Profile of PanzerFutz

Give it an "Ambulance" function as a vet ability, that will keep it relevant into the late game.

[Cue howling now.]

I'd be interested to hear more on the mechanics of that idea. What happens when the cover gets destroyed in the middle of a fire-fight (mid-burst of the maxim)?

camoing an AT gun and walking it thru an open field shouldn't be a viable strategy in a ww2 rts

Amen! No camo should work when a unit is moving, ever.

I agree with Mazianni. If you nerf (or remove) loiters, you have to severely nerf anti-aircraft units as well.

Hand-cranked, visually-aimed AA guns were even more inaccurate than ground-attack planes. As Smiling Tiger insinuates, the only way to be sure to hit something was to have lots of units firing at the same time - both on the ground and in the air.

I don't know how the Soviets organized their ground-attack planes but, the US "cab rank" system operated a lot more like the single pass strafes (with the pilots free to make a second pass if they thought they missed their target). Planes usually didn't loiter in the area looking for targets of opportunity; they were assigned a particular target by a forward observer/liaison officer. If there was more than one target or if the strike was deemed ineffective, additional strikes could be requested. Whether it was made by the same plane usually depended on its fuel and ammo situation.

However, if the game moves to single-pass strafes, they have to target units in the area of attack and not just shoot at a patch of ground regardless of what's there. How effective the strafes are should be addressed by varying the damage. Strafes should not be "hit only if the unit can't move and miss if it moves even the slightest bit", regardless of how "unrealistic" that is. This game is SO unrealistic on so many different levels that "realism" can never really be used to address balance issues (as SkysTheLimit has pointed out to me on more than one occasion).

#BuffStrafeTargeting/NerfStrafeDamage

Sorry. I thought we were talking about a way to get rid of loiters altogether. If the strafes had loiter targeting, loiters could be replaced completely.