Realistic paratroopers

What would you like to see in Freeciv? Do you have a good idea what should be improved or how?
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samdef
Posts: 21
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2022 7:01 am

Realistic paratroopers

Post by samdef »

In real life, paratroopers jump out of airplanes and use their parachute to land safely on the ground. In Freeciv, paratroopers are seemingly catapulted from a city or airbase and somehow manage to land far away. This is very strange behavior for a paratrooper! Was this strange behavior initially implemented due to the lack of an aircraft unit from which a paratrooper could jump from? Freeciv probably needs a transport aircraft unit before realistic paratrooper behavior can be implemented (New unit: transport aircraft).
cazfi
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Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2013 6:54 pm

Re: Realistic paratroopers

Post by cazfi »

I can't think any missing feature in the freeciv engine related to this. For several versions already you've even been able to define only some units able to leave the plane during flight. Let us know if support for such new features would be needed.

As for using it in some supplied rulesets - don't know. It would be mainly a balance issue, I think. Would it make some of those rulesets to work better?
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soundnfury
Posts: 28
Joined: Sat Apr 11, 2020 12:09 pm

Re: Realistic paratroopers

Post by soundnfury »

This is definitely possible with the current freeciv engine, because Aviation ruleset already has it :)
However before 3.0 it was difficult to make it work well because of the lack of actionenablers (needed to prevent paratroopers from doing things like attacking without getting out of the plane first) which might be why the classic rulesets use the abstracted system.

It has a few interesting consequences, since the range of paratrooper attacks is no longer "some fixed radius around each of your cities" but depends on aircraft range, airbases, potentially carriers (there are a few seaplanes that can carry paras)… Also, some of the early slow-moving aircraft have more than 2 fuel, meaning your transport might get intercepted en route and shot down before it can drop the paras.
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XYZ
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Re: Realistic paratroopers

Post by XYZ »

As soundnfury said, before 3.0 you had the problem of having a paratrooper who could fight out of a plane without first leaving it.
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