Profile of Tiger Baron

What is the point of breakthrough without the "Close the pocket" ability? Laughing at your enemy because he lost 2-3 points while you spent a small fortune of fuel on it?

Maybe it would be a bit better if it was an ammo based ability.

Still tho capturing an enemy's cut off is still viable if you can get your vehicle to there I suppose, even if it's a mild inconvience to the enemy.

Ask Mr Smith and the "community balance team" that never really properly talked through the last patch with the community (especially Brit or USF players). He just did his own thing once lelic gave him the green light

If you look he's gone into hiding now the GCS stats are out, Soviets are insta picked the majority of the time and USF are underperforming but crucially Brits are dead and buried.

We all make mistakes, it's only human and even if so I still blame Relic.

He made the Artillery Pit mod together with Planet Smasher a long time ago and when I confronted him about it he said that they were limited by Relic's imposed scope, and frankly speaking I believe him.

After they botched DoW3 they left a skeleton crew to just call the shots on the further development of CoH2 so they could say that the community helped them fix the game but not entirely so they could save their shame, plus all of the flak as you are proving is going towards the community team, while Relic still have ultimate control in the background.

What will eventually fix this game is a community mod not plagued by Relic's "scopes" that people will actually prefer to play with over the vanilla game, problem is that that would only be the custom game crowd.

But perhaps that would show them how they were wrong in not giving full creative freedom to the community.

The Panzerbusche would be a nice addition, but I feel it would be more fitting to an "early war" style commander, with other things to complement the theme like the panzer III and mg34's. I also think the panzerfaust ability should be kept. Unsupported vehicles could be punished at close range by disabling them with the panzerfaust then flanking them with the rifle.

Well if we're honest, the Osttruppen do feel like an early war doctrine, apart from the air dropped Pak 40 and Railway Artillery of course, I don't even think that the Schwerer Gustav made it to the Eastern Front and even if it did the Russian railway network is in pretty bad shape for German trains to be on them, let alone to fire a 800mm gun from them.

How I imagine a revised Osttruppen doctrine together with your suggestions and a more early war/Stalingrad theme would be like this:

Everything else would be lef as it is except for:

The Osttruppen themselves would get the Panzerbusche upgrade as well talked, whether or not the Panzerfaust should be left after that is up to the devs to balance out.

The Supply drop would then no longer need to have the Pak 40 as well, I would either replace it with a GrW 34 Mortar or a Pak 36 (renamed M42, just give it the ability to garrison so it can utilize the trenches as well) which would then entirely fit in with the early war part of the commander because it already has an MG34 and it makes sense for the Luftwaffe to still be active in the earlier part of the war, suppling troops on the ground.

The Railway artillery like I said is a bit out of place and I never really find enough ammo to use it now that the Osttruppen have MG42s as well. So replacing it with a StuG III E would be more fitting and would actually have something fuel related you can also rely on.

Apart from that the Artillery officer can have some sorf of new artillery to compensate for the Railway Arty and I would really like for Entrenching Tools to become Defensive Tools and also give Pioneers tank traps but yeah...

That's about it from me for the Osttruppen doctrine, talking about it here even gave me an idea for a commander mod but I don't think I would have the time and knowledge from work now sadly.

What do you mean it automatically switches to HE?

Smoke is a timed ability, you use it once and have to wait for a while for it to "recharge" so to speak, it's not like in the UKF Alpha where there were 4 separate toggleable abilities.

Those abilities really made it unique and it was sad for many people to see them gone when the UKF was officially released, it made the mortar pit balanced because you had to micro it still unlike now where it's mostly useless and still has to be micro-ed.

But the real problem is that for smoke specifically it's still static and probably won't reach the spot where you want it to smoke some at least 60-70% of the time when you're fighting out of it's range, while other Armies can smoke wherever they want as soon as their indirect fire units are in range.

Ost vs USF is fairly balanced. USF vs OKW is broken which is why OKW did so well against USF in GCS2. OKW early manpower advantage is significant with how much better sturmpioneers are than riflemen and RE. It puts USF on the backfoot immediately.

Something needs to be done about USF early game against OKW. Maybe put MG in beginning in place of mortar. .50 cal would not be good against Osteer early game but would be much better against OKW in beginning and stopping sturmpioneer abuse.

I would like to see mg in tier 1 instead of mortars

Not that I'm against it but making this change would trigger a chain reaction in the balance of the USF.

Without smoke being available in T0 this would more or less force the player to go the tier in which there is smoke, but then that would make the player predictable and vulnerable to another counter.

Specific scenario for example:

Ost player gets MG42s, USF players is forced to go LT for the Mortar in order to provide smoke for his riflemen and destroyed the garrisoned MG42s, Ost player reacts to this by getting 222s as someone else already mentioned, the USF player then falls behind because even with the .50 cal and AP rounds it doesn't provide the fast punch of the 57mm AT gun needed to reliably destroy said 222(s).

So case in point, the USF needs the mortar right now in order to be effect early game because of the mortar's smoke and anti-garrison capabilities, if let's say the REs are replaced by Assault Engineers with the flame upgrade which would handle the anti-garrison dilemma of the USF but there is still smoke left, if the rifles are given back their smoke then people will again mainly only go for rifles, unless of course the USF T0 is redesigned with 4 or 5 man Assault Engineers, Riflemen with smoke and let's say a WC51 to provide more options for the USF's start but then people would complain that they're mimicking the OKW in a way with their Volks, Sturms and Kubelwagen.

But I think that perhaps all T0 MGs should be removed as AEgion suggested as well so there is less of the early game MG lockdown problem which would make it so there would be less reliance on smoke and anti-garrison capabilities, this would in turn also benefit the UKF which rely on the UC WASP for anti-garrison capabilities against Ost MG42s and have no reliable smoke because of the static nature of the mortar pit not being able to reach certain places on the map which you might need smoke right on the second.

But then again maybe the Ost will suffer then even if the MG42 is replaced by the Grens in T0, I'm not sure of that but I know that Relic made this change with a purpose during the UKF Alpha because they saw that the Ost would then underperform.

Maybe giving them 5 men Grenadiers and Panzergrenadiers would solve the issue and would make them less reliant on the MG42s? No idea, I sadly didn't reach this phase of testing in my mod to say from experience.

All in all I believe there are several ways of tackling the issue, question is which way the devs think of and decide on, that's all.