Can the Drill promotions alone kill an enemy?

[Handel]

What I mean? Just for fun I spent a lot of time leveling up couple of xbowmen to 50 XP, giving them Drill IV and then Garrison III promotions, and then I upgraded them to machine guns. Being immune to collateral damage they became super-duper city defenders and won zillions of battles, quite often w/o taking a single hit. But I never saw them kill an attacker with 1st strikes only, no matter how weak the attacker was. But of course "I never saw them" doesn't mean it never happened

 

[Pangaea]

Machine Gunners with 4-7 first strikes is awesome! - but how do you know when the first strikes end and the real combat begins? Don't think there is any differentiation in the combat log

 

[TiglathPileser]

To answer the question they can if you have enough of them and the difference in strength is big enough to remove all the hitpoints after all the strikes. Its hard to tell but the unit has to remain unscathed at the very least to have taken out its opponent through the first strikes alone (if the opponent gets a hit in then the first strikes must have already happened).

To be honest it's not important. What is important is effect of the first strikes on the expectation value of survivability of the unit.

 

[Handel]

I actually looked mostly at the animations. If they correspond to the actual battle rounds it seemed to me the best the 1st strikes could achieve was to peel off the enemy HP to just one hit left. And yes, I know it is about survivability; I just made those just out of curiosity and for fun and started to wonder why the hell it seems they cannot kill the enemy outright (at least sometimes).

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Animations are not completely indicative of what happens in the combat.

I hate that they spent so much time with animations with a passion actually, and even moreso in civ V since they supposedly animate off-screen there (because it's REALLY important to have smooth animations on things we can't see..........)

 

[gcaliber]

I've never played civ4 or 5 with the animations on, they are so boring.

 

[mtr12]

With huge stacks, animations take forever...I turn them off.