Pressing B while selecting a group of cannons and soldiers

[vetiarvind]

The key "B" maps by default to "bombard" on cannons and "build city" on settlers, so if you select an army group of soldiers\dragoons and cannons and press B near an enemy settlement your soldiers prefer to build a new town instead of the artillery bombard.

Possible fixes - 1)prompt a dialog whether to build town. 2)Change default order of processing keyboard shortcut "B" to artillery > soldier. 3)Change keyboard shortcut of one of these.

 

[Commander Bello]

Although your observation may be correct, it is almost never a good idea to have a group of cannons bombard city walls.
Reason: typically, the cannons with the (highest) promotions start the bombardment, but are also the ones which you want to use for attacking the city.

 

[Willi_Tell]

I second the Commander's statement - bombardment might be better done manually

Another attempt to avoid such "silly settlements": You could do a small XML edit in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml and make it so, that a settlement cannot be founded next to another. In Vanilla - as far as I remember - "city range" is only 1 (allowing close settlements)
If you change the value of the tag MIN_CITY_RANGE to 2, your problem is gone...

 

[vetiarvind]

Although your observation may be correct, it is almost never a good idea to have a group of cannons bombard city walls.
Reason: typically, the cannons with the (highest) promotions start the bombardment, but are also the ones which you want to use for attacking the city.

I usually like to bombard until the defense bonus goes down to a low threshold (preferably 0) before attacking so that's not an issue. It's unlikely I always have a doomstack where I bombard and attack in the same turn.

 

[vetiarvind]

I second the Commander's statement - bombardment might be better done manually

Another attempt to avoid such "silly settlements": You could do a small XML edit in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml and make it so, that a settlement cannot be founded next to another. In Vanilla - as far as I remember - "city range" is only 1 (allowing close settlements)
If you change the value of the tag MIN_CITY_RANGE to 2, your problem is gone...

Sounds good to me Although I was playing a TAC game while this happened near an Incan city. Maybe Native settlements aren't counted as "cities".