Modern paratroops

[pauli]

yes, yes. and rename.

[nbarclay]

I just spotted a huge problem with the idea of giving Modern Paratroopers an amphibious assault capability. The only benefit of the tech Amphibious Warfare is the ability to build marines. If Modern Paratroopers are given the same amphibious assault capability just two techs into the modern era, there will almost never be situations where it makes sense for players to research Amphibious Warfare. Worse, AIs likely will research Amphibious Warfare instead of aiming for Synthetic Fibers. Making an optional tech that's already marginal completely useless in the vast majority of situations is exactly the wrong direction for the AU Mod to go.

I'm also a bit puzzled at how the same panel that says, "Good enough players who know the right tricks can get enough value out of the Jaguar Warrior as is, so there's no need to change it," can say, "Let's create an uber-special--forces unit that doubles the stock attack value of the Modern Paratrooper and provides some other goodies as well." Yes, the default attack values for the Paratrooper and Modern Paratrooper are too low. But what I would expect from a conservative mod would be the minimum changes needed to make the units clearly useful in a reasonable number of situations, not changes that take the Modern Paratrooper all the way from being virtually useless to being tied for the third most powerful attack unit in the game. The more powerful we make the unit, the less strategy has to be developed to use the unit effectively.

[alexman]

Amphibious units are much more useful to the AI against the human, because the AI defends all of its cities, while the human defends them more lightly, or even leaves them undefended. Therefore, I see no problem if the AI, but not the human, gets Amphibious Warfare, which forces the human to garisson his cities.

Keep in mind that Amphibious Warfare provides a unit with the same attack as the proposed Modern Paratroopers, but you can get Marines with as many as 5 required technologies remaining in the Industrial Age. Also, Marines don't require oil, while Modern Paratroopers do.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by alexman

Keep in mind that Amphibious Warfare provides a unit with the same attack as the proposed Modern Paratroopers, but you can get Marines with as many as 5 required technologies remaining in the Industrial Age. Also, Marines don't require oil, while Modern Paratroopers do.

I count six: Scientific Method through Radio, Motorized Transportation, and Flight. But how often is that of practical rather than merely theoretical importance? The fact remains that Amphibious Warfare is already a tech that many of us ignore in most of our games, and would ignore even more often if we could get a unit with the same abilities a few techs later without any special research effort. I don't see how the benefits of making the Modern Paratrooper double as a marine can outweigh that.

[alexman]

I didn't count Radio because it's going to be removed in the next patch.

In any case, a unit with an attack strength of 16 and no retreat becomes less and less useful as you progress through the tech tree, which I think gives good enough motivation to research the optional technology in some cases.

[Jaybe]

Elegant solution: just make amphibious warfare mandatory, not an optional tech.

[nbarclay]

If allowing marines to upgrade to Modern Paratroopers added wonderful strategic depth to the game, I could see its being worth the price of taking away the need to research an optional tech to get an amphibious assault capability. But in my view, the upgrade path takes away more strategic depth than it adds.

Unlike the classical situation with marines and regular paratroopers, there is no challenge, "Are the benefits of the Modern Paratrooper unit worth going out of the way to research an optional tech for?" On the contrary, Synthetic Fibers is already the single most important tech in the modern era for offensive firepower. Thus, making Modern Paratroopers more powerful merely makes a tech that is already important even more important.

Granted, making Modern Paratroopers more powerful makes the idea of researching Synthetic Fibers before Rocketry rather than after (and thereby delaying the discovery of aluminum and access to TOW Infantry and jet fighters) more interesting. But that effect involves only a minor shuffling of the order techs are researched in. And making Modern Paratroopers powerful enough to be useful can make the choice an interesting one without going to the extremes of taking the unit's attack value all the way up to twelve and giving it an amphibious assault capability on top of that.

Further, giving the same unit both paradrop and amphibious assault capabilities takes away a lot of the challenge of deciding how many of which type of special forces units to build. Players can simply build the units and decide which role to use them in later. In my view, that significantly reduces the game's strategic depth.

If this were the "Give players powerful new toys to play with Mod," I would view the proposed revision to the Modern Paratrooper as a perfect fit. But my impression is that the "Give players powerful new toys to play with Mod" is exactly what the AU Mod is not supposed to be. I think maximum strategic depth is achieved by making Modern Paratroopers more powerful than they are in the stock game but still not as powerful as this change proposes, and by leaving marine and paradrop units as separate and distinct units. The fact that the same approach is also more conservative makes it even more preferable.

Nathan

[nbarclay]

Duplicate Post

[Myrddin]

This thread started because Modern Paratroops were useless- too late and too weak. Simply upping the attack strength does little to fix that as any paradrop landing is likely to be attacked by TOW infantry. or something stronger

Amphibious attack and stealth attack allow different options, as opposed to bombard and assult with Modern Armour. These may be 'new toys' but I cannot see that they are over-powerful or radical, and they seem to fit with the 'how do we make every unit useful' idea

[Risa]

One minor point: Should we remove leader and king units from valid target list? Surely it seldom comes into play in most of SP, but allowing killing hard-earned defensive-combat leader or king with a single shot is not that fun.

[alexman]

I think it's a lot of fun if you are the one with the Special Forces unit!

Seriously, you're probably right. It changes the game too much.