Profile of Hannibal

...or requiring a garrisoned squad to unlock.

I suppose this will just lead to huge bugs or exploits. Do you just have to jump a squad in, click Brace and can jump out? Or is the squad garrisoned then. Does brace still have a timer or can you keep it this way as long as a squad is in there? Can the squad fire out of the emplacement?

I am not sure this is such a great thing, although it might be interesting.

Two years ago the Stuka did get a nerf vs buildings to make it less wipey, I think it also nerfed it against emplacements. The reason was also that it is not meant to be an anti structure unit.
Still I think Stuka should be more consistent, either by increasing penetration and nerfing the near damage slightly, or by lowering penetration and just always add deflection damage.

Back to topic though:
I think brace is a very bland ability. You get attacked, you click the button, the attacking player has to sustain the attack long enough for brace to enter cool down. If the UKF player does not break, then everything is reset for the next attack without further input until ou click the button again. It's more of a micro/reaction mini game with relatively few things to consider because everything is for free and getting the status quo requires no input and also not a very long waiting time.
My suggestion (#4) makes it way more interactive. More micro, higher cost but also more reward. On the other hand a barely supported emplacement gets destroyed quickly. Of course there will be issues to iron out, but one of the core designs of UKF is either gone or very uninteresting to play.

The recent thread about UTT criticizing mortar pits got me thinking a bit about UKFs initial design around emplacements. Some claim that this emplacement strategy went inherently against CoH2s design - an opinion I do not share. CoH2 is as much about smart assaulting as it is about smart defending, and emplacements when well designed can add to this.

The issue with Brit emplacements in my eyes mostly originate from Brace, making them near invulnerable for a certain amount of time. Therefore it has been reworked quite some times, and usually emplacements were spammed or not built at all depending on the status (duration and cool down) of brace to a large extend.

So what solutions do we have?
1. Remove the pit, give non doc mortar. Good although uncreative solution for the pit, no solution for anything else though.
2. Give repair ability instead of brace. This would allow for trading munis for repairs without risking your pioneers. Might be feasible, but my gut feeling tells me that this would lead to abuse in 2v2 and 3v3.
3. Remove brace. To compensate, increase the emplacements HP or give it a straight damage reduction to keep repair times feasible. However, since the emplacement is static, even one single mortar could shut it down for the most part. The role of brace is to make negate damage for some time to compensate for the vulnerability of being static. This solution however would not do that, and repairing the emplacement is very risky too since you risk your pioneer squad in mortar fire. In team games, often 2+ early mortars are around that would shut down any emplacement immediately. All in all, I think brace must stay.
4. My favourite: Brace needs to be unlocked. Similar to war speed, pioneers must be around emplacements for some time to enable them to use brace after every use. To compensate, brace would need light tweaks lile a slightly higher duration, or the emplacement getting a slight defensive buff in some way. This would mean that a well supported emplacement could be quite durable, but now it needs additional effort in micro and investment in popcap and MP for the pioneer squad. Badly managed emplacements could go down quickly due to the lack of brace, if you want your emplacement safer your pioneer can't move as freely on the map anymore to sweep mines. It's hard to guess all the implications for larger modes, but instead of finding the very small sweet spot for the duration of the current brace, it would work way better with the games overall design and also reward micro.

With the recent progress in scatter calculations ans MMX's excellent sheet, the current discussions can be supported by actual data.
However, one thing that still remains somewhat hidden in the sheet's data yet is quite important is alpha damage. For example, the ISU is not such a feared unit because its DPS would be outrageously high, but because a single shot can cause huge health damage in the blink of an eye. If you got hit once, you don't risk the second shot even if you know that the reload will take ages (at least from the SOV player's perspective).
Similarly, the Sherman has often been critiqued to be too cost efficient due to the switchable rounds that too easily wipe or deter Axis squads. For units with switchable rounds one could also assume that the AT specialized round then performs much worse compared to a "generalist round".
We could also take the outrage of the Tiger being useless against infantry after the recent patch as an example, but to close this part I'll just quote Sander form a recent King Tiger thread:

Except that it [the KT] does have excellent anti-infantry. It reliably hits enemy squads for ~40% health every 1-2 shots, more when they are clumped, which is significantly better than the Panzer IV because it forces off squads faster and generally has a better chance to wipe squads.

So, let's put this to the test. You could run a ton of simulations with MMX's sheet and get the data from the first shots only, then process those. The issue is that all of these are randomly generated therefore deviate between simulations, and your sample size has to increase with high scatter units. Additionally, nobody knows how many samples you need per scatter area to really give reliable output.
So I sat down and coded (quite a while actually). Instead of picking everything randomly and then averaging over a huge sample size, I tried to generate more reproducible output by calculating almost "all possible" shots that could occur. Instead of working with RNG shots, I created a mesh over the complete scatter area. On every node, a shot is created and the effect on a virtual squad is measured. This leads to 400.000-800.000 simulated shots over the whole scatter area, and for each shot the AoE damage to every single model is collected.

By doing so, we get a very clear picture of how our chances are for certain effects. How many shots cause one hit kills? How many damage the target squad by at least 20% of the total health? How many shots cause 40 damage to how many models?
Or, to put Sander's quote to the test: Can the King Tiger really reliably cause 40% health damage (not nit-picking here, it just provided a good example)?

For the following data was created at a distance of 40 meters on standard formations of Volks and Riflemen (as they would be in open terrain) with the model in the center being targeted. This also has the advantage that we see the differences caused by squad formation, since both squads have 5 members. Natural hits are neglected since the chance to hit naturally is very slim, just scatter shots are considered.

First off, let's go straight for the heavies:
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We can see that the chance for OHKs is actually not that high. Even for the almighty ISU the chance to cause a OHK is about 10%, and no vehicle is able to cause two OHKs against a squad in standard formation. It seems that Volks perform worse then Riflemen, which could be due to the different spacing of the squads or the targeted model. The nerfed Tigers and the IS2 all perform abysmally bad, so the we can conclude that all heavies primarily cause health damage with their first shot. But how much?

Looking at squad level, we can have a check. This is the data on shots that caused at least 40% health damage to the total squad ("they 'passed' the check for damage according to the legend):
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Again, Riflemen perform better in general, many of the heavies do not seems to be able to deal 40% of damage against a single squad in standard formation. Sadly for Sanders, under the given conditions (which are not the exact in-game situation obviously), the King Tiger can barely do 40% of squad damage. But what if we lower that threshold to 20%?

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Suddenly, magic happens. Way more shots now seem to be able to do at least 20% of damage, even the recently nerfed Tigers. The difference between both infantry squads becomes larger, Allied tanks seem to deal at least 20% damage in 4 out of 5 shots, while Axis tanks shooting at Riflemen still have a hard time. But is it possible to get a closer look on actual damage distributions between the models?

Of course it is! In the following graphs we can see how many models have received over 20 or 40 damage, respectively.

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Here we can see the that the ISU can be a true beast (it's still firing at range 40 though, this should rarely happen in game). Although it's OHK potential is not excessively large, it's ability to damage models is very high. Guaranteed damage on Volksgrenadiers, at least 3 but often all 5 models loose half their health or more. The King Tiger shines against Riflemen in this statistic, being able to deal decent damage on 1-3 models with one shot and - at least alpha damage wise - performing better than the much discussed Pershing. The Tigers however are still not able to do much.

For smaller damages, we can get a better resolution if we lower the threshold even further.

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Now finally, Tigers don't look that bad anymore. At least in the lower damage compartment, they work similarly reliable as other heavies. ISU is almost guaranteed to deal at least 20 damage to 4+ squad members, but in general, all heavies perform well.


Since the post is already getting very long, I'll just leave you with some remaining data for mediums to look at.
A release of this script is planned, but without schedule so far. Big thanks to MMX for allowing me to use his stats data from his scatter simulator for calculations. The script lets you somewhat easily filter vehicles according to categories and their stats (for example, you could have a look at all vehicles with near AoE larger than 1, a penetration > 200, all heavies as above, all vehicles from certain factions or a combination of all of this). Additionally you can pick your target squad, thresholds and distances. Plots will be plotted automatically, but many of the analysis features are yet to be implemented.


Cheers,

Hannibal




medium tank data:
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SU-76
280mp, 75f, 8 pop
400mp, 75/35 armor, 20 size
6.8 or 6.9 speed, 2.3/4.4 acc/deacc, 36 or 38 rotation
120dmg, 160 far pen, 4.9-5.4 reload, 60 range

STUG-G
280mp, 90f, 10 pop
560hp, 140/70 armor, 17 size
6 speed, 2.1 accel, 28 rotation
160dmg, 170 far pen, 4.5-5.5 reload, 50 range

This vomparison is very misleading. Raw penetration values mean nothing. Also accuracy values (plus ideally scatter) is missing. I don't have their current stats at hand, but SU76 got a rework a year ago or so where its accuracy was nerfed iirc. I don't know about how it compares to the Stug at the moment.
Additionally, the increased health and the 40 difference in damage are a huge deal. It's the difference why StuG is a very effective anti medium vehicle while SOV players rarely go for an SU76 to counter mediums. SOV has more cost effevtive AT units, yes, but the SU76 is quite unreliable especially against OKW P4s and the low damage make it very hard to actually finish it off.
I don't think OPs suggestions would fix SOV T3, but I also doubt that it would make the SU76 broken.