It would also be trivial to introduce a promotion attribute that checked for unit level for availability.
@civplayer33 might kill me, though, as that would break the conditional logic in his promo viewer.
G
Yeah that would mean a lot of rewriting...
I don't have the time to play right now, but how are people finding the change to the submarine promotions? We had the same problem there, with Logistics being too strong, and attempted a fix by significantly strengthening the other side of the tree, such that it should now be worth taking, with significantly more damage than the Logistics line before Logistics is reached and easier autonomy (which is important for loner subs), which makes up for lower damage once the subs of the other line have reached Logistics. The key here was to think about the roles that a submarine can fill, with the loner sub needing more maneuverability and (fore)sight, because it needs to evade groups of enemy ships as much as possible.
So, since we're talking about a single unit class here (naval ranged surface ships), it would be worth thinking about that unit class and its roles specifically, instead of about Logistics in general. Personally I do build Bombardment ships, though in relatively small numbers, because they'll give me access to higher city damage right away, instead of needing to be promoted to level 5 first. Also keep in mind that Military Academies come fairly late in the game and thus there is a good chunk of game time where one won't have a fleet with level 5 ships, so I wouldn't say that giving
no ship Bombardment is a good strategy; however, since it might not happen often that I besiege 2 or more cities from the sea at the same time, 2 - 4 Bombardment line ships will usually be enough to have that extra punch for besieging a city.
Maybe this is the problem: the Bombardment line's niche is simply too narrow. So how about this:
Proposal (TL;DR):
Make the lines conform to anti-land and anti-sea, respectively; i.e. take anti-land unit damage bonus away from Targeting and give it to Bombardment; that way we widen the niche of Bombardment to be a general purpose anti-land ship and weaken Targeting at the same time.
Potential issues:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only other unit class that uses Targeting is subs and they can't attack land units anyway with their main attack, so it won't have any side effects in that sense and Bombardment, I think, is only taken by naval ranged surface ships, so no problem there, either.
That leaves possible implementation troubles; I don't know if direct boost to damage against certain domains is possible, so it would likely have to be implemented with a malus against domain, which means increasing overall strength first for the Bombardment line (and then giving it the anti-sea malus), while for Targeting it should suffice to give it an anti-land and anti-city malus, if that's possible. Here the subs would see their anti-city damage lowered a bit, but they aren't exactly the unit of choice for besieging cities anyway and since they already get an anti-city malus natively, that could simply be lowered a bit to compensate.
This change would synergize with the Shrapnel Rounds promo, which increases anti-land damage in the Bombardment line, as well.
Edit: If needed, since the Targeting line gets an extra promo over the Bombardment line anyway, we could add Bombardment III to the prereq's for Splash Damage (make Splash Damage appear on both sides of the tree).
If this change is implemented we should probably test the actual effect this has in the game with respect to relative damage because the damage formula can be a bit unintuitive to think about as I noticed when testing submarines a while ago.
