USF Airborne Company drops

Does anyone use mg and at-gun drops from this commander? It is pretty useless to drop them for MP, when I can just build them on my base for the same price. It will be much more useful if these drops required ammo, not MP. What do you think?

You can drop them for your teammates and can drop them next to an ambulance to reinforce in the field immediately. they are situational and have an opportunity cost on manpower but can be worth it.

You will almost never go both Lieutenant and Captain, and the advantage to dropping these is that you can fill in where you are missing. It can take a long time for a unit to build and walk down the field, if you need it right away, a drop near an ambulance is golden.

It's quite userful if you skip T3, which I do almost every game :-)

You can drop them for your teammates and can drop them next to an ambulance to reinforce in the field immediately. they are situational and have an opportunity cost on manpower but can be worth it.

Yeah, but playing this commander requires a lot of MP - paratroopers and pathfinders are pretty expensive units, besides you need MP for officers and vehicles.

Only useful in team games to drop shit for your team mates when they don't have it. The MG drop comes a little too late to be much use and is too expensive for what it is.

They need to lower the MP cost on these drops or make them cost a tiny bit more but drop with crews, because honestly they're more expensive than just training them out of base and I don't know anyone who actually skips the Lieutenant and Captain anyways to start with, which is where that equipment is bought.

Also, they're pretty much zero "opportunity" and all cost. You're sacrificing a squad to man them. If they dropped with crews, they'd have an opportunity cost because then they could actually be dropped into a fight when the situation allows it.

Unless you've seriously screwed up somewhere along the line, you're almost always better off just buying from base.

IMO the commander would be much better and legitimately competitive with Mechanized and Infantry Companies if they just scaled back all the CP costs by 1, even if they didn't add crews to the drops.

IMO the commander would be much better and legitimately competitive with Mechanized and Infantry Companies if they just scaled back all the CP costs by 1, even if they didn't add crews to the drops.

Exactly what I've been thinking too. The whole commander would be much much more interesting if every ability had one less CP to unlock. It would probably be my favourite commander actually. Now the variety this commander would offer is pretty much nullified because every unit/weapon drop arrives too late to use. Shocks are 2CP I don't understand why paratroopers aren't. 0CP pathfinders and 1CP mg drop would add so much more variety to dull early rifle spam.

The main utility is that you can get MGs if you went Captain, and you can get AT guns if you went LT. But the Pathfinder/AB squads are of rather limited utility, despite being fairly good units. You'll be utterly overwhelmed MP wise if you try to get rifles, officers, AT guns, MGs, pathfinder squad and AB. If you try to substitute rifles for AB partially, you'll wind up with an early gap in your lineup because the AB squads come well after the point in the game when you actually need a good amount of core infantry. Usually I'll just end up replacing dead Rifle squads with them later on if the need arises.

It's situational just like somebody said. You can drop an AT gun and crew it when you need it instead of waiting for it to build, then hauling it from your base all the way to the front lines. Realize how long that will take?

If you have the time, it's better to build it from your base. But if you're in trouble it's better to just drop it so nearby RE's or rifles can crew it.

Paras need recoilless rifles, and they need to be able to throw a satchel, not this stupid demo charge shit

Yah, half the time I use the timed demos, my Paratroopers just blow themselves up because of the shitty path finding lol.

I still think it's not a bad idea to drop mg and at-gun for ammo. For example 60 muni for mg / 90 for at-gun and saved MP you can spent on infantry squads or armor.

I rarely use them. Usually the ATG, not the HMG though. In general I use the commander mostly because Paratroopers are so extremely strong.

Place beacons with Pathfinders.
Drop ATG at frontline, crew with Pathfinders.
Use hold fire with remaining entity and place somewhere at the map where it can be useful as a spotter, but won't get revealed.

Gives you a cheap upkeep spotting unit and a really really really useful ATG (since Pathfinders have 50 vision range instead of the normal 35) that gets even better with vet (87.5 vision range and 70 attack range for the ATG, small vision cone though). It's a bit like the old Elefant with spotting scope and focus sight - Can see even further than it can shoot which is already far.

I still think it's not a bad idea to drop mg and at-gun for ammo. For example 60 muni for mg / 90 for at-gun and saved MP you can spent on infantry squads or armor.

Those prices are far too low to be honest.
Let's say 240MP for the MG and 280MP for the ATG to discount the lack of a crew. Converting that to munitions is still ~145 munition for the HMG and ~170 for the ATG. That would make them even less useful I think. You have to take the amount of MP you save into consideration and assign a similar munition value. Even at a discount (100 / 140 munition) I can't really see people use them that much. You might say "they'll call in Pathfinders!" - but those units are only really effective with their upgrades, so I don't know if they actually would do that.

The manpower bleed is ridiculously high for the Airborne commander. I started using it initially, but then gave it up when I realised that I wasn't ever actually using any of the abilities because everything is too expensive.

Actually i did start a pretty extensive discussion about this commander. It got some steam for a while and died at some point. The issues you are discussing here were discussed there too with suggestions and all.If someone whant's to continue the discussion there, i'll gladly respond!

http://www.coh2.org/topic/20110/toughts-of-a-veteran-on-the-airborne-company

Cheers for an actual Airborn company!

I personally find it a bit too situational, and should have been put together into a larger supply drop ability. An idea I came up before is that a supply glider is dropped to a location (say, it can only be at a Pathfinder antennae), and from there spawns HMGs and AT guns with a cooldown timer. It would also act like the Pathfinder antennae itself by providing reinforcement and even a healing toggle like the ambulance.