Battleships Collateral Damage ?

[ferenginar]

Battleship
Naval Units 40 6 225 Industrialism
Oil or Uranium - Causes collateral damage
Can bombard city defenses (-20%/turn)

Barrage I +20 Collateral Damage - Barrage II
Accuracy Siege, Armored, Naval


These two extracts from units and promotions would indicate that a battleship with Barrage 1 promotion is a very effective weapon against coastal cities.

However, I have been using a number of battleships with Barrage 1 promotion and have not succeeded in causing any damage. What am i doing wrong? When the ship is next to a city with defensive % then the bombard symbol comes up, is this when the collateral damage take place? I cannot find any other way of attacking the city.

 

[NuWorld]

Collateral damage takes place when you attack a stack of naval units, simillar to barrage promotions of tanks and artillery, all units on particular tile suffer damage. You can't attack city with battleship, can only bombard it to lower city defense to 0

 

[crunch]

Try attacking a stack of naval units, then collateral damage would apply.
Naval units in Civ 4 cannot attack ground units.
They can bombard = reduce cultural defenses

Edit: exactly.

 

[Thalassicus]

Fighter-laden Carriers, on the other hand, can attack units, improvements, city defenses, etc

 

[ferenginar]

Many thanks, that explains everything.

There are no stacks of naval units for me to attack, as my destroyers have already taken control of the seas. I only built the battleships to assit in taking down some rather well defended coastal cities. Never mind, going to have to build more artilliary.

 

[ferenginar]

Fighter-laden Carriers, on the other hand, can attack units, improvements, city defenses, etc

Yes, I have tried this, but boy was I disappointed when I could only carry 3 fighters, when I was used to 8 in civ II. Never played enough Civ 3 to know what the carrier limit was there.

 

[Thalassicus]

It's actually somewhat of a benifit if your stack gets severely attacked. Rather than losing one carrier with 8 fighters, they have to kill 3 carriers with 9 fighters. Carriers don't cost too much, anyways.

One nice thing is that you can still select all your fighters on that tile (for air striking a stack of units) with CTRL + Left Click on a fighter.

Fighters don't do much to city defenses, so bomb those to 0 with surface ships, air strike all the defenders to 50%, and the remaining units are sitting ducks for an ampibious modern armor assault. Move in your transports, reload the armor, airdrop in a mech infantry, and move on to your next target. Airdrop a second mech infantry your next turn and it's usually safe to rebase a huge stack of bombers

Coastal assaults are a lot of fun