Use those gunships

[BruceLeeee]

When I wage modern wars, I always bring a few gunships with an invasion army. They are good against tanks and amazing at pillaging. The order of pillaging for me is special resources, road, towns, and lastly farms. AI loves to send artillary to suicide damage the whole stack. It's always important to me to burn those roads. I noticed on emperor, medium AI cities can maintain 50-100 production on a barren landscape and probably large commerce also. It's pretty useless to try to cripple their cities on higher difficulties. I wish there is a way to burn the roads before the improvement. Is there? Go gunships.

 

[Thalassicus]

I also wish you could target the improvement to pillage...it seems silly that you can't order your army to destroy a specific target for strategic purposes.

 

[p dandy]

I agree. Gunships with their 4 movement and ignore terrain attributes are definitely helpful in detaching special resources very quickly.

 

[chewbaccad]

I usually have shorter, capture-oriented wars, so I don't tend to do much pillaging. However, I will keep a suicide Gunship or two around for pillaging that hard-to-reach resource...

 

[Picky1999]

I load up a transport with 4 gunships and then barrel it along the enemy's coast, sending each gunship 1-2 moves deep to pillage and then pulling each back to rest safe on the transport until next turn. This works surprising well to decimate the enemy's coastal developments, roads, mines, and towns prior to a general assault. Perch a destroyer over the transport, or ideally over a transport and a loaded carrier and you've got the ideal aerial shock force...safe from most attack other than fighters or battleships (which you could soften up with your fighters anyway if you had to...) When int doubt, perch two destroyers over it, or a battleship. I've yet to lose a carrier that was this well-defended.

I just love this unit. I find myself building up a massive cavalry in preparation for when I develop flight and oil and then upgrade. I suggest this as well, as the upgraded cavalry-to-gunship keeps the promotions the cavalry earned.

 

[Finite Monkey]

Gunships make the baby Jesus cry.

1-2 are never enough, these things are killer as a small stack like Picky said. They can get deeper into enemy territory to start than any of your other units (without commando). I like to cut a swath of no roads from my invasion point to the enemy. That really slows down the response.

 

[morofski]

I load up a transport with 4 gunships and then barrel it along the enemy's coast, sending each gunship 1-2 moves deep to pillage and then pulling each back to rest safe on the transport until next turn. This works surprising well to decimate the enemy's coastal developments, roads, mines, and towns prior to a general assault. Perch a destroyer over the transport, or ideally over a transport and a loaded carrier and you've got the ideal aerial shock force...safe from most attack other than fighters or battleships (which you could soften up with your fighters anyway if you had to...) When int doubt, perch two destroyers over it, or a battleship. I've yet to lose a carrier that was this well-defended.

I just love this unit. I find myself building up a massive cavalry in preparation for when I develop flight and oil and then upgrade. I suggest this as well, as the upgraded cavalry-to-gunship keeps the promotions the cavalry earned.

Haha. Well I bet that is what the designers wanted you to be able to do. Very Apocalypse Now, particularly the way they upgrade from cavalry. I was looking forward to trying them out myself on a larger nation that hadn't quite discovered flight yet. Unfortunately, the Space race was on by then and I was forced to concentrate on that. An issue that I have at the moment is that the modern era just spins by too quickly, going from technology to technology while you try to prevent other Civs from taking the victory.

 

[bdohaney]

I use my gunships a bit differently. I use mine as stack killers. I get to cavalry quickly, so that I can get a bunch of them some xp, and then when I convert them to gunships, hopefully shortly thereafter have blitz. There is something to be said about being able to attack 4 times with one unit. I usually use bombers (or fighters if I don't have them yet) for my improvement destruction, and I almost always try not to destroy the towns (unless I am planning on cutting and burning).

 

[Warspite2]

I load up a transport with 4 gunships and then barrel it along the enemy's coast, sending each gunship 1-2 moves deep to pillage and then pulling each back to rest safe on the transport until next turn. This works surprising well to decimate the enemy's coastal developments, roads, mines, and towns prior to a general assault. Perch a destroyer over the transport, or ideally over a transport and a loaded carrier and you've got the ideal aerial shock force...safe from most attack other than fighters or battleships (which you could soften up with your fighters anyway if you had to...) When int doubt, perch two destroyers over it, or a battleship. I've yet to lose a carrier that was this well-defended.

I just love this unit. I find myself building up a massive cavalry in preparation for when I develop flight and oil and then upgrade. I suggest this as well, as the upgraded cavalry-to-gunship keeps the promotions the cavalry earned.

This is a neat idea, I never thought about doing this. Your basically using a Transport as a Helicopter Carrier. Anyway, I normally use a couple of Aircraft Carriers loaded up with fighters to do this stuff, but I will try this out and bring a heli loaded transport with my fleet next time.

 

[SES-Eugene]

I tend to play the Russians coz I loved their Cossacks. Thus, I have no problems upgrading most of them to gunships after enemies get too many Musketeers or other anti Mounted/gunpowder units. Being Financial also means u get lots of money for upgrading units.

The only thing I wish they could be is being a military garrison. My town complain about "fearing for their safety" even when I have 10 gunships garrisoned there