AT Ambush Camouflage
Coming early at 2CP is a much-needed buff. It works quite well, now that it is akin to a real-life "double-tap" ambush tactic (where the loader already has another shell and will immediately load as soon as the gun fires, making the gun fire very quickly for two shots). I assume that the bonus penetration and accuracy remain?
Yep! Those remain. The bonuses are there to enhance zis gun in the stats that it's currently lacking compared to other AT guns (penetration/reload time)
Engineer Salvage Kit
The bug where it could not be upgraded in conjunction with flamethrowers/ minesweepers is gone. However, the UI is still bugged; when you salvage a vehicle, it shows a "+0" on top of the munitions and fuel icon. The resources are claimed, no problem with that end. May I ask for the resource values for salvaging vehicles?
You get something in the order of 10-50 FU and MU per wreck, depending on the class of the vehicle (from kubelwagen to King Tiger). We don't know how to correct that UI glitch that you mention though.
Tank Ambush
Allowing the vehicle to rotate slowly works wonders, greatly improves the viability of this ability for SU-76Ms and SU-85s. Works quite well, also the bushes no longer appear in the fog of war. I assume the workaround was to give the bushes "ownership"?
However, there are several issues with this ability:
- The hull-down depression in the ground is still visible in the fog of war.
- If the camouflaged tank is within view radius (either through Spotting Scopes, or if the tanks are in Prioritize Vehicle and don't fire at infantry) you can use infantry squads to detect their position; hover over the tank and it will show you green cover.
- Assuming the Soviet player captures other players' abandoned tanks, will they also have ambush camouflage? So far I have only tested other Soviet tanks. The T-34/85, KV-1, and IS-2 have the ability, while the KV-2, M4C, and ISU-152 do not.
Bushes were already player-owned (for the camo effect). The fix was setting ghost-enabled to false.
We'll probably remove hull down depression for the reasons you mentioned. An opponent can quickly verify whether a depression is hiding a tank by hovering over with their cursor. Unfortunately, I don't know how to fix the green-shield thing, short of permanently giving soviet tanks a yellow cover effect.
We've given this effect to a few select soviet tanks. However, it's a bit painful to copy over the necessary values needed to every possible capturable tank.
On both ATG and Tank ambush:
If the reason to remove extra damage was to reduce infantry-wiping power, why not rework it into bonus damage vs vehicles? 40 bonus damage verses vehicle would make both ambushes much more dangerous due to how much burst damage a couple tanks/ATGs could deliver, which would force the Axis players to be much more careful.
Alternatively, I would say giving tanks the +25% reload speed buff would also work.
I don't know of a way to add target-table damage that hinges on conditional requirements. The reason ATG damage was changed to reload was that damage was too weak (purposely below the 200 threshold to avoid 2-shotting lights).
A reload buff on the tanks could potentially make them more deadly vs infantry, but we'll see. Perhaps, the most powerful aspect of tank camouflage is being able to gain a flank on an enemy with a turreted tank.
From my experience with the commander so far, the commander is a bag of highly-situational abilities. Every time I've tried to use all of them at the same time, I ended up hurting myself more than I hurt the enemy. Perhaps the right approach is picking the right tools for the right moment, and try not to overdo it; sort of like the commando doctrine.