What are you on about? With 210 armor Stug Ds, Propaganda arty (which you can't counter), combined arms counter blob and the stuka, DAK has one of the best if not the best tools in the whole game to counter the current "blob near a heal truck" meta
StuG III Ds are abysmal vs anything bigger than a Stuart (which also outranges its 30 range by 10). I read somewhere that it has 100 pen far, but it tends to miss the target or detonate too early (eg: Chaffee seems to eat shots up like no tomorrow). AT guns pen that 210 with little difficulty. They have nice anti-inf cluster performance but let's not pretend it's a Tommy deleting machine. AT boy squads outrange it and 2 will beat it consistently. If one uses the StuG III D in places with lots of LoS blockers (to mitgate AT gun power) then it's asking to eat snares.
Combined arms (CA) is indeed fantastic. And vet I IS gets improved accuracy vs targets out of cover (Base of Fire), so forget about diving the heal truck. It evens out CA in my experience and stomps your men out of CA, at least until vet II. I suppose it could be the battle of the heal trucks but I never liked this playstyle. And your (usually) LVs are also countered by their A-move and/or Stuart(s). I can do the micro fine but most ppl will struggle immensely.
Propaganda arty is available in only 1/3 BGs and only really works once as a surprise. Hardly much micro tax to split the blob up into 2 slightly apart groups.
If you can make the Stuka work in the huge med tank spam meta, I salute you o7. Delaying your Pz III Ls that much is literally asking for you and your army to get rolled by Crusaders and 76mm Shermans. Unless you are already winning of course.
tl;dr: DAK does indeed have fantastic tools for dealing with Brits. Mainly in the late game and of course Achtrad
As WM, just go the Pzgren building and buy a Nebelwerfer. Get it a bit close to the Britblob then burn them all, esp if they're clustered around a healtruck.
As DAK, you are playing the COH2 OKW vs UKF experience and then some. So go play WM unless you're prepared to deal with the uphill struggle ahead of you.
Then why did they trimm the Wehrmacht AT damage of the combined loiter, but not for DAK. On paper its rather odd.
Edit: I'd imagine the AT-loiter of the DAK is a simple copy-paste from Wehr (or vice versa).
I can't speak for the damage of the DAK AT loiter, but the ability is different to the WM version. It doesn't target inf at all where as the WM one pins and shreds squads. I wasn't sure until I did some testing just now.
EDIT: Ok I think I understand the two Stuka loiters now after a lot of testing.
WM - Two planes. One targets inf and one targets tanks. If only one such target in the area, then the other plane just hangs around doing nothing.
DAK - Two planes. Both target tanks. If only inf then they hang around doing nothing.
They've nerfed the AT performance of the DAK Stuka planes too so I guess they might be identical AT planes after all. Each plane doing 225-250 sorta range damage per pass, same as the WM AT plane.
"Team-colours and some other BS. PS: we touched up some loiters."
DAK loiter as potent as before, and now cheaper.
To be fair, the DAK loiter doesn't track that well. I've seen med tanks reverse out of it no problem and the cannon trails land where the tank used to be. You can't do that vs the rocket planes as they have almost perfect tracking. I didn't know the Brit AT loiter was only 120 muni, that crazy lol.
As for the patch, I won't be able to speak for the balance until some games testing it against the usual FotM ppl. A big round of fixes and changes though.
Not exactly thrilled by it myself but I could see it being one of managements priorities to get the storefront open so that another revenue source is up and running. Gotta keep them lights on.
I wouldn't be surprised if ppl-above-senior-management are breathing on staff to try and cover the extra dev time costs when the game release was pushed back. The store is a necessary part of the game either way. Hopefully the monetisation is relatively benign overall.
Yes, this is true. I think what I was really surprised by are the flames; which, when combined with the armour, make them very dangerous. Not knowing the numbers off-hand, it seems like flames do more damage in this game. I have learned many lessons so far, some of them are what you describe- don't go toe to toe, 2xMG, sniper, mines... lessons that were abundant in CoH2, but became apparent extremely early in this game, with this unit.
I'll just add one point - I don't recommend double MGs against DAK. My MG comment was LMGs, so stuff like Brens, BARs etc. Though AT Boys also overpen the Guastatori armor easily too. COH3 has an easily accessible mortar to Brits, USF and WM, but DAK is forced to get a (zero fuel) mortar Halftrak for early light arty. If you go double MG opener they might commit to double mortar HT and then you'll be walked off the map because you won't have the assault force to push through their inf screen.
Absolutely. Yes, flames maximize against cover. I know this, but what I'm saying is, it doesn't seem to matter what the circumstances are, these guys are beasts; my opinion seems at least somewhat supported by the fact that they are an overwhelmingly popular unit in team games. Not to mention- flames, body armour, AT satchels, what ?
Ok I take back the cover comment.
I would suggest a different perception of them. When you see a Guastatori squad, they're like 2 flamesapper squads, but are more dangerous as they come later (2 vs 0) and have higher reinforce cost(40 vs 22). Still 440MP vs 2x220=440MP and 90FU vs 2x50=100FU for the flamers. 8 men unarmoured vs 6 men with 1.25 armour. Now I don't think you'd want to keep inf near two flamer squads unless you seriously outnumbered them with inf with proper anti-inf firepower. Or a lot of long range firepower like LMGs etc. I come across a lot of ppl who see one squad and then think they can go toe-to-toe with them, when they'd usually soft retreat vs 2 flamers.
AT satchel range is maybe 5 or 6? Kinda deserve them landing if you get that close with a vehicle. Only available from vet 1 too.
It's prob easier for ppl who fought against shocktroops a lot in COH2, as they are familiar with this kind of matchup, minus flamers but with more durable men.
Of course, problems arise vs experienced users who know how to maximise the smoke and atk-ground, but that's a story for another day.
against USF. firing out of cover, absolutely decimating any and all units with flamethrowers, while taking very little damage from units firing from cover.
I can't speak for Bersaglieri, they seemed alright combat wise to me in my very limited use of them. Lack of a snare (or even threat of a snare) put me off them a lot. But I'm a big believer in the scaling power of Panzergrens.
Guastatori well, they do indeed give pioneers a good name. However in 20+ games of them I've not had one post-nerf where they've felt invincible, esp since Allied mainlines will have a bit of a vet advantage due to 2CP timing. Getting models picked off is to be expected, making you pick your fights carefully. The usual Britblob contains AT boys who make your armour feel nonexistent. Obviously if an Allied player 1v1 Guastatori then they'll get stomped and they should since Guastatori have 440MP, 40MP reinforce cost.
Not sure why you seem to think cover works against flamethrowers? If anything you take more damage because your men are all bunched up together tightly and flamers ignore cover. Historically they even do bonus damage to garrisons.
I do see a lot of ppl dive vehicles onto vet I of them, but that's your own fault for what comes next (AT satchel).
I've only had problems getting T4 when things go really wrong or Allies abuse BS stuff to the extent that the entire team has collapsed. It doesn't take long to get the 80FU required for Pz III L and from there you can really start turning the game round with your scaling. Most of the time anyway. Assuming you are used to this uphill situation (hello OKW!).
T4+ is usually a winmore thing in my experience. The armoury upgrades make your upgraded call-ins stronger than their WM counterparts, but that's still 2 Pz III Ls worth of FU just to tech up further.
Tiger is just a fantasy at this point due to the extra tech fuel charge. Furthermore you are extremely heavily discouraged from getting it because it's extremely likely AT loiters will just vaporise it in one pass and a couple hits from the usual med tank spam.
If the point of T4+ fuel nerf was to delay the Tiger timing, it went too far, esp when the usual Crusader III/76mm Sherman spam never really had a problem killing it in a quick charge. For 150+180=330FU you can expect to face 3-4 Shermans or 5+ Crusaders.
Something I noticed whilst desperately fending off a med tank army with 2 flak 88s - 2 AA units should be enough to shred AT loiters. Later tested it with 2 Flak 36 (20mms) and a Wirblewind + the 20mm weapon team. Flak 88s don't really kill them in time to save a Tiger but it's still very heavy hits.
You don't need the AA units to be parked next to your army, they have a very long range. Of course the further away you are from them , the more damage you'll take before the planes are shot down. Can have planes shot down before they even fire rockets potentially in the best scenario.