Military Engineers should be fun and dynamic and important.

Jaster83

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Military Engineers... they are so crucial to warfare, yet they are absolutely worthless in this game... with a 4 upkeep cost they are fairly expensive, too. As is, unless you're Poland, you *might* pop one out before you need an airstrip to get the science boost for 2x forts. After you need an airstrip on a 1 tile island you would still have one charge left that you don't need and minimum 2 gpt upkeep. Dumb. Like the unit was a pure after-thought. They should be impactful, they should be valuable. They should be fun and a dynamic part of military strategy.

Rebalancing the current abilities for Vanilla (because it should be this way already)
Give him 4 charges to be used on:
Roads, cost 1 charge each tile
Forts, cost 2 charges
Airstrips, cost 3 charges
Missile Silos, costs 4 charges

To keep them from being abused and spammed you'd have to make them cheaper but scale them up like builders, just far more aggressively. Start them off at 100 base production, rising by ~25% every one you build, so 100, 125, 155, 195, 244, etc. Maybe give a free one with the Military Academy that still ups the cost of the next one, or each Military Academy reduces the cost of engineers built there by 15% with an additional 5% overall reduction (per academy). So with one Academy it'd be 20% or one tier reduction to build an engineer there, with two Academies the cost reduction at those cities would be 25% and 10% everywhere. This discount would increase the value of academies but without making engineers so cheap as to be spam-able. (If you build 4 academies it would reduce the cost at an academy by -35% and -20% with just an armory.) This type of discount would basically equate to every time you build an engineer you would need to build an encampment, a barracks/stable, an armory, and an academy to reduce the cost by about one tier.

If captured he becomes a builder with 2x the number of remaining charges he had. Turns back into an Engineer if recaptured, but has his charges reduced to half the charges the builder had, minus one, rounded up, minimum of one. This would keep people from trading their Engineers back and forth and exploiting.


Adding new abilities (for next expansion pack, because they would change the game)
If he has full movement points then the tile the engineer is on, as well as every adjacent tile, has no movement penalty or cost due to hills/rivers/woods/rain forests associated with it. Also, if embarked, eliminate the embarkation cost to move onto the water tile the engineer is on or adjacent to, and similarly eliminate the disembarkation cost to move onto the land tile the engineer is on or adjacent to. Effectively creating beach-heads or creating make-shift portable docks, but only one directional unless you bring two engineers. The reason he needs full movement points is so that you can't just march along through whatever as long as you have an engineer with you.

So the charge counts are very specific and I think would be perfectly balanced with his adjacency uses. If you want to use his adjacency you get 1 fort + 1 road or 1 airstrip. If you don't want to use the adjacency you get an extra road or an extra fort out of him. If you wanted to make 2 forts you could, just like now. If all you want is roads you get two more tiles out of each engineer, if you want an airfield you can still use his adjacency bonus, and if you want to nuke your neighbors then you need the whole engineer.

This function would be a lot more historically accurate than how the unit is now, as engineers are used to facilitate troop movement through difficult terrain. Once the troops had moved through the engineers would often destroy whatever they had placed to aid the movement of the troops so that the enemy couldn't use them.

New Abilities that should exist:
With Steel:
Make a Czech Hedgehog (large anti-tank caltrop) for 2 charges that costs all of your movement to move onto (if the unit starts a turn with 6 movement it would require all of that movement, if the unit starts with 2 it would require all that movement) and all of your movement to move off or to pillage. (This way non-cavalry would be the preferred method of clearing, but cavalry still could clear it.) Engineers can destroy to gain 1 charge, which would allow you to move your own while still paying a bit of a penalty. (It would still cost two turns to remove it, and if you're an enemy assaulting a city you'd have your engineer exposed to capture, so it's risky.)

With Conservation:
Turn a tile into a lake, requiring flat land and river on at least three sides of the Hex, costs 3 charges (the river requirement so that you can't just spam out lakes everywhere, and flat land because you can't dam a hill =P Not entirely sure why you would *want* this, but that's what the Army Corps of Engineers does, it makes reservoirs... so they should do it in this game, dammit! Maybe for appeal and Beach Resorts?)

With Rifling:
Blow up a cliff =D for 2 charges.

With Replacement Parts:
Make a Trench for 1 Charge over two tiles. (You'd stand on one tile, then choose Trench, and select an adjacent tile and both tiles would get a trench on one side. You'd control which side by which direction the adjacent tile was.)
Trenches would cost movement like rivers to cross and cost a pillage action to remove. They would also halve all non-melee damage dealt to the tiles on either side (Airstrikes, artillery, ranged naval and land units)

Also with Replacement Parts:
Reduce a City's defenses by a percentage per charge (this would have to be tested out so that the % makes sense, about a third of what a jet bomber does per charge, I'd say.) Or maybe just have an adjacency bonus that gives + Combat Power to city defenses for melee, which might make more sense, not sure.

In about three hours of thinking about it I've come up with all this, what is Firaxis's problem that they can't make these units useful ffs? I would just mod this myself but I'm currently on PS4 =( (Yes, it is inferior in every way as a gaming platform, I agree, but it is more convenient and cheaper... because I already have one.)
 
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Since they can be used to rush the production of Aqueducts, dams, canals, and flood barriers, I find they are one of the best units in the mid-game onward.
You can absolutely slam out extraordinary amounts of infrastructure in new cities with a little wagon train of these guys. Even a flood barrier will never take more than 5 turns, and you can do it in no more than 3 with most civs. Because they are so cheap in late game turns, you can crank out a ton of them from one city and effectively transfer production to new cities, which is strategically invaluable.

At least, in Gathering Storm. In Vanilla they aren't very useful.
 
At least, in Gathering Storm. In Vanilla they aren't very useful.
Ah, yeah, I have Vanilla on PS4 (wish I had a decent PC). I've read a lot about the expansions but hadn't read they added functionality to the ME.

Even with the added benefit to infrastructure that doesn't nearly address how undervalued the Military Engineer is in the warfare aspect of the game. They are military engineers after all. They just added civilian engineering to their resume, when they should have probably made a different unit entirely called... Civilian Engineer =P
 
Ah, yeah, I have Vanilla on PS4 (wish I had a decent PC). I've read a lot about the expansions but hadn't read they added functionality to the ME.

Even with the added benefit to infrastructure that doesn't nearly address how undervalued the Military Engineer is in the warfare aspect of the game. They are military engineers after all.
I share that feeling in general, but occasionally ME (rail-)roads save an invaluable troop for me.
They just added civilian engineering to their resume, when they should have probably made a different unit entirely called... Civilian Engineer =P
As Civilian Engineer they should do some Builder tasks. I think a proper name would be Picky Engineer.
 
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