Marines and Paratroopers what are they??!!

[PapaLenin]

Could an experiensed player tell me what are Marines and Paratroopers for? Yes they have their special abilities but aren't they pretty useless for having so low def and attack value and being so expensive to build? I mean is there only one way to make them useful - edit???

[lockstep]

IMO, yes. Marines and paratroopers are about as useful currently as the privateers of Civ3 v1.07.

[Kc7mxo]

Marines have the advantage of being able to kill ground units from the ocean. Take a few along witha fleet of ships, and whenever you bombard a city, finish off the units with the marines. Because they're attacking from sea against a stack, only the marine who kills the last unit will actually hit the beach.

I like this because you can assault enemy cities and only place a single unit of yours in danger. I consider the razing of an enemy port a reasonable trade off for the relative cheapness of a marine.

[Optimizer]

I am going to remove the Marine (or make it an upgrade from the Infantry unit) and give all gun units the Marine ability and the Offensive role. Does that make sense to you?

[steelehc]

Marines should be different then regular infantry, their aility is useful, and if their attack/defence values were higher...

What I did was give the marine and paradrop abilities to both marines and paratroopers, rename them to "Light Infantry" and seriously up their numbers. I don't think its necessary to have two special-ops type infantry units.

Steele

[Jaybe]

Marines:
I was invading Persia, and they had a well-OILED town connected with the main body of their country by a narrow isthmus. This would be a great place to cut them off with, especially on a mountain on the isthmus. Unfortunately, they had the isthmus tiles occupied by a single spearman and worker, preventing my landing directly on those tiles.

My inability to take the mountain isthmus tile directly led to the complete failure of the invasion, as over time Persia overwhelmed my 2-3 stacks of infantry, tanks & artillery with cavalry, knights & immortals.

Morale to the story: (1) take a few Marines along for the ride; (2) wait to invade until everyone's ready and you have massive local superiority.

[PapaLenin]

Marines have the advantage of being able to kill ground units from the ocean. Take a few along witha fleet of ships, and whenever you bombard a city, finish off the units with the marines. Because they're attacking from sea against a stack, only the marine who kills the last unit will actually hit the beach.

Do marines retreat like mounted units? Cause if they don't then u endanger them all because they have very bad attack against infantry.

Have anyone made use of paratroopers?

[dr.charm]

*IF* there was some limit placed on railroads, so that there wasn't one on every square, I can see how paratroopers would be useful. As it stands though, just about wherever you drop them, the enemy can instantaneously move the attacking units into place, making them more or less utterly useless.

Cheers,

Dr. Charm

[korn469]

PapaLenin

what Kc7mxo is that if you have a number of marines on a ship and they attack a number of units on the ground, then the only marine that will advance after combat is the marine that killed the last defender on the ground, the rest of your marines will remain (in relative safety from ground counter attacks) on the ship

otherwise marines as is do not retreat

[MikeV]

Originally posted by PapaLenin
Have anyone made use of paratroopers?

I find para-dropped (and helicopter-borne) units useful in special circumstances. As with Marines, these are usually secondary targets that I can't reach easily with other units
They're also great on/near a strategic resource the enemy civ is counting on (like Oil).

Marines are great for getting onto an island, and/or taking an otherwise inaccessible harbor city.

Paratroops are great for getting to a city that is surrounded by mountains and hills, or any other terrain that Tanks/MI/Armor can't reach in a single bound. (See the picture below: New Nottingham isn't reachable across the surrounding terrain.)

In both cases, it's important to bombard the target a lot beforehand. And, since paratroops have to endure at least one counter-attack, it's important to place them on the best defensive terrain.

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by dr.charm
*IF* there was some limit placed on railroads, so that there wasn't one on every square, I can see how paratroopers would be useful. As it stands though, just about wherever you drop them, the enemy can instantaneously move the attacking units into place, making them more or less utterly useless.

Cheers,

Dr. Charm

No, No, No! You got it all wrong...
The idea, just as in 'reality' is: the Marines assault the beach after you've bombarded all the defenders to 1 HP, then you load the tile up with infantry for defense.

[TinCow]

I have used paratroopers a couple times effectively. Both times were in games in which I took over a continent, but the civs that I defeated still had a few small cities on other nearby islands. I usually try to avoid overseas campaigns, especially in ancient and medieval. Thus I'll often make peace once I have the main landmass secured. In two games, I built up a whole bunch of paratroopers and dropped them on the various islands to take them out in a two-turn period later in the game, to get rid of those puny hostile civs. The reason they were successful was because I kicked the snot out of these guys early on and crippled them. Each time I did this I was facing mainly medieval level units, with a small scattering of riflemen and cavalry. As such, my paratroopers mopped the floor with the opposition and wiped their pathetic island 'strongholds' off the map.

As such though, the paratroopers were little more than convenience units for me. I used them to take out a weak enemy that I wouldve had no problems killing by normal means... it just saved me loading up transports and sending them out there to do the dirty work.

[korn469]

MikeV

looking at that picture still doesn't make me think that paratroopers are worth much with their current stats

moving diagonally starting with the gold square you can get your modern armor setting on a moutain beside of their New Nottingham in one turn, now maybe if the attack was coming from another direction (to the right hand side of the screen or from the top of the screen possibily) then it would possibly make the paratroopers more useful, but with only a six attack, the defender would have to be really really weak befor you could do that

just a little food for thought

a veteran paratrooper against a fortified 1hp infantry in a town gives you a 77% chance of winning with the paratrooper

a vet marine against the same infantry gives you an 84.5% chance of winning

however if the infantry is in a city and has 2 hps then you have the following odds

paratrooper 35.7% chance of victory
marine 47.5% chance of victory

i really think that both could use some inmprovement

[TinCow]

In response to korn:

The problem is not their attack/defense power. I think the problem with paratroopers is that they are a unit from Civ 2 that was kept in the game despite the fact that what made them useful in Civ 2 was eliminated. In Civ 2 you could bomb the living hell out of enemy cities, then drop in paratroopers to take the empty city. Now, since planes cannot kill units, this aspect has been removed. There are currently only two ways to clear a city via ranged attack. 1) Drop the defenders down to 1hp and bombard them with cruise missles. 2) Nuke the living hell out of the city.

Number 1 is pointless because of the pathetic range of the cruise missle (2??? Really, please explain this to me Firaxis? What the hell is the point of this unit?). If you can get several cruise missles within bombard range of an enemy city, you might as well just drive your damn army into the city and take it that way. As for option number 2... well, I don't think I need to explain the problems with that.

If Firaxis allows planes to kill units (please, please, please bring this back), then paratroopers would instantly be useful once again with no alteration in their stats (more so if airbases were brought back too).

[korn469]

Tin Cow

firaxis could make paratroopers half way useful right now if a paradrop didn't use the paratroopers move up, that means they could attack a weak unit after they landed beside of them, but i still think that since they are an offensive unit that they need to have their attack stat upped some, same thing goes for marines, mainly because marines don't have a chance of blasting into a city with regular infantry, so this means that you need to bring a huge naval taskforce to weaken the city, especially since naval units are so slow that it is quite possible for defenders to arrive before the transport does

i really like the fact that air units can't completely kill things, while firaxis does need to make air units stronger, being able to kill things qith air units alone just breaks the game

i would rather firaxis alter a few units instead of change the entire dynamic of the game

as for cruise missiles i agree with you completely, especially since you can't load them onto subs or anything