Civ 4 Warfare

[Mide]

So I got on a D2D deal a long while back and just now found the time to install the game. It was fun until I got into the warfare aspect of the game. I don't understand how I could have a whole bunch of units and one by one they died off when I attacked an enemy town with 2 defenders. I looked through the instruction book and googled it to death but did not find a way for the units to attack as one. Did anyone else find this annoying or find a way to bypass this instead of waiting for the tech tree to have siege units?

I'm sorry if I have 4 archers and 6 axemen, I should be able to take a town with 2 archers guarding it.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Siege units really help early warfare, but if you want a whole stack to attack you can press alt and click the unit icons to select everyone, or press control and click for all of one unit type. You can also hold down shift to do a manual selection of units. Other factors have an effect, like if you're attacking a town on a hill from flat ground and the defenders are veterans, etc.

 

[minmaster]

cultural city defense - you see the x% the city has in defense? that adds to the archer's defense, who's already strong because they have city defense bonus and they have first strike. if the city is on a hill, you're even more screwed.

you will probably want to use catapult to bring the city defense down to a more manageable % and then attack.

what everyone does nowadays is camp with a spy and use the spy to get rid of the city defense and then attack. of course you will have to have enough espionage pts for that to work so allocate it smartly.

btw, even if you do the whole stack attack, it just automatically selects the best one each time, no? i don't think you can attack as a group in the sense their attack pts are added up.

 

[NoWhereM]

Basically what is happening is a series of dice rolls with the archers guarding the city possibly having a number of advantages over your attacking forces. Some examples are archers having a bonus when defending cities and, if the city you are attacking is on a river, attacking across the river gives the defender a bonus.

 

[minmaster]

pay attention to what it says on the bottom left of the screen when you are about to drag the attackers to the archer. it gives you the ODDS, and it should clearly be in RED as the odds will be against you. swords are better than axes for city attacking also.

 

[Mide]

Yeah my odds were always bad...but I don't know what else to do if every block around the city is red for my units vs. that of the archer defenders

 

[Dorkenstein]

Are they red as in you can't move to any other tile?

 

[minmaster]

Are they red as in you can't move to any other tile?

read 2 posts up from yours...

 

[QuantumPion]

If you are trying to warfare in late ancient age and onwards then you need catapults. Swordsmen/axemen alone only work in the very beginning. If you can't take his cites then just go around and pillage all of their improvements while you wait for your catapults.

 

[Mide]

Yeah I think that's my only option. Thanks all

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

Archers and axemen are terrible for taking out cities defended by archers. Archers are defensive units and axemen are anti-melee units. If you swordsmen with good experience (barracks/theocracy/vassalage/etc) you can reliably attack archers in walless cities. Once they get walls, you're going to need some sort of siege. Either spies to take out the walls or catapults/trebuchets to reduce city defense. If I remember right bombard reduces the city defense bonus inate to cities, but doesn't affect the city wall/castle bonus so spies + siege might be beneficial.

% health remaining is a multiplier for their strength too so the less health they are the weaker they are at fighting. Siege weapons do damage to the whole stack generally so sometimes it's worthwhile to sacrafice a catapult to bring all the enemies in range of your units successfully killing them; a lot of times after one or two seige attacks the defenders will be low enough that the seige weapons will escape attacking alive.