Using the bombardment button outside the double adjacency rule

[Captain_Orso]

Okay, something new appears to have snuck in.

Normally naval units can only bombard if they are supporting land units or they are returning fire on land units which are bombarding them. They cannot just sail in somewhere and blast away at enemy units in adjacent land regions.

For land units to be able to bombard naval units they
1. have to have canons that have enough range to reach those naval units (I believe on rivers the range is shorter than on coastal region)
2. they must either a) be in an old style fort or b) be at entrenched level 3 or higher and have the bombardment button pressed.

Beyond this there is something called the "double adjacency rule". This is a rule of thumb and not an absolute rule. The rule says, for land units meeting 1. and 2. the naval units must pass from one river or coastal region adjacent to the land units into another river or coastal region adjacent to the land units, thus the "double adjacency rule".

A good example of this is Fort Gaines and Fort Morgan, south of Mobile, AL. Fort Gaines has Harbor Exit Points Jackson Shore, Mobile Bay and Falmouth Beach. Fort Morgan has Harbor Exit Points Mobile Bay and Falmouth Beach.


Naval units sailing from Falmouth Beach into Mobile Bay meet the requirements of the double adjacency rule and will likely (practically always) be bombarded from Coastal Artillery batteries in Fort Gaines and Fort Morgan.

As I said, the double adjacency rule is a rule of thumb, not an absolute rule. This means that naval units moving from Biloxi Bay into Jackson Shore can be bombarded from Fort Gaines, but it is much less likely. The same goes for units leaving such an adjacent river or coastal region. As the CSA if you've ever sent naval units past Fort Monroe - and you probably have - you know that you either get a message saying the you successfully bypassed the Fort Monroe batteries or that you were bombarded by them.

What has changed is that now if your naval units have their bombardment button pressed and they are in a river or coastal region with enemy land units meeting 1. and 2. above, bombardment will take place. In fact you can sail your naval units into such a region in defensive posture and using 'avoid combat' to spare cohesion and in the next turn click their bombardment button, and bombardment will take place, always, for as long at the bombardment button is pressed.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Captain_Orso]

Gray, this is my experience from hours of testing. If you are the CSA and send a naval unit for example into the Pensacola Bay coastal region - next to Fort Pickens - from one side and then out the other - assuming Fort Pickens belongs to the US and has coastal artillery -, occasionally it will get bombarded. Not always, and from my experience, not often, but sometimes. The same thing goes for Galveston if there are enemy land units with entrenchment level 3 or higher, where there is no old level 1 fort. If you try to send naval units down the coast from the east and up the Brazos River, you will get bombarded (maybe in Galveston Bay - the first coastal region adjacent to Galveston), definitely in the Brazos Estuary (directly south of Galveston), Brazos Mouth (west of Galveston) and Goodwill Landing (west of Houston, but the lower corner still touches the Galveston region and it is an Harbor Exit Point for Galveston). It's happened to me. And as I stated, there is no pre-game fort. So the double adjacency rule does not apply only to pre-game forts.

The major difference is in what happens if you are in - not moving through - a coastal region, for example Falmouth Beach, and press the bombardment button, then bombardment will occur between the naval units and coastal artillery in Forts Gaines and Morgan. This is completely new. Previously, if you had done the same thing, nothing would have happened. The bombardment button on naval units only came into play if the adjacent region was occupied by friendly and enemy land units, in which case your naval units would bombard in support of your land units.

What, please, have I explained wrong?

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Captain_Orso]

Okie-dokie, after fiddling around with old saved games trying to get a good setup for testing bombardment and the double adjacency rule I decided the best solution would be to write my own scenario in which I can control all significant elements.

The test setting is Early July '63.
In Galveston at entrenchment level 5 is a CSA stack of **Taylor, a brigade consisting of 4 Inf regiments and a 6 lb pounder, one Columbiad and one 10 lb pounder Parrott.
In Vicksburg is a CSA stack of **Pemberton and the same type brigade and artillery batteries.
The USA has a fleet of 8 Ironclads and two river transports north of Vicksburg and a second fleet with the same units east of Galveston.

I ran the tests in both patch level 1.15 and 1.16b5. Some of the thing I noticed.

1. The rule book and Wiki say that bombardment only happens through the DAR or if a fleet, with the bombardment button pressed, is supporting friendly land units in in an adjacent land region with enemy land units in the same land region. In testing I've discovered that this is not true. If the shore batteries have their bombardment button pressed, or are in a pre-war fort, and a fleet with pressed bombardment button moves into, is standing stationary in, or is leaving an adjacent river or coastal region, bombardment will take place (I will call this the 'Double Bombardment Rule' or DBR for short), even if there are no land units friendly to the fleet in the shore batteries region. This is totally different than when I learned the game. I'm not saying that it is bad or good, just different.

2. As stated previously, in patch level 1.16b5 no damage is ever done by the DAR nor the DBR. Hits to fleets and shore batteries is always 0, the shore batteries have no cohesion loss, and cohesion loss in the fleet is so low that I can only assume that it is caused by the fleet moving and firing.

3. In 1.15 if the shore batteries are in good shape, if the bombardment is caused by the DAR there are almost always 50 hits inflicted by the shore batteries per adjacent region after the initially entered region (with Galveston there can be 3 when sailing around it's perimeter). Return fire hits were generally around 0 - 2 but seldom more.

4. If bombardment was caused by the DBR, the damage inflicted by the shore batteries was significantly lower (around 20 - 40 hits) with return hits varying between 0 and 4. If this occurred a second or more times, the hits inflicted by the fleet dropped significantly to 0 - 2 hits. This my be due to the fleets lower cohesion during further bombardments or another mechanism unknown to me.

5. There are a number of coastal regions that are not adjacent for the DBR but are for the DAR, notably:

• Northern Mississippi Delta (first region entered when leaving the Mississippi). Movement between here and the Mississippi Mouth will trigger the DAR, but only naval units in the Mississippi Mouth can trigger the DBR.
• Yazoo Confluent (river region north of the river region west of Vicksburg. Same as above, it triggers the DAR but doesn't trigger the DBR.
• Ocracoke Inlet (north-east of Fort Macon, NC). This is actually just a little bit hidden because the tool-tip highlighting of the region shows that the highlighting almost touches Fort Macon, but the dark dividing line is further north. Same as above.
• There may be more such regions, but those are the ones I found while testing.

6. Often during play (patch level 1.15) I've found that shore batteries loss the pressing of the bombardment button. I find myself constantly having to check the button on all the shore batteries that my come into use in that turn. In patch level 1.16b5 during testing I had to repeat a turn a number of times because the DAR did not trigger when it should have and upon inspecting the shore battery I noted that the bombardment button had become un-presse. This happened in the attached game same '116b5 BT3 1'.

I've attached the scenario that I created for testing (BombTest3.scn), plus two saved games from testing; one at patch level 1.115 (115 BT3 1) and the above mentioned one at patch level 1.16b5 (116b5 BT3 1).

BTW learning to build a scenario, even such a simple one, was very ... interesting



Edit: Oh, BTW2: I did run into situations whee the DAR did not trigger with shore batteries not in pre-war forts, but I can't be certain that it didn't occur due to the bombardment button becoming un-pressed, as noted above, but I did not notice it ever happening with pre-war forts.

Edit2: with regards to 5. above, this is of course WAD because to initiate bombardment from a fleet it must be in one of the Exit Point regions of the adjacent land location's harbor. Relearning what I've forgotten