Lategame combat

I finally managed to get to the lategame while aiming for science victory. Pressing "Next turn" is pretty boring at this stage, so I decided to start a war with Peter (who is also in the information era).
If it wasn't nuclear weapons, this would totally look like a trench war. Lategame unit damage is so low, that it is actually hard to advance into enemy territory.

1. Rocket artillery armies: they to a massive amount of damage to city/fortifications which should be a little lower in my opinion. However, damage to units is something like -15 hp to mechanized infantry army. However, it is quite high compared to other units.
2. Naval units: this is quite funny. I have spent 4 turns with a destroyer, 2 nuclear submarines and missile cruiser fleet trying to kill an embarked mechanized infantry army. It got 2 levelups in a process. I am not sure if the defenseless transports should be so durable.
3. Jet bombers: I have built 3 bombers simultaneously after I got access to aluminium just to find that bombers do not deal damage at all. They have a strange penalty against units and they do whooping 9 damage to the city fortifications. Now I am using them to destroy the improvements. I like the idea that bombers can destroy the enemy infrastructure again but limiting them to this purpose isn't right, I think.

What's your experience with the lategame warfare?

 

Yes, aerial combat/bombers are absolutely pathetic in this game. Naval combat is similarly bad.

Mechanised infantry is crazy strong and defeating the waves of them the enemy can produce is tedious.

Rocket artillery should only be used for cities. Even with the damage to troops upgrade, its low damage. However machine gun armies do amazing damage to troops. They are your frontline troops. Send in the machine guns, then mop up the leftovers with mech infantry and modern armour tanks. Rocket Artillery + observation balloons (which stack bonus) keeping well back to reduce cities to dust.

 

I've never managed to use airplanes in any of my games. Disappointing to hear that they're not very powerful

Embarked units are bizarrely strong. They should definitely be sitting ducks to contemporary naval units. (Otherwise, navies are very nearly pointless!)

 

The defense of embarked units is that of the unit, not that of the transport. A tank on a wooden raft is stronger than a Warrior in a modern transport.

and yes, this is hilariously stupid.

 

Agree. And mechanized infantry is way, way too strong in all respects. Have an army (3 units combined) of normal infantry attack a single unit of mech. infantry and you do maybe 1/4 damage to it and lose 60% health yourself. Not working as intended.

About bombers though: they are quite useful if the enemy is just one tech level behind you. Having a few bombers on line makes capturing cities much faster. They are much more practical to use than artillery because you don't need to worry about terrain and movement. The damage they do to equal tech level cities is way too small, but then it's not much less than what artillery do.

The bottom line I believe is mech. infantry and late game cities are defensively too strong.

 

It takes about 10 bombers several turns to destroy an information era's city defences. It takes 2 rocket Artillery 2 turns to do this. And with observation balloons as I said, they stack. So you can have artillery with a range of 10. And they move. So are much better than bombers.

Bombers are only useful in early modern era if you have tecched there way ahead of your neighbours

 

^^ Same era bombers and same era artillery do within 10% same damage to cities. I'm not sure how you got your results.

 

Hi
I use fighters and bombers a lot. Quite useful for supporting naval landing. Long range and flexible support for your troops. Powerful to chase wounded units in coordination with helicopters. Can deploy nuclear devices. Can help to destroy cities defences.

I find that balloons are a little bit immersion breaking late game (talking about the unit itself, not about spamming the unit to get insane range bonus). I would prefer to have a late game upgrade. Maybe satellites as a unit or as a military card. And why not a support unit as commando, that give a bonus to missile/air-plane damage to adjacent enemy units (laser pointing).

 

Those embarked mech infantry are more powerful than battleships, more powerful the nuclear subs etc This is how devs perceive the world.

Someone has to teach them that the real stuff is far from what they think, their existence is a non sense

 

Does the AI do better in late game warfare? Assuming they upgrade, or you do an Info era start, weak air, strong transports & strong Mech Infantry should play to the AIs limited abilities.

Or do they still just shuffle units and therefore suck?

 

During some periods of history the manpower aboard the ships were very relevant re the naval power of them (e.g., galleys rammed into each other and then the sailors/troops stormed across). Not trying to rationalize the later periods, perhaps the devs will try to do so at some point or change it.

 

I've never seen an AI build a more advanced unit than, at most, the industrial age antitank. Even when they're in the information age and building spaceport projects. How did you manage to make them actually build mech infantry?

Also, bombers are most definitely not bad. They don't do insane damage but the ability to cripple improvements and districts as well as their huge range makes them powerful, not to mention the ability to carry nukes. You can't take a city with air power alone without nukes in real life either - just look at how little effect air bombardment has had on ISIS over the past few years of daily air raids.

Ships are definitely too weak against embarked units, but they're extremely powerful when used against shore targets thanks to their ability to stay out of range.

 

I think I was playing quite slowly (on Emperor difficulty), so I have started building space race projects only when I got to future tech. Peter was ahead of me in science the whole game, so when I started the war, he already had mech infantry.
I can say that AI is not better. Actually I have seen only lots of mech infantry and machine guns. Oh, and there was a rocket artillery once and two nuclear submarines.