I've been wondering about something for some time and finally figured that the wisdom of the HoI4 forum is needed for this mystery.
You see, in the game, there are three types of special forces - paratroopers (air), marines (sea), mountaineers (land). Both the paratrooper and the marines have a "special attack" being airdrops and amphibious assaults respectively. Of course, technically, infantry can attempt a beach landing, but are so heavily penalized that it is usually not worthwhile once there is any opposing defenders at all.
So this leaves us with the mountaineers. Since they have no "special attack", I had always assumed they were essentially elite infantry, having the role of the "mainstream" special forces, similar to say commandos or rangers. This bears out historically, as mountaineer divisions fought well in many engagements regardless of terrain (e.g. German mountain divisions in the capture of Crete).
However, upon checking the in-game stats, I realized that mountaineers had better bonuses than infantry only for Mountains and Hills. This could still be somewhat acceptable, if they were just as good as infantry everywhere else (i.e. they were "Mountaineers" after all). But it turns out that they had worse stats than infantry for almost all the remaining terrain types (plains, deserts, forests, jungles, marshes etc). So I could not just use them freely as "elite infantry", but become worse-than-regular once we're down from the mountains... This is just weird, or am I missing something?
(On a related note, if the above is the intended design, then shouldn't there be a few other special unit types for other terrains like jungles? This would be historically accurate too as there were WWII units on both sides that were specially trained say for the Malayan or Burmese jungles.)
My question: Am I missing something about the Mountaineers?
Yiren.
You see, in the game, there are three types of special forces - paratroopers (air), marines (sea), mountaineers (land). Both the paratrooper and the marines have a "special attack" being airdrops and amphibious assaults respectively. Of course, technically, infantry can attempt a beach landing, but are so heavily penalized that it is usually not worthwhile once there is any opposing defenders at all.
So this leaves us with the mountaineers. Since they have no "special attack", I had always assumed they were essentially elite infantry, having the role of the "mainstream" special forces, similar to say commandos or rangers. This bears out historically, as mountaineer divisions fought well in many engagements regardless of terrain (e.g. German mountain divisions in the capture of Crete).
However, upon checking the in-game stats, I realized that mountaineers had better bonuses than infantry only for Mountains and Hills. This could still be somewhat acceptable, if they were just as good as infantry everywhere else (i.e. they were "Mountaineers" after all). But it turns out that they had worse stats than infantry for almost all the remaining terrain types (plains, deserts, forests, jungles, marshes etc). So I could not just use them freely as "elite infantry", but become worse-than-regular once we're down from the mountains... This is just weird, or am I missing something?
(On a related note, if the above is the intended design, then shouldn't there be a few other special unit types for other terrains like jungles? This would be historically accurate too as there were WWII units on both sides that were specially trained say for the Malayan or Burmese jungles.)
My question: Am I missing something about the Mountaineers?
Yiren.
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