When is the right time to assault the city after bombarding

[lou_dummy]

I've read on the threads that it is essential to bombard the city before directly assaulting it with armored tanks and cavalry. For how long should I bombard a city before making the assault?

I would like to occupy the city and I don't want to destroy most of the improvements already in there.

 

[Rock]

Try bombing once,
if result is emeny unit hit, continues
if result is building destoryed, stop and attack at onces
if population hit, continues.

Reason, the three element above will have a dice value assigned to them at the start of the turn, the lower value will get hit often. Thus if building at hit on the first time, the value assigned may be the lowest.

For me I usually bomb a few times if the defencing unti is too powerful else i will attack at onces.

Same thing else, a fight between two full health unit has a greater chances to create a great leader.

 

[War4War]

bombardment is overrated. You don't have to bombard in all cases. If you have a massive army determined to eradicate an enemy island completely don't bother bombing. The biggest advantage of bombardment is that it reduces the population so that the city will not revolt as easily once conquerred. There will also be less resisters so the city will become useful quicker. This is all good but bombardment slows your military progress soooooo much that I just don't use it that much (artillery moves only 1 square at a time). Unless you use bombers of course but even then you need massive amounts to be able to do some significant damage since they fail pretty often, not counting enemy fighters... So you have to wait for the bombers to do their stuff unless you have hundreds...

What I do is just plow through everything with tanks and starve the conquerred cities. Once resistance is over pop-rush a cathedral and you should be down to a pop of 3-4, which is pretty safe. And even if they do convert back they will only have 1 defender in there and it will probably be of poor quality (rifleman or infantry). One of your tanks will retake the city. The big problem of conversions is that you lose all your stationned units inside. So be careful not to put too much. 3 is a good number.

Now if you want a specific city or two, then bombardment is very good. You probably have a smaller army so the damage you will do to the units inside the city will be of good help. But in case of massive domination wars my opinion is don't bother unless you want to spend 30 minutes per turn moving bombers and artillery around

 

[Psychlone]

I made a land transport unit that carries my artillery along just as fast as my tanks go. Drop the guns and let the preliminary bombardment begin!

For conventional rules, I still find waiting for my artillery to arrive is faster than replacing cav lost assaulting infantry/riflemen, or for those cav to heal up afterwards.

IMO, use of catapults or cannon is just a waste of time offensively, so I don't bother with bombardment before Replaceable Parts.

My typical bombardment invasion force consists of two infantry escorting about 10 artillery. I have never seen a computer dare to attack this force with ANYTHING, despite the fact that the arty's not fortified because it's on the move. Generally, one turn of bombardment with such a stack will reduce all defending units to one or two hitpoints, and at that time, I'll send in the cavalry.

If bombardment reduces the city population below 7, great. If your intention is to reduce the population, not beat down defending units, I would recommend pillaging the irrigation and just letting the city starve down to size rather than pounding the city itself. Obviously, you don't need artillery to do this, but a stack of arty on a well-placed square can often lay waste to a good chunk of the irrigation to multiple enemy cities from a single location, without exposing units to counterattack by skirmish units in those cities. Often, this type of "scorched earth" fighting will drive an enemy to their knees and the peace talks, even if you don't actually take any cities.