Bombardment and Siege Weps

[averagejoe]

If you're not willing to look at the hammer tradeoffs yourself, or just a lot of game summaries I can't help you.

Not saying the strategy is wrong or doesnt work but every situation is different.
If i need to take the city right way then yes i would use the suicide method. But if my siege weapon has been promoted im not gonna risk it for a city that i can take with less expensive units.
If a city is close by that can produce another siege weapon i would do it. But if i try a suicide siege and it fails, i now have to wait for the nearest city to build another which may be way across my land unless another city can afford to change its production.

Then i have to wait for the siege weapon into position. In the mean time i could pillage roads and let my cavalry pick off some of the enemy reinforcements and weaken other cities.
Even though i may be attacking one city its not my only goal when fighting another nation. just depends on how bad or how close i am to taking that city.

Like i said i dont think the strategy is wrong but i dont think its all in black and white either. It wouldnt be much fun just to build a lot of siege weapons to use as suicide weapons.
If its a flaw in the AI doesnt mean i need to take advantage of it. It doesnt seem historically realistic to me that a a nation would send a siege weapon on a suicide mission if they dont have too. I dont play the game to win at all costs. Sure i want to win but i would rather enjoy playing the game. If it was online it would be different but as for playing solo im not hellbent on taking every city at all costs.

 

[r_rolo1]

Rarely siege units aren't the cheapest units of your army. Except probably axe/catapult, mace/cannon or rifle or gren/artilery armies ( where you deliberately gunned for advanced siege ), in the more normal game conditions ( with siege units of the same era than the the other land units ) , siege is definitely the more expandable type of unit in terms of invested .And OFC siege can withdrawn

 

[averagejoe]

Well again im not saying its not effective strategy and certainly would be wise to use against a human opponent or if your main goal is conquest. But thats not my main goal.
If all i cared about was waging war then i would play a war game.

To me its more about enjoying the game and while it may not be cheating it does seem like a flaw in the game. What i mean is for example how many times would a real army have sent their cannons into a city? Building 4 catapults just to sacrifice them doesnt seem fun or much in strategy to me. Now if the AI does the same thing it might be different. If you could sacrifice 4 bombers over a carrier would you do it? It wouldnt seem realistic to me.
Theres only so much a game can do and and taking advantage of something that seems to be a flaw in the AI's logic would lose its appeal of challenge to me.

 

[Sincro]

Personally, due to how much siege was nerfed from Vanilla to BTS, I say they should just go whole hog:
Siege units can only defend.
Let em have a partial defensive bonus.
They can use the bombard function against cities or units, and that function will both lower city defenses and cause collateral damage to all units in the tile simultaneously. The amount of damage they do will be relative to the ratio of their current hp/max hp.

From an historical perspective, it does make a fair amount of sense. Siege weapons were *rarely* used to take territory or positions. They were parked a fair amount of distance from their target, and literally rained stone/steel on that target until the attacking army was ready to take it. That rain of stone/steel did in fact both reduce enemy fortifications *and* cause a certain amount of collateral damage to enemy troops stationed within those fortifications. As warfare got more and more technological, the seige units in question could often not even be *seen* by the defenders, much less attacked. In game terms, Cats would have a range of 1 to bombard, Trebs and cannons range 2, and Artillery/mobile artillery range 3. What are your options to deal with ranged siege units? You have 4. 1) Use your own against them. 2) Stage a break-out by your army to deal with the problem. 3) Use aircraft. 4) Suffer and die.

And while you're at it modifying land siege units, the ship-board siege function ought to be considered, too. Especially modern ships. Take the real-life 'Iowa' class battleships from the US Navy. They could and did quite literally park a dozen *miles* away from a land target and shoot at it, with a fair amount of accuracy. They were devastating to coastal defenses, unit morale (since you had no chance to shoot back) and yes, they damaged/killed troops at the same time.

Then there's air power versus ships. As unstoppable as WWI-WWII era ships were to land forces, by the time WWII ended, it was pretty much demonstrated fact that air power brought about the end of big battleship superiority. Consider the fate of IJN Yamato, most powerful warship ever put afloat, in terms of personal power. (I won't even try to claim that the force multiplicative powers of aircraft carriers do not surpass such a ship, because they clearly did and do.) Sunk by nothing more then carrier-based fighters and dive bombers. I feel that Civ 4 gets it wrong when they penalize airplanes versus ships. I don't think airplanes merit a bonus versus ships, but they certainly do not deserve to have a penalty.

-Sinc