Artillery Effectiveness?

Anybody figure out how to use artillery to bombard tiles? I see you can bombard cities, and they defend when your stack is attacked, but can they bombard selected tiles? Same question goes for all siege weapons and ships.

 

Artillery have been changed so that using them to participate in an actual field battle is very risky for them. You practically end up sacrificing them to get their use. But, the way you do it is to attack with them like any other unit. Whenever they make an attack on the enemy, they are actually doing damage to everyone; not just the unit they are fighting.

=$= Big J Money =$=

 

No, you can only bombard cities, and only when that city is above 0% defense. Which is ok, all bombarding does is reduce a cities defense anyways (maybe forts too, but never actually been in a position where I needed to kill one).

If you want to destroy an improvement on a tile, you can just ransack it while standing on it with a military unit (believe all military units have this option aside bombers and fighters).

If your looking to deal collateral damage to a stack, you need to attack the tile with the artillary. You may lose the artillary doing this, but you deal a decent amount of damage to many/all units on the tile.

 

Artillery is extremely effective if you are able to make it attack.

A stack should have between 1/3 cavalry/knight 1/3 melee/gunpowder unit and a 1/3 artillery so that means a stack of 12 is pretty potent

 

Artillery can be a potent weapon as long as you prepare yourself right.

By using barracks and the implementing the correct civics you can get as much as 8 experience points (two upgrades with a third close on the way) right out of the box. Give your Artillery unit one strength upgrade and than one city attack and you got yourself a unit that stands a chance of actually surviving the attack.

Also, after you attack with one or two artillery usually the defenders are softened up enough where following artillery will not die in the attack

Just some observations

 

Putting Barrage on tanks is the best of both worlds. You have killing power and barrage damages multiple units. Once you get to the bottom of the enemy stack they're at 1/4 strength and you can actually use the blitz to attack more than once. Found that out by accident last night... didn't mean to pick a barrage promotion the first time.

 

And if you get the Pentagon on top of the civics and the barracks you can produce units with 10xp

 

And build your units in a city with westpoint & heroic epic and you get 14xp, and build twice as fast .

 

When your stack of 12 gets attacked by a few artillery the collateral damage will weaken you severely. I don't recommend huge stacks of units if it is avoidable.

 

Well artillery only collaterals a few units, unless you upgrade that. And if you upgrade collateral damage, you didn't upgrade power, and it dies that much faster. But yes, don't send a huge stack.

Send many huge stacks.