Guided Missile: 60 Hammers of Suck?

[Kid R]

The only time I used guided missiles was for bombardment and I was very happy with them. Being able to *guarantee* 0% city defence, regardless of what defending units are present, UN resolutions, tech parity, EP situation, etc. seemed pretty handy. Having said that I could have probably just sent 10 more artillery in the main stack to drop the defenses.

There is no limit to the number of GM that can be stacked in a fort or city ... also they fly from the production city to anywhere in the world ready for use next turn

I thought these were both useful features too. GMs seem a good way to keep a non-nuclear domination push going by letting cities far from the fighting still contribute units. Presumably you can rebase them to another continent too - that would be very useful and save on sea voyages back and forth to pick up more artillery.

 

[Brownsfan02]

if they blow up improvements then it wouldn't be a bad idea to use one to take out a country's only oil supply.

 

[Kietharr]

I only use them for kicks (and because i get bored of manually choosing the right production so i just let the AI do it) once the game is already won, which is usually the case by the time they're available anyways.

But yeah, they're pretty much irredeemably useless. Absolutely no reason to use them over a plane. Rocketry also unlocks jet fighters which have better range and you know, don't die when you use them.

I wish you could use them to manually target and destroy buildings in a city, then they'd actually be somewhat useful. Still kinda marginal because capping cities at that point is generally somewhat trivial but it'd make them unique at the very least.

 

[Tristan_C]

Always happy to pile on the hate for something. It certainly does seem like GM's only even give you a positive return on your hammers against modern armor and battleships? Against the things which yield an even return (second-tier cost items like Mech, Mobile, Destroyers), GMs are worse than more conventional weapons that have a chance to survive combat and promote, or by tacticals. Well, like TMIT said, tacticals pretty much own these things in every circumstance. I never build GMs. I build nukes like they're going out of style, but I've never even seen a GM outside of Worldbuilder.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Using them in a nutcracker of "maul this one city" role is interesting. That does seem a valid use, if a difficult one to implement since you need to tech something you ordinarily would not tech (either radio if massing fighters/carriers with naval invasion forces or rocketry if using something like tanks/bombers).

I'm amazed someone remembered the forum game where I actually used them. It was actually "win this game 1", hosted by futurehermit where we were given a partially played game and told to win w/o cottages or pyramids. It was only on monarch though so pretty easy even then. The final stack I used while messing around/uninformed on late warfare at the time was mechinf + missiles.

 

[mirthadir]

GMs are useful in limited roles where air defenses are effectively saturated. Likewise, they can be useful for allow you to paradrop into a city if nukes are off the table (either from UN vote, lack of U, or diplo concerns).

Consider the case where the AI has adv flight and you have radio/flight (say for building the wonders) and rocketry (say via trade). You can't take out his key targets (e.g. a city settled on oil/Al) with fighters because the intercepting jets make that prohibitive. Spies aren't an option because you can't burn the city with them. You can either do the whole attack amphib without softening - very expensive, land and endure a counter attack - more expensive - or burn GMs to soften the attack and raze.

That said, I virtually never use the suckers. If I'm going to use missiles, tac nukes are almost always infinitely better.

 

[NihilZero]

I'm amazed someone remembered the forum game where I actually used them. It was actually "win this game 1", hosted by futurehermit where we were given a partially played game and told to win w/o cottages or pyramids. It was only on monarch though so pretty easy even then. The final stack I used while messing around/uninformed on late warfare at the time was mechinf + missiles.

Nah, I don't remember that game (probably before my time). I was referring to:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8488008&postcount=28

 

[huerfanista]

I almost never use GMs, but here's a question:

There seems to be a bug when trying to destroy a fort on top of a resource with fighters. I remember one game where I attacked over a couple of turns with something like 15 fighters, and every one of them failed (0 for 30 - I gave up, figuring this was some kind of bug). Was this just an incredibly bad dice roll? Would GMs have more success on this kind of mission? Do GMs have a guaranteed 100% chance of destroying an improvement, unlike fighters which only have a chance of succeeding?

 

[CornPlanter]

I load them to ships. Purely because its cool. I mean its awesome when you can launch tomahawks from your ships before attacking, isn't it? Usually those are situations where I've already won just AIs do not know it, yet. When I do struggle for win, no Missiles and no Nuclear Plants and no Explorers, sorry. No time to fool around.

 

[shyuhe]

Using them in a nutcracker of "maul this one city" role is interesting. That does seem a valid use, if a difficult one to implement since you need to tech something you ordinarily would not tech (either radio if massing fighters/carriers with naval invasion forces or rocketry if using something like tanks/bombers).

I use them for this quite frequently in my games. I find that my more marginal cities don't have enough hammers to build anything decent so I'll leave them on cruise missile loop. I find that it contributes more to the war effort than anything else they can build. It can really help whittle down CG3 defenders on hills. And as others have mentioned, it's useful in hitting enemy battleships and missile cruisers. I generally do not use nukes in my games so I find cruise missiles useful.

 

[NihilZero]

I almost never use GMs, but here's a question:

There seems to be a bug when trying to destroy a fort on top of a resource with fighters. I remember one game where I attacked over a couple of turns with something like 15 fighters, and every one of them failed (0 for 30 - I gave up, figuring this was some kind of bug). Was this just an incredibly bad dice roll? Would GMs have more success on this kind of mission? Do GMs have a guaranteed 100% chance of destroying an improvement, unlike fighters which only have a chance of succeeding?

Oddly enough, I just faced exactly this situation. I flew about twenty jet fighter missions to try to take out that damned fort, and failed every time. A GM took it out on the first attempt. They don't have 100% success, but the higher base strength helps.

Forts seem much more durable than regular resources...

 

[iggymnrr]

IIRC, they were they only seige option that could sink a damaged ship in Civ 3. Never noticed them in Civ 4. So they got worse?

 

[naterator]

It would be nice if the range was upped to at least 6. I figure that's the movement of a commando cavalry (pre-railroads), and i'd hope my cruise missles could outrun a horse.

 

[vhhawk]

Since I don't hesitate modding what annoys me, I'd like to know that, too.

Price, Range, or strengh, capacity of ships, and to which extent? Or a little of everything?

6 Range, 2/3 price, 48 strenght; six of them per cruiser?

Although capacity would include tact.nukes, guess that would be too much. Also increasing their number would overpower them in their other functions (destroy improvements). The safest would be to just increase their strenght.

Equip them on stealth bombers for long range strikes in late game. Missiles don't give you the diplo penalty that tac-nukes do, so if you're trying to fight a containment/limited war they might be handy if they had great range.

 

[r_rolo1]

Guided Missiles in RL are used to precision strikes, either vs buildings, veicules or people , without harming the immediate surroundings much ( atleast that is the theory ). As you can't do precision strikes in Civ IV, having those in the first place looks a little.... well, stupid If we could make GM in game act like this the unit would be better. Or to be honest, some kind of armed UAV doing bombing strikes would be far better....

On game ...well, i normally don't use them on land wars, but sometimes I use them against the enemy navies to soften them up before the engagement. Naval combat is much more luck dependent due to the lack of both counter promos and of decent terrain defensive modifiers, so any edge against the enemy units is good. But even them I sometimes wonder if losing a extra ship will not pay better that using some GM....

 

[vicawoo]

It really sounds like the problem is that people are trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. People are treating it like a nuke or a cleanup unit or a wipe out a city unit, where if you build enough of them you win. The problem is that it has range and it kills units completely and can bombard, and people are trying to leverage that instead of its 40 strength and cheap cost.

If I could build the medieval equivalent, say a suicide unit with 16 strength (2 x 8) for 25 to 30 hammers(40% x 70), I would definitely build a few rather than waste some of my macemen/elephants. You'll probably only need maybe <4 per city attacked, but that should spare your real units.

 

[Wen123]

In line with their suggested use as suicide nutcrackers, would anyone know if GMs are treated differently in any way with regards to war weariness? If they don't cause any, that's another plus to their use as nutcrackers.

 

[Kid R]

It seems to me Guided Missiles might be unique in being more useful the more outdated they get, even if not spectacular at the first moment of availability. If a game were still finely balanced at future tech 100, uninterceptable bombardment of every city down to 0% for around "600 hammers of suck" would become really quite attractive.

But in regular games the availability of the space victory condition means it never comes to that. If the only VC were conquest like other strategy games perhaps things would be different...!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

It really sounds like the problem is that people are trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. People are treating it like a nuke or a cleanup unit or a wipe out a city unit, where if you build enough of them you win. The problem is that it has range and it kills units completely and can bombard, and people are trying to leverage that instead of its 40 strength and cheap cost.

If I could build the medieval equivalent, say a suicide unit with 16 strength (2 x 8) for 25 to 30 hammers(40% x 70), I would definitely build a few rather than waste some of my macemen/elephants. You'll probably only need maybe <4 per city attacked, but that should spare your real units.

This seems to be the gist of people who have experience using them to effect.

By the way, what is the effect of a guided missile on war success?

 

[mirthadir]

It really sounds like the problem is that people are trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. People are treating it like a nuke or a cleanup unit or a wipe out a city unit, where if you build enough of them you win. The problem is that it has range and it kills units completely and can bombard, and people are trying to leverage that instead of its 40 strength and cheap cost.

If I could build the medieval equivalent, say a suicide unit with 16 strength (2 x 8) for 25 to 30 hammers(40% x 70), I would definitely build a few rather than waste some of my macemen/elephants. You'll probably only need maybe <4 per city attacked, but that should spare your real units.

That would be true, except that:

1. You need launch platforms and the range issue is huge.
2. How many units do you really save? Collateral seems to favor Arty/MArty over GM.