Originally posted by tianx
Does anyone have any comments on how efficient the bombardments are for different units? I was using 10 cannons against the capitial city of Zulu and it was just not working out well. The cannons are all located on hill and of the 10 turns I pounded the city with fire but only scored about 8 shots. That's less than 10% efficiency. Maybe artillery will be better? This is also the same with sea bombardment using frigate. Is there anyway to increase the efficiency of bombardment(research etc)?
Bombament is similar to a normal attack -- the bombarment value is like the "A" attack value of a normal unit and it is applied to the "D" value of the defender. A cannon has a bombardment value of "8" and a rate of fire "ROF" of 1 -- think of ROF as the number of "shots" a bombarding unit gets. With a ROF of 1, only one shot is fired, so at most a cannon will take one hit point from a defender (with a ROF of 2, you will experience some bombardments that take 2 HPs from a defender).
When bombarding a city, a bombardment unit actually has three potential targets: defending units, city population, and city improvements. The game will randomly determine the class of target (according to a weighting system that slightly favors units), and then "roll the dice" to determine whether the bombardment succeeds -- the "roll the dice" is comparing the bombardment value against the defensive value and using the random number generator to determine hit or miss. City improvements and population have a defense of 16. Let's assume your opponent's defender is a rifleman. Fortified in a city (size 7 - 12 population city) located on grasslands, the rifleman has a defense of 11.1 -- a base defense of 6 with defensive bonuses of 85% (50% for city, 25% for fortification, and 10% for grassland).
If your bombardment is randomly selected to attack the rifleman, it would have a 42% chance of taking a hit point (and a 58% chance of missing!). If bombardment targets a city improvement or population, it would have a 33% chance of destroying an improvement or reducing the population. One quirk in the targeting formula is that the bombardment unit might "target" city improvements or city population -- even if no such targets are available! Certain improvements (wonders, aqueducts, palace, hospitals, and "free" improvements from a wonder like free baracks from Sun Tzu's) will never be destroyed by bombardment. Similarly, the last population point will never be hit. If a city is reduced to size 1 and all eligible improvements have been destroyed, your bombardments will suffer a lot of misses, simply because the targeting routine calls for improvement bomabrdment but there is no improvement to vbe destroyed.
Many players find artillery to be the first truly effective bombardment unit -- with a 12 bombardment vaue and a ROF of 2 artillery can do some real damage. Others get plenty of good use from cannons and even catapults.
Also, does anyone have problem with automated bombardment? I cannot seem to get them to aumatically bomb the town so I have to click on the units each round. A PAIN in the ASS.
. Strangly, sea auto bombardment works out fine.
I haven't much experience with auto-bombard bt many players report troubles only to discover that in their preferences panel (Ctrl-P) they have selected "Cancel orders for enemy combat unit" which means any continuing orders (GoTo or auto-bombard, for example) are interrupted when the applicable unit comes within one tile of an enemy. If you have this preference checked, it seems to effectively disable land unit auto-bombard since, before artillery, all land bombardment units must be next to an enemy unit in order to attack.
P.S. I assume the reason you want to downsize the town is that any town with 6 or lower pop have less defense?
Many people employ bombardment for this very reason. A metropolis (size 13+) offers a 100% defense bonus to units; a city (size 7-12) offers a 50% defense bonus; a town (size 1-6) offers no defense bonus. Some people also like to reduce the population in order to reduce the chance of the city flipping back to the enemy after it has been taken by ground forces.
