Bombardment not always available

[Armchair Shark]

How is it that sometimes your catapults are not allowed to bombard cities, and sometimes you can. I moved a whole bunch of catapults into the Roman nation, and layed siege to the first city (but the bombard button is greyed out), the next city I could bombard the third I could not. Is it something to do with hills ??????

 

[Vikings Diehard]

If the city has no defense % left or none to begin with it can't be bombarded to reduce the intrinsic defense of the city.

 

[Hells_Hammers]

You can only bombard cities that have cultural or physical defensive bonuses, and not all do; otherwise, your catapults will simply attack whatever military units exist in the city (which, if the city has something like an axeman defending, is a bad idea).

A city's defensive bonus should be listed directly underneath it's name on the world map: you should see something like "+40%" or +"60%". If you see no percentage, than it has no defensive bonus and cannot be bombarded.

 

[Armchair Shark]

Okay that makes sense, I was beginning to think one of the mods I had installed might have broken it.

 

[AngryPants]

How is it that sometimes your catapults are not allowed to bombard cities, and sometimes you can. I moved a whole bunch of catapults into the Roman nation, and layed siege to the first city (but the bombard button is greyed out), the next city I could bombard the third I could not. Is it something to do with hills ??????

Once the cultural defense bonus is down to 0%, the bombard option is gone. Once that happens, its time to use suicide catapults.

 

[Qpdaj]

...otherwise, your catapults will simply attack whatever military units exist in the city (which, if the city has something like an axeman defending, is a bad idea)...

Actually, attacking with catapults is an excellent idea, even against much supperior deffenders, because of their collateral damage (not only do they have a chance to damage the one unit that's actually defending, but they also do a smaller percentage of damage to up to 5 or 6 other defenders in the stack). Sacrifice a few cats (who knows, they might even win, or sometimes just withdraw) to reduce all the defenders to around 50%, then mop up with your better attackers.

 

[Danghis Khan]

A city's defensive bonus should be listed directly underneath it's name on the world map: you should see something like "+40%" or +"60%". If you see no percentage, than it has no defensive bonus and cannot be bombarded.

I like to see axemen defending if I'm about to go in with catapults. They don't have the city defence bonuses of archers, which is just really annoying when you have a unit that's +50% or more for the unit ability, +25% for fortified, +25% for terrain (hill) and oh yeah, a first strike for good measure.