I made three bombards towers close to each other to defend the wall and they easily succumbed to just ONE ram. Three Japanese Keeps would do a lot better.
Logically, I thought that the Bombard tower would deal melee damage, and therefore be better against siege units, but it’s pierce damage.
I propose that the Bombard Tower deal 100 melee damage instead of 120 pierce damage, also then remove all of the bonus damage. Would also be nice if it had splash damage.
It used to be melee damage. It was changed because it was too good, specifically vs siege.
That should be the point. Why would the Bombard Tower when it’s range is capped at 8, and it can only hit one unit that it’s probably going to miss unless it’s a slow moving ram. It should be good against siege like rams, scorps and onagers, that should be it’s specialty. Also against ships, obviously.
It is an Imp age tower so it can be destroyed easily by brute melee force, or by BBC/Trebs.
It was changed to pierce dmg because BBT could one-hit kill any siege with their huge melee dmg? While rams should be strong vs buildings. If BBT with melee dmg is for Koreans specifically, this can be quite interesting.
Because if bbt do melee damage there is little counter to it late game. At that point you mostly will have siege ram and trash. The idea of bbt doing melee is that you actually need units to protect them from siege ram.
How about we don’t touch what has worked good for the last 20 years, not to mention they used to deal melee damage, as it was mentioned here, but it was changed as practically the only counter to bbt is bbc, trebs are very annoying to have to repack every square.
Bbt are op enough already. Don’t buff them.
A tiny bit of extra bonus damage vs rams wouldn’t hurt though. Like 10-15.
I found them borderline useless tho. it’s Basically a glorified guard tower with slow projectile and misses 99% of the time. It can’t even reliably defend trade route between allies. Why would I want to build something so useless like that? Rams are easy counter to these useless things, you don’t even need bombard carnnons
Dev believed milita line was fine for over 20 years, and turned out they were terrible for over 20 years and finally got the buff they badly needed. I think it’s the same case for bombard towers.
BBTs are good enough. OP even. Get it inside your head.
I don’t know, watch 3k+ TG on arena, BF, hideout and tell me why the pros are always pushing with this useless building and why we see it in 100% of games.
BBTs are strong. They make it extremely hard to push back, you can’t engage with melee units under BBT, you can use them to snipe SO because ballistics, and also they clear out buildings/production without needing any micro or attention or pop and cost less than a bbc. They aren’t that great for base defense, they are an aggressive building that lets you get a foothold right in front of the enemy without being obnoxiously big like castles.
Use them like that, not to protect your base.
Just like Eliza summed it up above: in order to put BBTs to a good use you need to regard them as an offensive structure, not defensive one.
Which is a complete design fail imho.
Just like towers were more used for feudal rushes pre DE.
Bbt is at least very good vs ships as defence tool though.
And more specifically Rams. Civs that doesn’t have good siege (BBC or SR) used to struggle a lot against a row of BBT.
It is already good against onagers and scorpions. About rams, it is intentionally changed to pierce so that rams can counter them.
Why though?
I guess 5 at most will be okay. 10-15 is too unbalanced for rams.
Bear in mind that capped rams have +1 ram armor and siege ram +2 and I think that can reduce the bonus damage the same way Cataphracts and Condottieri armor do.
So 5 bonus damage would mean 4 damage against capped rams and 3 vs siege rams. At least in theory, I didn’t test it.
15 extra damage might be too much, but 8-10 maybe not.
Using BBT as an offensive tool not only in my opinion goes against the use of what should be the principle of defensive structures, but by the time you can afford to push with army and back it up with several Bombard Towers I believe the game is already in your favour.
Imho their only very good defensive capability is against ships, unless they’re cannon galleons, BBTs make short work of any ship.
Agree completely. I remember them being melee damage, just like Bombard Cannon or Cannon Galleon. It made sense conceptually, and ensured that the opponent needed Imperial Age units (trebuchets or cannons) to safely destroy your expensive Imperial Age towers.
I made a similar thread not too long ago. I won’t repeat all the points here.
Let heated shot tech also increase the bbt anti ram bonus damage by +x.
Kinda forgot that. +7 then.
Maybe still too big for Capped Ram. 8 means Capped Ram will take 7 damage and will die at 29 shots, 9 means will die at 25, 10 means at 23 instead of 200. Too big nerf imo. Well even doing 2 damage instead of 1 will just cut the number in half. So it will always be a big drop anyway.
Please stop forcing the game into your logical/historical standards, it’s a game, balance and playability are the top priority, deal with it.
This isn’t an invented change, it’s a request to restore what the original game designers intended. Being anti-siege was the niche of bombard towers, they fire slowly and struggle to hit faster units. When they do manage to hit something like an archer it is massive overkill and most of the damage is wasted. Any other defensive building performs better against rams and trebs because they fire faster and can shoot multiple arrows, it is a backwards system.
I don’t personally believe melee BBT would cause balance issues, but if it did I would rather see BBT become scenario-only like fire towers than to see one cannonball reclassified as pierce damage.
Edit: Another acceptable answer would be to split the BBT into two different buildings. One that fires smaller piercing projectiles like an Organ Gun or Hussite Wagon, and another that slowly shoots massive cannonballs for melee damage. Give or take access to each tower as needed for balancing civs.
Castle age siege doesn’t beat BBT. Only battering rams stand a chance but they deal so little damage they are only taking down a BBT if you let them do it.
It’s the original game designers themselves who changed their mind on the matter and nerfed BBT this way, just like they realised pikemen suck agaisnt paladins and eles, that CA with 3 range and 50% accuracy are bad, etc…
Ngl I have no idea what happened internally to spark this nonsense. Maybe the guy who understood what a cannonball was quit 
? Maybe they caved to player complaints about turtling? I still don’t see any problem with needing ranged siege to take down expensive towers with zero losses.
I know there are some crazy mechanics in this game (hammering out fires, wololo…), but at a minimum things need to be consistent across the board. If someone decides Light Cavalry is too strong against rams and changes them to deal Pierce Damage I’ll object to that as well, they need to remain similar to heavy cavalry mechanically (that being said a short-ranged pierce damage unit with a lance or spear could be cool).