Profile of Strummingbird

in all seriousness - soviets have a both a forward retreat point and a forward HQ, in airborne commander and urban defense commander respectively.

If artillery fired fewer shells in a barrage, but had a proportionally smaller cooldown, they might be more useful in 1v1 and less annoying in larger teamgames.

With a more responsive barrage you could harrass team weapons more often (like a mortar) instead of wasting 1min+ hitting dirt when the enemy packs up after the first shot. It would also differentiate it from the long cooldown / high wipe potential of rocket arty.

Unlimited pop would help the player that gets ahead and starts to roll out mass vehicles first, since they inflict mp-damage without receiving any. vehicle armies will grow much more linearly (only affected by upkeep) as opposed to balanced or inf armies naturally stopping growth (due to upkeep + reinforce).

Currently you can see that effect to a minor degree - armies with mass mediums start to float a lot more mp, against armies with balanced comps- which take mp bleed in exchange for map control. The 100 pop limit helps stop the vehicular army from turning that MP saving into even more units, which inflict more bleed more efficiently, snowballing over the nonvehicle army

I'm skeptical of whether this makes for good gameplay. with infinite pop maybe players might start suiciding low val squads or leaving them unreinforced to capture after some time, to just maximize a MP-efficient vehicle army.

The games with Machine were interesting, and the first i've played with 2.1.

-G1
No comments on balance overall. I didnt play osttruppen enough last patch to get a feel of how to use them well, and dont feel like I used it or flamer HT optimally enough to make any judgement on the matchup.

Ptrs penals really zoned out flamer HT in a very big radius, but it didnt make the flamer HT useless even though DPS seems noticeably higher (is the aimtime 1.25-> 0.5 buff also a functional 0.75 second ROF buff?).

In an earlier game a ptrs squad in green cover dueled an OKW p4 very successfully (brought down to half health with little damage in return). I am fairly confident that ptrs squads can outtrade an ostheer p4 head on barring bad RNG, and cannot be pushed like a shreck squad either. this is not necessarily a problem, however.

w.r.t. the ptrs penal change: I feel like its good. I don't think its too strong, but worth testing in the unlikely event of overly strong combinations. I agree with Machine that its going to be more relevant in 2v2 than 1v1.

Machine didnt have a zis for a long time, which I think would have been a stronger follow up than a mortar (understandable choice given my triple HMG). I think elchino's (?) suggestion for 220MP basic mortars for wehr and soviet merits testing, especially vs more conventional double AT gun compositions which are currently as strong as ever.

-G2
Second match was more standard wehr, skipped t2 due to confidence in the early game. couldve been punished if he went lend-lease guard halftrack. Here, lmg grens and MG42 really shredded penals, so there wasnt much of a change here compared to live.

Machine dived with the SU76 on a damaged P4 at one point, which I think was not really possible pre-patch. Caveat; P4 was isolated and on the wrong side of a wide map. I do like the mobility change.

@vipper- I tested the replays again, no issue watching them on my end.

-duplicate replay - please delete