Attacking Cities

[zeeter]

Maybe I'm just stuck in a Civ1-3 frame of mind, but I'm having great difficulty capturing cities in Civ4.

Typically, I find that in the early game the AI will defend a city with two archers and one spearman. If I want to take that city I generally need to bring six or seven swordsmen (praelatorians, actually) to the attack. What happens is that I typically will lose the first three attacks. I'll lose one or two of the second attacks, and usually by the sixth or seventh attacker the city will finally fall.

Usually I only attack with units that have at least one point in City Attack, and usually two points as I build them in Theocracy.

Do you people generally try to send catapults and such along the way?

Another thing I've tried is looking at what's in the city. If they have an archer or two, I may dedicate a few points in attacking archers when upgrading. When I try to attack with that unit what will happen is that he'll always go up against the one melee unit that happens to be there. Very frustrating.

What I've found myself doing to get best results is to give a unit two stars at creation and attacking with that unit first. I'm going to lose him anyway, but maybe I can inflict as much damage as possible to give the city attackers a better chance. Even my units that have been promoted to the three city attack points get wiped out if they attack first.

 

[skeller]

Catapults, catapults, catapults. You need to bombard city defenses if the city has any.

Then, and this is the important part, once you have a force amassed outside the city (though not all on the same tile) you send a cat or two to attack the city on a suicide run. They will hopefully cause collateral damage and hurt all the units inside the city, weakening them for your ground assault. Sometimes against really well-defended cities when I have a lot of troops but am at a technological disadvantage, I'll just suicide five catapults in there (they're cheap to build!) and then clean up with my city raiders.

Then you move in. Remember not to build *just* praetorians, though obviously you have to take advantage of your unique unit. Combined arms are key -- you'll want some spears for mounted units and some axemen/crossbowmen for melee units.

City defenders have a lot of advantages in this game, but the big disadvantage they have to be in the same tile to defend a city and thus are very weak against collateral damage. Once you get used to sacrificing some siege weapons (long war campaigns require you keep your supply replenished) it becomes much easier.

I also like to mix up the unit promotions I give my troops, like you mentioned. Some of them I give city raider, some points versus archers, some points versus melee units (for swordsmen it can be very handy to have both upgrades against archers and melee, so you can stand well against any defending axemen).

Here's another tip: when you have a unit selected, hold alt and put the pointer over the city you want to attack. In the bottom left, the game will show your modified strength vs. the defender's modified strength. Often if I cycle through a couple of different units with different promotions, I will find one who is particularly well suited to the job.

 

[strider3700]

I starved the cities out. Apparently I need to sacrifice my artillery/cannon/catapult to weaken up the stack. I'm not exactly sure how to get more experience for those units to improve them though since they die in fights.

 

[drsafety]

Yes, very difficult to capture cities, even if you have superior units.

 

[sturmtrupp]

I actually like how its harder to take cities. However, when playing the Romans I normally would take a city with around 5-6 praetorians (sp?). I actually did not used catapults in taking this particular civ, in this war. However, I had pretty good success. Especially since I had about 4-5 of the veterans from the first city ramp up even more on city capturing. By then end I was a lean mean roman city capturing machine.

 

[zeeter]

Usually I'm fighting before construction - so no catapults yet. Plus, when I do eventually get catapults I don't see that they cause a lot of damage.

I agree that it should be more difficult to capture a city. It's historically accurate. Just trying to get used to it. Plus I feel bad for my poor Camel Archers who are sacrificing themselves as we speak in the name of Buddha! At least they were before my game crept to a near halt due to the memory leak. Right now they're standing by, waiting for new orders.

 

[Jaraxle]

You want the catapults for two reasons as mentioned before. Even during that time period its not uncommon for a city to have a +45% to defence and the unit have a +25% for being fortified. A spearman at defence 4 with no upgrades gets boosted to a defence of 6.8. If you use your catapults to take out the city defence it drops to a 5.

The second reason is of course collatoral damage and thats where the suicides come in. Lets say you have 4 catapults and the city has 4 spearmen with the new adjusted strength of 5 (because you bombarded the city). Your first catapult attacks and lets say it dies and only does a point of damage to the first spearman plus half a point of collatoral to all the other units in the city. You do this 4 times and your lowered the defenders from 4 spearman at strengh 5, to 4 defenders with strength 3.

I just picked arbitrary numbers for this example but hopefully you get the idea.

 

[narmox]

Not to mention the archers will mow down the swordsmen... But they're little bunnies when faced with the chariots - assuming there's no spearman to kill the chariots... So you need catapult to weaken them all