chickensaver
Chieftain
Hello! I am back after 16 years! Old habits never die. (Most of this could be common sense for advanced players.)
The point of this post is to mention that I found a potential use for paratroopers, if your border town has an airfield. (or airport)
I was testing to find any good use for this unit, and I found that if I have a helicopter loaded with paratroopers in my productive city, I could, in the same turn, re-base the helicopter with the paratroopers in the airfield of the border town, unload the paratroopers and have them parachute into enemy lines, getting there one turn faster than if I loaded regular infantry. This works because when the helicopters rebase, the units inside do not use movement points. The movement points only get used when they parachute.
Then as usual, you can parachute to protect a failed attack of your "red-lined tanks," parachute to enemy resources/hills/mountains as annoyer units, parachute to crater-bombed zones so the AI can't send workers, or parachute next to an empty city that was bombed or undefended. I also occasionally attack with paratroopers if the defender has 1hp, but get really annoyed when a 1hp pikeman defeats my healthy elite paratrooper.
Of course, I still find paratroopers to be of very limited use since the tech and unit are costly and the shields and beakers could be better spent, but I believe this strategy is worth mentioning, especially for island hopping in archipelago.
Note: You could do this without paratroopers too, but you need twice as many helicopters, half of your helicopters in your main city and the other half in the town airfield. Load Infantry into Helicopter A rebase to airfield, unload infantry, load into Helicopter B, then Airdrop into enemy lines as indicated above. (I use infantry as generic term, ideally it would be TOW infantry)
The point of this post is to mention that I found a potential use for paratroopers, if your border town has an airfield. (or airport)
I was testing to find any good use for this unit, and I found that if I have a helicopter loaded with paratroopers in my productive city, I could, in the same turn, re-base the helicopter with the paratroopers in the airfield of the border town, unload the paratroopers and have them parachute into enemy lines, getting there one turn faster than if I loaded regular infantry. This works because when the helicopters rebase, the units inside do not use movement points. The movement points only get used when they parachute.
Then as usual, you can parachute to protect a failed attack of your "red-lined tanks," parachute to enemy resources/hills/mountains as annoyer units, parachute to crater-bombed zones so the AI can't send workers, or parachute next to an empty city that was bombed or undefended. I also occasionally attack with paratroopers if the defender has 1hp, but get really annoyed when a 1hp pikeman defeats my healthy elite paratrooper.
Of course, I still find paratroopers to be of very limited use since the tech and unit are costly and the shields and beakers could be better spent, but I believe this strategy is worth mentioning, especially for island hopping in archipelago.
Note: You could do this without paratroopers too, but you need twice as many helicopters, half of your helicopters in your main city and the other half in the town airfield. Load Infantry into Helicopter A rebase to airfield, unload infantry, load into Helicopter B, then Airdrop into enemy lines as indicated above. (I use infantry as generic term, ideally it would be TOW infantry)
