working around ai's artillery problem

[Emerentius]

Hi, I understand that there is no solution to the inability of the ai to use artillery effective.
But I was thinking, can we work around that problem?
The scale of the map with civ3, a movement of 1 or 2 etc, it is un-realistic to have a ranged attack of 1 or 2.
What if we use the same (I agree lame) solution civ4 uses. A ranged animation but a real attack with losses and retreat possibilities on the side of the attacking ranged unit?
Would the ai build them? Can we have catapult attack animations with a high retreat change? So the attack is the same as any inf. attack but looks and feels different and with a high survivor change for the attacker but a low kill-rate?
I changed the settings within one of my favourite mods MEM, using the bombard factor as attack, a range of 0 and artillery and bombard still flagged, but I haven't seen ai catapult attacks yet.
Did anyone else try this idea in a scenario and with what result?
Thanks.

 

[Civinator]

It works well: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=248901

May be you have forgotten to disable the artillery flag and to enable the offensive flag.

 

[Emerentius]

Hi, Civinator thank you for that info. I didn't search that part of the forums and had no idea SOE is going to use a simular approach.
I will try these settings for sure. I'm still really curious if more people have used this idea in other mods. WW2 or Aoi for instance wich both have a reel need of better use of artillery by the ai.

 

[Civinator]

Welcome. And don´t forget to add stealth attack against all land units to the arty. This makes the results of arty battles much more realistic. On the other side this can cost some time, if you have a scenario with more than 1.000 different units.

 

[Emerentius]

Hi Civinator,
That's a lot of work you suggest, but how can I switch on the offensive flag? The moment I change range to "0" the editer removes the artillery flag.
Looking at inf. I see the offensive flag turned on but with arty it is greyed out. (I'm changing the Aio biq to see what happens). I must overlook something but I do not see any real differance between the two settings.
Thanks.

 

[Civinator]

Hi Civinator,
That's a lot of work you suggest, but how can I switch on the offensive flag? The moment I change range to "0" the editer removes the artillery flag.
Looking at inf. I see the offensive flag turned on but with arty it is greyed out. (I'm changing the Aio biq to see what happens). I must overlook something but I do not see any real differance between the two settings.
Thanks.

To activate the offensive flag, the new arty unit must first have the option "capture" activated.