Guided Missile: 60 Hammers of Suck?

[jihe]

Yeah, they sure are the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked.

 

[Negator_UK]

I once thought of using them as siege in conjunction with massed helicopters, but I am not winning much at the moment (cos I suck with Ghandi) and when i do win the success I have seems to come during the inf/arty stages of the game.

Someone good, who wins their games in the modern age could test this (!!??)

 

[JTMacc99]

I like them as a way to soften up (normally coastal) cities in the period of time where my air forces no longer have supremacy. (For example, if I've moved on to Wang Kon in my domination world tour, and I find his cities stocked with CGIII infantry and lots of SAM infantry+fighter cover. It's just less painful to drop about 6 cruise missiles into those cities than to hit them with 15-20 fighters. As was described up-thread, they do a nice job of making dent to the initial target city, letting me land an invasion force. Also, since you can then fly in another half dozen to the city you just captured to reload the subs, you can repeat this process when necessary.

They are certainly not the most useful units, but they do a pretty good job of being part of the combined arms concept of this game.

 

[UncleJJ]

In earlier patches they were a good way to generate gold in high production cities with the gold from hammer overflows. Unfortunately this loophole has been fixed .

A city with a forge, factory, power and MA with PS has +175% production bonus on military units and it used to generate a GM and pile of gold every turn. That used to be good in the later stages of a domination.

 

[Sincro]

I always thought the intention of the cruise missile was to get in some guaranteed damage on the 'primary defender' of a stack or city. I know there are a lot of times when there is a single defender (possibly as many as 2 or 3) that is simply better then everything else in the stack, and spending a cruise missile, just one, to damage that defender results in less losses to you overall.

Another plus, they are guaranteed to get through any amount of air interception. Doesn't matter if there's 40 fighters covering the city, the missile gets in and does its job. That's not a small benefit, either.

I build them, sparingly, and use them for 2 things: 1) To cause those initial hits of damage on the main city defenders, and 2) I'll have my subs fire 1 or 2 at destroyers/battleships that come prowling around so the sub itself has a far higher chance of taking the ship the rest of the way out.

Obviously in most situations, you would rather have a reusable air attacker, or a nuclear missile which will cause massive amounts of damage to everything, but I am of the opinion that you use them for the very narrow niche they excel at, they serve that purpose just fine.

 

[Earthling]

Generally not that useful; I've never made use of them on land combat.

But they do come incredibly in handy for taking out ships. Great cost ratio, and ease of use beacuse as others mentioned you can fly them around anywhere- if you've never seen a use for them, an archipelago game that lasts to the modern era will set that straight.

Also gamespeed tends to make a huge difference, in terms of production. On normal and faster you more likely won't be wasting time building these when you wouldn't, say, get full overflow if you could already double-produce them. But they can be a nice, solid, "one-unit-per-turn" deal that you can just set a city or two to autobuild at a certain point. They may not be perfectly ideal, and I really don't see a particular advantage for stack-busting/attacking cities especially if you can use nukes - but I do like them at sea.

 

[noto2]

The OP failed to mention something: guided missiles work very well when combined with other air units. Let's say you have an amphibious invasion force, with battleships, transports full of marines, carriers and fighters, and subs or missile cruisers armed with missiles. The fighters can redline the defenders, and the cruise missiles will destroy them. The OP mentions it takes many GM's to take out a mech infantry. Well, not if that mech infantry is already weakened by a bomber. Your bombers can bring the defenders down to the minimu (is it 50%?) and then the GM's will destroy the defenders. Also, the OP probably used them against bunkers or something, because when I've used them I noticed they were quite powerful, usually completely destroying a unit if it was at 60% health or lower. In any case, I think GM's in the game have a similar use to what they do in real life - they are defensive units, and most useful in naval combat. You don't get nukes in every game. If you have nukes, tactical nukes are probably much better for defence than GM's. However, if you don't have nukes, GM's in your coastal cities/missile cruisers will help defend your land against an enemy invasion.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The OP failed to mention something: guided missiles work very well when combined with other air units. Let's say you have an amphibious invasion force, with battleships, transports full of marines, carriers and fighters, and subs or missile cruisers armed with missiles. The fighters can redline the defenders, and the cruise missiles will destroy them. The OP mentions it takes many GM's to take out a mech infantry. Well, not if that mech infantry is already weakened by a bomber. Your bombers can bring the defenders down to the minimu (is it 50%?) and then the GM's will destroy the defenders. Also, the OP probably used them against bunkers or something, because when I've used them I noticed they were quite powerful, usually completely destroying a unit if it was at 60% health or lower. In any case, I think GM's in the game have a similar use to what they do in real life - they are defensive units, and most useful in naval combat. You don't get nukes in every game. If you have nukes, tactical nukes are probably much better for defence than GM's. However, if you don't have nukes, GM's in your coastal cities/missile cruisers will help defend your land against an enemy invasion.

Marines generally beat even mechinf if the latter is 50% health.

And while my tests were against a bunker, that is generally a fair test...most dedicated late game warfare using air units will fight targets that have those if the game's outcome is still in doubt. If it isn't than you can do whatever the hell you want anyway.

Your suggested use is interesting though since it is actually backwards from what the other high level players suggest using them for: weakening very powerful top defenders.

The only problem I have with that is probably 80+% of the top defenders you will encounter would be sufficiently weakened by air as to not really need further beatings. Exception probably come at mechinfantry on hills or with PRO bonuses.

IMO they're crap at defense by the way, unless you can sink the enemy before they land you're better off with just using fighters + infantry or canned mass collateral.

The only "naval" usage I see for them is to weaken a few target sufficiently for a battleship/missile cruiser to get good odds. After that, collateral takes over in big ship battles, too. Although to be fair large stack naval battles vs the AI are pretty rare.

 

[MadmanAtW]

Yeah, my main use for them has been big naval battles against another human.

 

[Mudcrab]

GMs are good for smashing resources when at war, but only if the resources are within strike range. eg near the borders or from the sea. After that, spies are useful, and fast pillagers in stacks 3 strong. The idea is to destroy all the resources to build decent units. If possible, use the GMs in the first strike, as you want to lure the enemy AI SOD to your land to pulverize them. If you send in the pillagers early, the SOD may divert to them, instead of to your SOD trap.

 

[Artichoker]

There are a handful of units in Civ 4 that I haven't put to significant use in any game, and the Guided Missile is one of them. I'm not saying that it's a weak unit, but that around that time I always find different alternatives to get the same job done.

Maybe after they finalize the patches for Civ 5, when I finally may make the switch from 4 to 5, I will have used all of the units in Civ 4 at some point in time.

 

[thinkingnut]

Neco attack!

I just modded the Guided Missile so that its stats are as shown below:

10 strength, 8 air range, 100% collateral damage, max 100% collateral damage and 100% airpower limit. All other stats remain the same.

Oh, and missile cruisers can carry 8 of these babies now, and submarines can carry 6. Does that solve the OP's concerns?

 

[Macksideshow]

Modern era naval combat on a huge map on the opposite of the globe to your production centre so faster reinforcement. Also non coastal cities can contribute to the naval war effort.

Its fair to say they're "situational"

 

[blunderwonder]

Just gonna throw my 2 cents in here.... I dont use them but i can understand the arguments made. At the end of a game it may be easier to build them than planes, and you dont need as many right away, just enough to get the job done.

Someones post had me thinking though, if they were given a production bonus because of multiple resources they might be more efficient and lucrative. That said, if you have a city that has 60 hammers a turn, cruise missles might be efficient. Im too lazy to do the math but my point is if you have a city that generates 200 hammers a turn, it would be stupid to build something in that city that costs 100 hammers. If overflow didnt work as it does if a city had 30 hammers a turn, building a unit that cost 70 hammers might be a waste.

In any event, i feel like one of the people who was saying building them in low production cities is reasonable. If a war is only going to last a few turns you could have all the low yield cities build them strictly because they are cheap and you will have access to them quickly. Silly to build a unit that takes 10 turns to build, when the war will be over in 7 turns.

In a theoretical environment, say you get planes or cruise missiles at the same time, it would be quicker to build enough cruise missiles to get rid of all their defenses, than to build an air force. You'd end up not having an air force when you were done but thats not the really the point.

I also suppose as some sort of first strike weapon they are not bad, someone mentioned you can put more than 4 in a city, so if you have a 3 move unit, and an enemy city is close by, you could take it in one turn, even if you can only get 4 planes in range of it. This is a pretty uncommon scenario, and nukes would still be way more efficient, but it could happen Oo. If nukes are not available, and their entire stack is in that one city, and only 4 planes are within range... but you could get 16 gm's in range, in that ridiculous scenario, they may be worth building Oo

 

[dohh]

Am I mistaken, or are these legit candidates for "most underpowered unit in the game"? How do people use them? IF you do use them, please tell us how and why they compare favorably to alternatives in that situation. I've yet to see a case.

Yes, together with musketeers they are themost useless units in game. I have made only kind of use of them just once during years and years of civ-gaming. When I moved to Immortal on civ4 I once had AI enemy who made a decent navy. I kind of slept out parity at seas. He had like 15-20 strong units bombarding my coastline and I used massive amount of missiles just to get my ships back onto sea. before that I was severely outnumbered and as I built new unit it was killed as soon as it left port.

But as I said, just once. And making up my own mistake in strategy.

 

[Nick Carpathia]

I'm going to sing the praises of Musketeers, especially for MP, because human-controlled 2-movers are terrifyingly to fight against. MP warfare has been about speed and misdirection, and threatening multiple tiles at once, and Musketeers are extremely good at that. Their main strength is that they can be drafted, meaning you can build them much cheaper than knights and cuirassiers. And if the two are used to support one another, they can be very difficult to wipe out and kill many of your cities.

 

[Unconventional]

I rather find guided missiles useful at times. Imagine a situation where you are about to launch an intercontinental strike and you enemy is out of the reach of your bombers. Your enemy also has a strong air defense which renders your a few fighters on your carriers ineffective. However, your marines (you want to use them for %25 penalty issue) are weak against the strongest defenders in enemy city. Your veteran tanks& mechanized infantry, on the other hand, would have %25 penalty for attacking from the sea and they would probably die. In such situations guided missiles can be quite helpful. soften the strongest units in the enemy city with a bunch of guided missiles and then kill them with your marines ( no %25 penalty and greater chance of survival compared to other units). Once the strongest enemy units are gone your tanks or mechanized infantry can take care of the rest. So guided missiles can be effective where your enemy has superior air power because guided missiles can evade enemy fighters and they always hit the target.

Guided missiles can also be useful to protect your damaged ships against enemy ships with full health. Caught up in the middle of ocean, your damaged ships have no place to go, but if you have some guided missiles loaded, then you can soften the enemy ships and maybe take a few of them out. Even if you lose your damaged ships at the end of the day, you can at least take a few enemy ships with you into the depths of the cold ocean.

 

[Gregonar]

Yay for answering old threads.

GMs were crucial in ONE game I played, and it was an OCC where I didn't have fuel. My city was coastal and GMs prevented a destroyer blockade when my best ship was a frigate...

 

[qazq2]

I like using guided missiles because they allow lower production cities to contribute to the war effort, especially since they cannot be evaded, I like to use them if I cannot gain air superiority or if I am going for a quick raid and don't want to move in an entire naval fleet. Although if I lose oil they are nice. but then again, I love naval invasions (if I am the one invading.) Navy SEAL's rock at this point as well.

 

[fantsu]

You dont have to pay supply for them when you strike?

Do they increase war weariness?