How do you take enemy Capital Cities?

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How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 4:53:49 PM

Primarchx

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So I've had the enemy capital surrounded with huge forces for years but there appears to be no effect of limiting access to resource. The screwy combat system doesn't give me any bonus for attacking from EVERY direction at once with good forces and my combat odds drop instead of improve. So it's a huge battle of attrition and trying to lure forces out to nickle and dime them. Though that doesn't work because materials and manpower don't appear to be a problem for them.

How do you take a city that's stacked with opposition?

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RE: How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 5:02:00 PM

jwarrenw13

Posts: 1897
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From: Louisiana, USA
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I'm sorry. I couldn't resist.

(in reply to Primarchx)

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RE: How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 5:03:23 PM

zgrssd

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1. Make sure you got enough scouting around the enemy, to get accurate data. Ruings got +20 Hide Points/Recon Reduction.
2. Infantery in Ruins is the hardest to overcome obstacle in the game. 250 Entrenchment is just incredible. Do not give them time or damage their entrenchment. The sooner, the better.
3. Shell with artiellery if you do not care about taking too much infrastructure intact.
4. Just keep attacking, until one of you runs out of reinforcements to send. It should be them.
5. Keep a ring of MG Brigades around the city that you do not use to attack. They are there to shred enemy counterattacks.
6. Consider tanks. While the suffer a massive Attack penalty, the Calliber/Armor Modifier can be a game changer. 200mm Armoring defeats any conventional Small Arms short of Bazookas.

< Message edited by zgrssd -- 6/14/2020 5:08:48 PM >

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RE: How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 5:04:59 PM

OldSarge

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From: Albuquerque, NM
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When the Queen of battle can't cut it, it is time for the King of battle!

Artillery works wonders on reducing an enemy's will to fight! Bombard! Bombard! Bombard! Then the bayonet!

< Message edited by OldSarge -- 6/14/2020 5:05:45 PM >

_____________________________

You and the rest, you forgot the first rule of the fanatic: When you become obsessed with the enemy, you become the enemy.
Jeffrey Sinclair, "Infection", Babylon 5

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RE: How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 5:15:11 PM

Primarchx

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I'm aware. However the combat res system really is so screwy. Say you devote 4 units to an attack. The attack odds changes based on the order in which you commit them. How do you look under the hood to sort this stuff out?!

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RE: How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 5:15:12 PM

Jdane

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How about mechanized infantry? (I.e. infantry protected with APC's during the assault?)
I've yet to use it, hence my asking.

Primarchx, the Odds screen is just an estimate. You can only look under the hood in the detailed combat report (and even then, there's still some information hidden should you play with fog of war on).
Basically, you might get burnt once or twice but you'll have gotten data to figure out why. From there, you develop an intuition that helps correcting the Odds estimate.

Just like when your recon says there's 400 guys there, but you know well from the previous turns' events there possibly couldn't be less than 1 500.

< Message edited by Jdane -- 6/14/2020 5:18:49 PM >

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RE: How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 5:31:23 PM

Laiders

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Okay... first minor or major. Minors literally cannot be besieged and cannot be out of supply inside of a city ever period. Majors do care about supply to varying extents depending on difficulty. It's pretty easy to keep units supplied if they are bottled up in a city though as cities can output a lot of food etc. I don't think sieges ever affect trade for anyone (it's a loose siege spread over many kms so some global traders can always slip in and out). Cities can also produce metal, normally by scavenging ruins if they are on ruins though you could luck out and get a metal deposit, and obviously cities invariably contain IP assets to ensure they are defended. What resources would you expect this city to not be able to produce or blockade run? Depends on the habitability of the planet right? Siwas are pretty much impossible to starve to submission. It may be possible on less hospitable planets.

Okay moving on. You do get a concentric attack bonus. It is the first bonus listed on the combat odds screen and it clearly defined in the manual. It scales based on angles of attack to 100% for an all-round attack with mixed units. Units entirely in the same OHQ get a bigger bonus and yes you can have up to 7 units per OHQ so a single OHQ can fully surround with a unit spare. The bonus here is 200%.

Adding more units can have counter-intuitive results both because the game generates odds based a one simulated combat round using all the data available to the player. There are a lot of modified and weighted rolls in combat so combat situations can be highly chaotic (as in chaotic systems though obviously battles are highly chaotic in the colloquial sense too)). Chaotic combat scenarios will have wide results swings from each addition or subtraction because the game simulates a new round each time. Also more is not better. There are penalties for attacking with too many units and some units have big penalties attacking into cities. The game may be accurately reflecting the fact that your attack, overall, is actually less favourable (though not necessarily less likely to win) with additional units.

The answer is artillery, encirclement, human wave attacks, bypass (though this is a capital) or technical development. Keep hitting them turn after turn with cycling units, to ensure readiness and morale recovery, that are in perfect supply and have good casualty replacement. They will crack. No different to, you know, actual urban warfare against a determined opponent with supplies.

Personally I have never had problems, so far, taking cities. Then again, I use a lot of foot infantry who get no additional malus for city attacks (maybe there are no maluses for city attacks and only base terrain is used... can't find it in the manual and I don't have a city I can attack right now) though they are poor offensive troops in general.

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RE: How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 5:59:58 PM

Naselus

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A lot of the 'under the hood' stuff is literally there in the combat window. The 'offensive mods' and 'defensive mods' windows tell you exactly what's going on to make the calculation.

If your odds are going down when you add another unit in, then you're likely going hard over the overstack limit (which will penalize everything over the limit, which is why the order you add units matters). The bonuses are multiplicative, so they can give really massive results - particularly strategem and leader bonuses can be very high, so combined together with entrenchment they can make displacing infantry a real slog.

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RE: How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 10:35:53 PM

Cornuthaum

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Primarchx

So I've had the enemy capital surrounded with huge forces for years but there appears to be no effect of limiting access to resource. The screwy combat system doesn't give me any bonus for attacking from EVERY direction at once with good forces and my combat odds drop instead of improve. So it's a huge battle of attrition and trying to lure forces out to nickle and dime them. Though that doesn't work because materials and manpower don't appear to be a problem for them.

How do you take a city that's stacked with opposition?

keep bombing' em with artillery until they don't know which direction is which

(in reply to Primarchx)

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RE: How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 11:07:03 PM

EuchreJack

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Joined: 6/9/2020
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quote:

ORIGINAL: Primarchx

So I've had the enemy capital surrounded with huge forces for years but there appears to be no effect of limiting access to resource. The screwy combat system doesn't give me any bonus for attacking from EVERY direction at once with good forces and my combat odds drop instead of improve. So it's a huge battle of attrition and trying to lure forces out to nickle and dime them. Though that doesn't work because materials and manpower don't appear to be a problem for them.

How do you take a city that's stacked with opposition?

Note that concentrated artillery (and other weapons, such as most tank armament) will eventually damage the city assets. That will eventually cause hits to the food supply, industrial output, and metal scavenging. Eventually, they should be unable to replace their losses because their industrial base has taken too many hits.

If this is a major, then you have the problem that they've probably developed a lot of city assets, so it will take a lot of artillery before those hits will start getting the industrial assets rather than the zoo or whatever. But eventually, the industrial asset(s) should be hit with enough that it can't fix all its damage each turn, and then it should all fall apart.

I have no idea if the AI can conjurer stuff out of thin air, so that may still be an issue. What difficulty are you on?

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RE: How do you take enemy Capital Cities? - 6/14/2020 11:14:19 PM

ramnblam

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From: Australia
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Try attack formations, in my last game I used a light tank brigade with the blitzkrieg formation and rushed there capital before they could start moving significant forces back.

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Post #: 11