Artillery Limitations

[Magnus Maximus]

Seems like the artillery (catapults, cannons, even ships) don't have the flexibility they did in III. Seems as though artillery can only be used to attack a cities defenses. Previously you could bomb anything - other units, roads, improvements, hell even the ground if you wanted too!
Am I missing something? Is there a way to tell your catapult what you want to bombard? Or is it just hit <B> and let it whack at the city defenses?

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[playshogi]

You have to attack a unit with your artillery and it will also cause damage to every unit in the stack. Your artillery might get killed, though.

 

[Dairuka]

First bombard a city cultural/production defenses down to 0%.

Then use a stack of 5 Artillery like a normal unit; by pumping up their city raider/collateral damage promotions. Afterwords you can laugh when you drive a stack of 20 riflemen with full strength and +150% in defensive bonuses, into a stack of 15-18 riflemen with half strength and only their promotion defensive bonuses. {usually 20-50%}

This makes easy pickings for your Cavalry, Grenadier's, and Riflemen. As a Rifleman defending at full strength with 150% bonuses is about 32 strength. Where as a Rifleman defending at half strength with 50% bonuses is about 11.5 strength.

 

[Rustypipe]

I for one welcome the change in Civ4 as it makes bombarding weapons such as the catapult, canon, and altilery more versistile but not over powered. I hated the fact in Civ 3 that they where just strickly bombarding tools and otherwise useless. I love how they have brough the catapult back into the light and you can do collatural damage with them and acutally kill things / take over cities agian. I have taken down cities at devistating speeds with units with collatural damage such as the catapult and tanks later on. Stacks of units drop like flies. Also it makes weeker less technical units that you would find almost absolete in your time usefull agian. You kill 2-3 units with collatural damage and let your catapult or altilerty heal while your old units now beat on the packs of weekened defenders Its a welcome change for me, i'd give attacking cities another try. Bombard them till the defence is 0 then let the collatural damage units take a few rounds in, you'll be amazed how fast things drop afterwards

 

[Magnus Maximus]

yeah, yeah! Thanks! That stacking of the units is the ticket!!!

 

[MosquitoE]

I haven't found artillery units (catapults and cannons so far) very useful. In Civ 3 you just need a good sized stack of them to knock down enemies into the red.
In Civ 4 I've found they can only take off 1 or 2 points from defenders in collateral damage before they are destroyed. So you send in ten cannons and the defenders are cut in half, but you lose your ten cannons.
Not very useful in my opinion

 

[MosquitoE]

Then use a stack of 5 Artillery like a normal unit; by pumping up their city raider/collateral damage promotions. Afterwords you can laugh when you drive a stack of 20 riflemen with full strength and +150% in defensive bonuses, into a stack of 15-18 riflemen with half strength and only their promotion defensive bonuses. {usually 20-50%}

Your 150% defensive bonus is worthless on the attack. So if your units are full strength but the defender is half strength plus 20-50% bonus it is still a hard fight.

 

[Nilrim]

I haven't found artillery units (catapults and cannons so far) very useful. In Civ 3 you just need a good sized stack of them to knock down enemies into the red.
In Civ 4 I've found they can only take off 1 or 2 points from defenders in collateral damage before they are destroyed. So you send in ten cannons and the defenders are cut in half, but you lose your ten cannons.
Not very useful in my opinion

Well even if you lose them all which normally I don't as they have the ability to 'retreat' out of a fight you weaken all the units enough that your normal ground attack units have a much easier time. Also in modern era used in conjunction with bombers it is the only way to take a well defended city without huge loses.

My big gripe is you can't bombard defenders in the open field, or attack sea units at all, or at least I haven’t been able to figure out how to. Defense of coastal areas against navel attacks using catapults/cannon/artillery has always been a real life use and should be in the game. If he wants to risk his surface fleet in close then there has to be a risk to them, as it stands now the only way to defend against sea bombardment is with air or other sea units.

 

[mrsticks1982]

what is the greatest distance from a city that you can use the artillery units?

 

[Lord Shadow]

You can only bombard cities from an adjacent square.

And by the way, do I need to enable the Stack Combat (or something like that) option to carry out the tactics you suggested? That's a mixed blessing, since the AI can take advantage of it, quite a lot of advantage...

 

[APushkin]

I've noticed that stack-attacking everytime saves your art/cat - it's also discussed here

 

[Jazz_Newton]

Your 150% defensive bonus is worthless on the attack. So if your units are full strength but the defender is half strength plus 20-50% bonus it is still a hard fight.

The post that you're responding to is very badly written (not yours, the original). Replace the word "drive" with "turn", and you'll see what the poster actually meant.