raystuttgart
Civ4Col Modder
No, that is not really correct.
It is actually very immersive that land units in a city hardly get damaged by sea bombardment of a single ship.
It would definitely never be possible to kill all men - at most hurt or maybe kill a few men by debris (wood or stones) flying around.
In many cases such villages or cities simply gave up before an enemy ship actually openend fire - the threat itself was enough to surrender.
But not to protect their lives but to protect their homes (or stores) which were incredible effort and expensive to rebuild.
Also most of these colonial cities hardly had any loyalty to their home country anymore - or only very little.
They hardly cared who they had to pay taxes to - as long as it was not more than what they had to pay before.
And what you also do not consider:
Normally the ships did not even want to shoot into the city center where most of the troops might have been placed.
Shooting a city if at all would have hurt the civilians that would never have forgiven such a crime, not really the troops that may not even have lived there.
The attackers / conquerors normally wanted to capture the city intact with all infrastructure, all workers and also all stored goods.
Why destroy something so valuable if you can simply destroy the less valuable defenses and then capture the city by killing the 50 defending land troops?
We are not talking here about "large scale" war in the early days of colonization in 16th century. The major goal was to destroy the enemy troops at all costs but to conquer with little damage.
We are more or less talking about a crew of maybe 80 sailors and 50 professional soldiers conquering a small village or city with a few professional soldiers defending it and a few colonists maybe also taking arms.
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As @Nightinggale explained ships with cannonballs could hardly really attack Land Units in a City because a City is too much space.
Or the colonists simply moved a few 100 meters further inland - e.g. behind a hill out of reach of the cannons.
The only thing that then could still be damages were the walls, the harbour and maybe even the city center.
We are not talking about explosive wide range rockets or wide scale artillery bombardment of the modern age with massive kill potential.
It was basically a waste of ammunition trying to hit small moving troops 100 meters away in a city center with cannonballs.
As I tried to explain, the only thing you could really hit and damage with certainty was big non-moving objects like e.g. walls or fortifications.
Once own troops were approaching the city walls the ship could not continue to fire anyways.
It would have weakened the moral of the own troops just the same to have debris (stones and wood) flying around.
And troops outside the walls without any houses were in much bigger danger to be hit by debris (stones and wood).
Mostly because the debris exploded to the outside side of the walls where the cannon balls hit and not to the inside.
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And even if it was immersive:
Sometimes immersion needs to stand back behind gameplay.
If it was possible that Man-O-Wars would bombard the troops in a city to death,
there would be no chance to defend a City against REF in War of Independence.
The REF Man-O-Wars would simply lay waste on all defenses and then only 1 REF Unit could easily conquer all Cities on the Coast.
Also AI could not cope with something like that - a Human player would easily kick the butt of any AI if this would become possible.
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Summary:
No, it is not immersive that a ship on the coast could really do any serious damage to troops on land.
Doing damage to walls or fortifications is very realistic though and weakening moral is realistic too.
On the other hand, cannons in a fortification of the city doing serious damage to a ship at the coast is very realistic.
It was simply big and slow enough to be hit by cannons and holes in a ships hull were often deadly for the ship itself.
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And even if it was immersive that Ships bombarding a City could damage Units:
Very bad idea for gameplay and AI. (Sometimes a game needs to simplify a bit.)
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That is a modern warfare mod and thus naturally plays by totally different rules.
Please do not try to always think in "modern logic" for a mod that plays in 16th century.
Modern artillery bombardment and real explosives did not exist in 16th century.
At most you had shrapnel ammunition which was basically only a "close combat" ammunition for open terrain and complete nonsense to use at a distance of e.g. 200 meters against a city with walls.
Chain-balls would have been equally stupid because their direction was hard to calculated and they were basically only used to destroy sails of ships and thus immobilize them.
Normal cannon balls were only effective as I said against big unmoving objects and you needed to fire really masses of them to have a chance to hit a human - which was simply too expensive.
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Even the actual effectiveness of cannon balls on open terrain combat of e.g. 18th century is heavily disputed. (Which is the reason most armies had so few of them in usage.)
Most historician agree that they only were effectiv against moral and discipline and very ineffective considering actual human live tolls.
Only close combat shrapnel really caused live tolls but was normally also consider a last means when otherwise everything was lost since it could hit own troops just as easily.
Again "fire", "gas" and "explosive" ammunition of the modern age were simply non-existent ...
Only once they existed and were cheaply produced in indutrialized ways real bombardment of land troops on open terrain or in cities became a thing.
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