Marines (SEALs)

[Feyd]

I'm very pleased with the massive upgrade that was made to the Marine unit in Civ IV! Paired with a few rounds of battleship bombards and Carrier deck Fighter airstrikes I decimated two civs with my marines in my last game.

My question, however, is how do the Marines stack up vs. the highest end defenders taking bombards and airstrikes into account? I easilly handled any and all infantry I faced, but has anybody battle tested them against Mech Infantry?

Even with the hit they take in power in comparison to modern armor, I want to use them even in my new pangea map that I'm playing... Pull an Inchon flanking maneuver on them Looking forward to it especially now since I'm playing as Washington and will get to try out the SEALs.

What are your thoughts on these bad boys?

Hoo-ah!

[Blake]

Marines are definitely still usable, the key is Close Air Support, you would need to bombard down mechinf pretty severely, and those suckers do have a nasty habit of shooting at your bombers so you'll need lots of bombers to keep momentum up.

Something fun to do is to bombard the defenses with ships, bomb the units to 50% with an air mega-stack, then attack with a couple of collatoral artillery (they still work fine attacking from transports). The mush that remains will be easy pickings for marines. You'll still need Mech Inf for garrisons though.

[Solomwi]

Even with bombardment just taking out city defenses, Marines don't do terribly badly against Mech Infantry, in my experience, though you better bring a lot of them. In my Napolean game, I was forced to throw an ad hoc invasion at Mansa Musa to ensure my Space Race victory. My artillery was still in Egypt from the mopping up operations and my meager air force was stationed to strike at China if Qin got any ideas, so I was left with battleships and Marines to take the beachhead against a couple of Mechs and some other assorted units. Each Mech took a couple or so Marines with him, but strength of numbers won the day, and once the Mechs were knocked out, the rest were a breeze.

On a side note: capturing and even razing an enemy capital no longer destroys the progress on his spaceship. I don't remember for sure if it did in CivIII or not, but want to say it did. Either way, not any more.