Profile of Sander93

In that case, couldn't the Stuka be given a specific damage table entry for UKF emplacements - something like 0.67x multiplier?

It could, but the game is already bad at communicating things to players and hidden modifiers should be avoided as much as possible. Anyway, the original point was that the Stuka in its current state is already very good against infantry and support weapons and even vehicles (as long as it doesn't get direct hits) and it's considered to be one of the best rocket arties - making it good against emplacements as well would simply make it become overwhelming.

The only thing that could be done imo is reworking it to be more like the Panzerwerfer (rockets get lower damage but deal AOE suppression) which would make it a lot fairer against infantry and team weapons (and giving OKW a proper anti-blob tool) and then moving the incendiary barrage to vet 0 or vet 1 and rework that into a garrison and emplacements counter. But those changes would be so significant that they likely will never happen at this point.

What's next? Well, we have what to show as announce:
Show Spoiler

All I know is that there should be at least one armor commander that looks like this:

The best way to deal with emplacements were significantly nerfed. One of the few reasons to pick "Firestorm" was the incendiary shells for leigs that could deal pretty good damage to emplacements. Now the incendiary ammo- useless against almost anything else- is also bad against emplacements. The nerf was just too hard and a bad decision.

I tested this change and it was a minor nerf which barely made an impact on the average total damage caused by an incendiary barrage. Potential damage to an unbraced pit went from like 90% to 70-80%, and damage against a braced one from 60-70% to 50-60%, which still effectively means two barrages to kill one (one to force brace, second to finish it). The only things that really changed are that the UKF player now has a small chance to repair their mortar pit in between the barrages to try to save it (but there's only 15 seconds on the recharge), and that one incendiary barrage can no longer reliably kill almost the entirety of an unbraced mortar pit in one go (which was way too cost effective).

This is the result of one updated incendiary barrage on an unbraced mortar pit in the FOW at max range:


This is the result of one updated incendiary barrage on a braced (just before impact of the first shell) mortar pit in the FOW at max range:


TLDR the barrage went from incredibly potent against emplacements to slightly less incredibly potent against emplacements. Effective Time To Kill or Cost To Kill (2 barrages) did not change outside of rare occasions of bad RNG or the UKF player being absolutely on point with brace and repairs (and the OKW not following up with the second barrage in time).


Furthermore the barrage is very powerful against garrisons (since we fixed the damage against tall garrisons) and is very effective at forcing team weapons out of a certain area in advance or in support of a push.

i went with this

https://i.serealia.ca/files/coh2dps.html#134

This displays DPS per weapon. You need to multiply these values by the number of entities in the squad carrying that weapon. So even though the Lee Enfield has roughly 60% higher DPS than the Volks Kar 98K, the total difference in DPS isn't that high because Volks get a 5th entity at the start.

Perhaps there is a weapons stat (not listed on coh2db) that allows AOE to ignore armor or not.

So looks like I was wrong, and partially right.

I had a look in the editor. It turns out that AOE does not share the base penetration stat but has its own AOE penetration stats. It seems that for most weapons, AOE penetration is the same as the base penetration. For the Stuka rockets however, the AOE penetration is very high which is why near misses can deal major damage to tanks (vehicles) and emplacements while direct hits only deal a small amount of deflection damage.



So to correct myself: AOE does not ignore armor, but specifically the Stuka's AOE ignores the armor of the Mortar Pit and most vehicles because it has very high AOE penetration values. While direct hits only deal deflection damage because it has 0/0/0 regular penetration.