catapults and courthouses?

Courthouses reduce corruption.

Catapults do nothing unless you Edit up their bombard strength several points. Plus when you have them they can be upgraded to cannon. They are a luxury item, usually.
 
I've seen a ton of information here on the utility of catapults, unmodded. I won't be able to give you specific threads, unfortunately, but they are around, maybe with a clever search.

As for courthouses, Bamspeedy recently did a great study on the effect of courthouses & police stations. The results were posted here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18500

Edit: More specific to your question, "do they (catapults) do anything?"

Yes. For me, they add another level of strategic planning & organization to deploy during a war. Using a combined force makes the game more fun to me rather than just the best offensive unit.
 
Catapult can be very usefull, i was in war against zulu, they got iron and horse while i didnt, so i use a combination of great archer and catapult too destroy there swordman army and then walk up to there city with 10 catapult and great archer, it work, i took horse ressourse and iron and final blitz with chevalry.
 
The key to using catapult and other bombard units is numbers, they can be very frustrating but with enough of them they are seriously useful:

1) Use them to cut a city down to below size 6, a city of size 7-12 has a defence bonus of 50%, cities size 12+ have an even bigger bonus.

2) If you don't have a tech advantage, eg: you have Cavalry vs Infantry, attacking would normally be suicide. However use your bomard units to take the defenders health down to 1 or 2 first and then attack.

Bombard units attack both defenders and city improvements. From my experience if a bombard is succesfull then there is a die roll to see if it hit an improvement or a defender. If there are no improvements it seem to just count it as a miss which means once all the improvements are gone it seems to miss an awful lot.

Catapults would be useful for destroying City walls but I've never seen an AI city with walls... Maybe that will be something for MP.
 
As far as I can tell, the only thing a catapult is useful for is viewing the message "Artillery bombardment failed"

They couldn't hit a cow's arse with a banjo...
 
i dont agree with you tweedledum, my bunch of 8 to 10 catapult was reducing city defender hit point most of the time, i rarely lost a great archer against even pickman, for sure if you trie 1 or 2 shot with only one catapult it worth nothing, its like using only one or 2 bomber, built a bunch, stack them, protect them with some defender and you can crush any city in the old age.
 
With all the shields spent won't you rather just make 8-10 archers and throw them at a pikeman? You'd probably lose 2-3 at most.
 
Catapults are really only useful when used against other ancient age units. At the rate the ancient age progresses with 1.17, you really only have a small window to use them. All of my ancient and middle age wars are fought with predominantly 2 move units, so having catapults/cannons tagging along would just slow me up. Infantry/artillery combo is however the strongest in the game, partly because the AI doesn't know how to utilize this itself.
 
Originally posted by God
With all the shields spent won't you rather just make 8-10 archers and throw them at a pikeman? You'd probably lose 2-3 at most.

its because i like to kept my army alive and i dont like to lose units, because it take time to bring new one in the old age. so by keeping, catapult, archer, spearman togheter i dont loose too much units. like i said i didnt hav iron neither horse and zulu both, catapult did a great work.
 
Originally posted by God
With all the shields spent won't you rather just make 8-10 archers and throw them at a pikeman? You'd probably lose 2-3 at most.

Here is an example where catapults were very useful. Zulus with pikemen and impis on a hill. The impis neutralize horsemen (no retreat), and the pikemen on a hill are too powerful for sword, or even longbow. (Sword will lose 3/4 battles, longbow will lose 2/3 battles, horsemen lose 9/10.

Catapults reduced the pikeman hit points to one. Bapedi fell. This town was key to the position. The Zulus started this war, and once Bapedi was out of the way, my swordsmen took care of the rest of the Zulu towns.

Keep in mind that with losses so high, there is very little chance for leader creation. With the chances of winning combats improved substantially by bombard, the chances of a leader are improved, too.

zuluhill.jpg
 
Originally posted by God
With all the shields spent won't you rather just make 8-10 archers and throw them at a pikeman? You'd probably lose 2-3 at most.

In the Zulu hilltown example, you will probably lose 3-4 longbow per pikeman. And what will you do with a bad break of the randomizer? Your army will be gone and the Zulus will still be there ready to counterattack.
 
I'm normally not much fond of bombardment type units, but what really bugs me is the AI incompetent use of them. In a game a week or so, the Babs had managed to get every single civ on the planet to declare war on them, but only Persia (me) and France were in a position to actually do much about them. When we've fought them down to about half a dozen of (big) cities, the bastards discover Replaceable Parts and starts drafting Infantry, so our Cavalry gets some tought going. Despite this, I manage to capture Uruk and find that it wasn't one artillery unit that had pounded on my attackers, but well over a dozen! Well, I fortifiy an Infantry on a hill adjacent to Akkad (the Bab capital), bring the artillery there and pounds the city to dust. After it's fall I repeat the same on all the remaining Bab cities. Of course, if all that firepower had done something more than just sitting in Uruk before I took it, the Babs might easily 've survived.
 
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