Profile of Mr.Smith

hey Balance Team,

soviet 120mm mortar flare bugs out. not sure if normal sov 82mm does that, too.

Did you try combining 120mm mortar flares with hold fire on? This might help convincing the 120mm fire the flares. I'll have a look again at the 120mm.

The issue with the Soviet howitzer is the guaranteed payoff on base bombardment picking up retreating squads, moreso than actually targeting units on the map. It was always extremely effective at this but with the AOE increase and the ability to fit it into a composition with much greater ease due to cost changes it's even better now.

At Vet0 there's some tradeoffs between the ML-20 and LeFH. Those tradeoffs probably go away with the 2 shells the ML-20 gets at Vet1. We could rework Vet1 to something different, basically (e.g., make ML-20 fire slower, but Vet1 resets the reload time between to normal).

Regarding base-barrages; would something like lower range help? (we can restrict howitzers from firing in bases, but that's counter-intuitive)

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  [FBP] Soviet T3+ Howitzers

  by: Strummingbird map: Faymonville Approach

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I'm not sure about the Mortar Pit - the way it's set up now, its probably even more untouchable when ahead due to higher HP and reduced vulnerability to AT weapons, but when playing from behind and fighting takes place near your base it basically cannot stay alive. I doubt this is a good thing.

Let's break this up into two parts.

With respect to when playing from ahead, perhaps, indeed the mortar pit is too durable, especially when upgraded. That's probably fixable by reducing the amount of hitpoints. We could also remove the barrage cooldown bonus that the upgraded mortar gets, so that you only have 1 barrage every 60 seconds to worry about.

With respect to when playing on the backfoot, the only thing we can do is allow mortar pits to be built in base territory. Then, when you push the enemy out, you have access to smoke that you can use. However, such a change would be catastrophic for maps like crossroads, where a base pit can probably reliably harass mid.

With respect to coming back on the game and establishing a foothold, Brits would normally have the 25 pounder barrage, if it weren't a complete garbage ability. However, that's called #BalancingWithScope, and we have to live with it.

To be fair. In the live version, if you are on the backfoot, your pit would be most likely to explode to AT guns on Stugs that glance at it for even a second. The change, hopefully, makes it so that people can't arbitrarily prolong matches to the late-game simply by spamming sim city.

Ostwind is not nearly as potent as it was in FBP1.0. Effectiveness is probably about right, but the Wehr faction has plenty of very strong anti-infantry tools and I suspect the Ostwind will not find a niche. I'd suggest a 10 fuel drop in price, perhaps with corresponding manpower reduction, to allow players to fit it into a T3 based composition more easily

If you'd like a replay to demonstrate the last two points I'll gladly upload.

It's about having alternatives. It's also about having an early tool you can use to take down high received-accuracy infantry on maps where you can't or don't want to rely on the sniper. And it's also about having a vehicle that can move that can do that.

If anybody has any idea how to fix squad-ai (while avoiding gratuitous dancing) let me know, and we can work this out.

Currently, I've no idea how this part of the game functions at all. But yeah, the current lack of movement from squads makes those early game engagements look super-boring for rifle-wielding squads.

EDIT:

CoH1 AI was annoying at times when you wanted to place your squads behind sandbags; they would just spread out and hop around, making cover impossible to use.

CoH2 had some pretty atrocious squad AI back when, every time you would select a target, the squad would perform a little dance. This made guards/captain completely useless as AT platforms.

The ideal solution would be something that makes individual squad members dance while the squad is moving (e.g., how bar riflemen in CoH1 would jump like wildcats for cover while the squad is moving).

Mortar Pit Report:

Cheers for taking the time for testing this to us! I hope the adjustments to AA make those platforms feel ok now?

The Mortar Pit is quite viable in 1v1 due to reduced Mp cost, however range is still astoundingly massive. You can cover pretty much an entire 1v1 map if you put it anywhere near the center (e.g. Langres, Kholodny, Glider)

It's true that you can harass pretty remote points with barrage. However, the whole point for this is that the enemy has all the opportunity in the world to side-step the barrage area. After doing that, the enemy is safe from your mortar pit fro 40-60 seconds (depending on the upgrade).

If necessary, we can leave the recharge time for the mortars to 60 seconds, and let the pit mostly operate on smoke barrage for support.

It is reliably countered by infantry with automatic weapons, which is great. Some of the strongest are Sturmpioneers, Panzergrenadiers, Fallschirmjagers, Assault Grenadiers. Grenades and even anti-tank abilities (Panzerfaust, AT grenade) are quite effective too.

That's good; just remember that you need to aim grenades dead-center, due to the new hitbox. LMG grens should also be doing a number on them.

Howitzers (leFH) still reliably counter them, however all other artillery do not. Panzerwerfer and Stuka zu Fuss are quite useless against it, as are G.W. 34s and leIG 18s. AT guns (Pak 40, Raketen) and Tank Destroyers (StuG III G all the way through Jadgtiger) are also quite useless.

Howitzers apply a fixed amount of bonus damage to emplacements, even if they barely touch them. Since we can't touch sim-city stuff, I think it's ok for howitzers to be a safe pair of hands to wipe sim city off the floor, for now. However, if we were allowed to do a proper rebalance of all emplacements, that bonus damage would be have been snapped off.

Indirect fire is meant to be inefficient and unreliable vs mortar pits. That's because we want to desgin around the retardedness of artillery-spam which the current design promotes. Nevertheless, if we reduce the HP of the pit sufficiently, indirect fire could remain some sort of a soft-counter.

Do note that due to the decreased hitbox size, it will now pay off to get line of sight on the mortar pit (for fog of war) and move your indirect fire closer to be more accurate. In the live version, you could barrage mortar pits from max range like it was nobody's business.

Tank destroyers and AT guns are meant to be completely useless.

However, there is one type of weapon that should hard-counter it, yet does not. Flamethrowers are woefully ineffective against it, despite the Mortar Pit being a building. Pioneer and Sturmpioneer Flamers are incredibly useless, and even the Flammpanzer 38(t) Hetzer and Sdkfz. 251/16 Flammpanzerwagen with their vehicle-mounted flamers (with damage-over-time) are absolutely worthless.

Target tables, yaaaaay! Before you mentioned that, I had absolutely no idea that an accuracy modifier vs emplacements existed (all I knew was that a lot of flamer weapons were dealing additional damage vs them).

I'll have a look at the flamer weapons and see to that their accuracy and dot size are big enough to threaten the pits.

TL;DR, my main concerns are:
- Massive range is worrying
- Flamers are utterly useless

Suggestions:
Is it possible to increase the hitbox size to 3 or 5? First off, it will be easier to target with infantry, increases vulnerability to indirect fire (what should counter static play), while still being small enough to avoid being sniped by units like AT guns and Tank Destroyers.

If the pit is too durable to all kinds of threats, then it's good news. We can trivially fix this by reducing the raw amount of HP. The fun begins when we make the pit becomes uneven to different kinds of threats.

I haven't tested the pits enough. However, my original impressions are that even without brace, the pit seems too durable. (the only reason the pit might require brace now is fallschirmjagers and lava nades, tbh).

Now, hitbox size and target size are two completely different parameters.

Target size is what balistic weapons use in their calculations to attack. Ideally, the values should stay within 0.8 and 1.2. Anything higher than target size of 2 and bolt actions become completely obsolete, whereas short-range automatics will start sniping the pit from max range, which is less than ideal.

Hitbox size is what affects the size of the mortar pit and determines vulnerability to AoE. We can't change it at will, and can only reuse hitboxes from other entities (in this case, we had to use the TM-35 mine, as it's the only entity that seemed to be able to get overshot by AT guns).

Thanks for the testing.

Note that LMGs deal more damage at range. Therefore, ideally you would want to engage at 30-35 range with your LMG grens.


My guestimate is that cancer commander will take about 2.4 times as long to kill with small arms without brace. With brace, the longer it takes to kill, the more braces you can put in.

Note that we aren't allowed to reduce brace duration below 20 sec at this point. We also aren't allowed to reduce cancer commander armour bonus to anything below 100%. We'll have to work around this by changing HP, price and minimum range and barrage cooldown for the base emplacement.

PS: How come you get so different results for the 2x executions of the same thing (your first 4 experiments).

I think the leig will be more spammable with that price, it is already with the live cost, imagine with that cost

USF mortars are even cheaper than that at 240. However, I haven't seen anybody spam USF mortars ever since before WBP.

Hint: it's the difference in range