 90-95% of the time I'm going to want City Raider anyways, I just promote them all to City Raider and ignore Barrage.
 
May I ask whay a combat promotion is removed for siege in 3.19? Siege equipement was used in the field, not only for city attacks, why would I need to promote my siege only to suit city raids, and there is no real help for the field fight (such as using my catapults to demolish a sieging stack in front of my city).
 
Since that game, i've not recieved as much luck with the City Raider on cats.

I guess i just dont understand why giving a city raider promotion to the cat when its most likely going to die anyway is better than giving it barrage where it will do more damage.
 
Gorey said:
Since that game, i've not recieved as much luck with the City Raider on cats.

I guess i just dont understand why giving a city raider promotion to the cat when its most likely going to die anyway is better than giving it barrage where it will do more damage.
Click to expand...

Gorey,

If all your cats are dying, then you're doing something wrong. Typically I will lose less than half of my cats or trebs any time I assault a city with them. If I attack with 8 Cats, maybe I'll lose 3 of them because by the time the 4th one is attacking, everything is softened up and City Raider has changed the odds of winning from ~70% to >80%.
 
not all of them are dying, but a good portion of them.

if i have 8.. i expect to lose 5.. at which point i stop using them and go in with the troops.

on average that is.
 
Gorey said:
not all of them are dying, but a good portion of them.

if i have 8.. i expect to lose 5.. at which point i stop using them and go in with the troops.

on average that is.
Click to expand...

With City Raider you will lose less Catapults. And after the first few Catapults, all of your fights will be 90%+ no matter what. Promoting to CR gives the 1 or 2 catapults which fight at 40-70% odds a big boost (sometimes a 10-20% higher chance of surviving.)

The fewer Cats you need to build, the less strain on your civilization overall. Also it means less time waiting for resupplies to move up front, finishing wars much faster.
 
Kesshi said:
I remember reading about a bug with Barrage promotion not working properly a long time ago.
Click to expand...

There was a bug pre 3.13, or something, but it's been fixed. That's why Tanks lost their ability to do collateral damage, the new calculations for Barrage broke it for them.
 
Patak said:
...and there is no real help for the field fight (such as using my catapults to demolish a sieging stack in front of my city).
Click to expand...

That's what Barrage is for. Combat was kind of a useless promotion for siege units, you were always much better off using something else. It's a no great loss that it's gone really, except maybe in the case of Machine Guns.
 
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