Profile of Imagelessbean

Oh please, lets say see it in this way. How harder and how much micro PIV takes to crush, now compare how much micro cromwell takes to crush. You will see that cromwell is 900000% easier.

Look at panther, look at comet. And so on.

Its not like british dont blob, or soviet dont blob or USF dont blob. All factions blob and there are blobers across all factions. Why then crushing should be only usefull and easy to make by allies? Not to mention that crushing usually force player to lose his vet troops in a seconds.

This argument seems to imply because one faction has a tank that is probably overperforming in the crushing role therefore no one should have crush. That is a false statement. Also P4 has blitz, try that when you crush you will be presently surprised.

Crushing isn't just very useful to Allies, I find myself using it regularly with German factions.

Also most Allied tanks are extremely vulnerable when they crush because of the amount of AT on the German side, and the number of snares they have now in the patch.

Make sweepers for Ostheer and Soviet Engineers bump up their repair speed to be on par with Sappers and Rear Echelon at 2.0 from 1.6. It's already hard to get a sweeper unit to veterancy 2 unless you want to make sweeping and building give squad XP which could also work.

I like this, would you also consider adding a backpacking option for Pio's and CE's to help them retain what little potency they have?

Making Bofors and Mortar Pits mutually exclusive MIGHT work for 1v1s. However it doesn't change anything for 2v2 and up.

IMO, the main issues regarding emplacements are the following:

1. Emplacements can repair at normal rate while they are braced.

Suppose you are DPSing an unbraced emplacement while the enemy repairs it. If your DPS is high enough, health will start going down. If it is not, the health bar will remain stationary or will start topping up.

While an emplacement is braced it takes -75% damage. This means that you need to, somehow, muster 4x the DPS to continue DPSing the damn thing.

2. Auto-repair synergises with brace too much

Brace + repair is not necessarily a terrible thing. Theoretically, you can still DPS the enemy's engineers while they repair, inflicting MP damage and wipes.

However, this trade-off goes completely off when you factor in auto-repair abilities (Standfast, or Advanced Assembly). The defending player can pop brace and risk nothing as his emplacements start to top-up to top health.

This needs to stop.

3. Infantry is relegated to a secondary role

Unless you are OKW (with flames and Schrecks spam), your infantry can do nothing vs emplacements. Thus, flanking with infantry only puts you at a risk of getting wiped by Bofors. This is extremely frustrating to play against.

(I'm not sure how OKW will fare post-patch now that Schrecks and Flame nades are on different units).

Solution

Brace denies infantry play. Thus, it needs to go. Thus, we need to find the right tradeoffs to make brace-less emplacements work.

Bofors can be a copy-paste of the OKW FlakHQ. If people are OK with the OKW emplacement, people will also be fine with a Bofors that also takes up popcap to deploy.

However, a Bofors without indirect fire support is rubbish (OKW at least has leigs, panzerschrecks, IR HT etc). Thus, Brits need mobile mortars. These mortars have no need for brace, since they can retreat. If you abandon your Bofors, you deserve to lose it, similar to how OKW loses their T4. Bofors could lose its attack ground to make it easier to counter, but it could be given a rotate function (to aid in the AA role / punishing reckless flanks).

Since relic designed mortar pits, we need to do something with them, otherwise Relic will reject the idea. The best solution is to make them garrisonable structures. Make them give decent defense bonuses vs indirect fire and decent offensive bonuses to garrisoned mortars. I am sure we can find a price/bonus to make it work. Sim city will become unviable since it would take up too much popcap to maintain this.

Also, an artillery called down on your mortar farm needs you need to retreat all of them + cede territory.

At the same time, a successful infantry flank + grenade toss in the mortar pit will guarantee a wipe. Thus, infantry is no longer completely useless. You only have to beware of the Bofors.

Finally, for the 17 pounder, just make it a copy-paste of Pak43. An AT gun should be vulnerable to infantry rushes, and prolonged exposure to artillery, but relatively immune to tank pushes. The 17 pounder is completely the opposite of what it should be with respect to its counters.

I think you make a number of very important points about the balance with these emplacements right now. I am not 100% convinced of some of your solutions yet, but I do agree with your analysis and would be open to try them in the balance preview.

Certainly emplacements make the game less interesting for the attacking player. This lowers player enjoyment. I don't see any reason in a game to make a situation where player enjoyment decreases because of a common strategy adopted by an opponent.

I do agree that 17pdrs are crap. They have a high pop cost, high investment cost, do not have the range of the longest TD in the game, do not come with stock shooting through wall abilities (which is all that matters since after 1 or 2 shots who comes back to fight a 17pdr?), and take damage from everything (further worsened by its already huge footprint and late arrival when arty is prevalent). To even this out it gets a flare, which makes you wonder, why wouldn't you be scouting for your 17pdr in the first place?

Also can we please have the firing arc of the 17pdr finally printed on the ground so everyone knows where the thing is pointing and what it can hit (like literally every other AT gun)?

+1
As much as I respect you as a strategist, I find myself disagreeing with your opinions.
OKW have more or less zero mortar smoke (unless captured one). This is traded for more accurate field howitzer fire.

While I do agree with you that lack of smoke requires accurate fire, I don't think that changes my assessment of the unit as fundamentally poor. The ISG works best when ignored, has extremely long range, and is highly accurate. This makes for a unit that is not well suited to COH2 where micro at a squad level should be rewarded. It is also in a faction that can utilize forward retreat and reinforce points and a big giant gun to protect it from flanking. All of this makes the unit a really boring and ultimately less interesting unit for the game. I would much have preferred a unit that required player input on both ends to make it interesting.

For instance the Pak howie has very short auto barrage, but long targeted barraged fire but few shells are actually launched. This makes the unit more like a mortar with better long range hitting power on occasion. It makes itself vulnerable for normal combat, which it has to be in to recoup cost, but can be used to hit distant targets reliably and especially as it vets up. Therefore, at times it is vulnerable to mortars while at other it hunts them. This unit is therefore a micro intensive unit for both sides, and plays fairly well. Though bunched squads getting wiped through FoW is stupid, that is not the unit's fault.

I hope that I can at least persuade you that, although as you pointed out, it is just an opinion you would agree a mortar is a far more interesting unit for COH than an ISG because of the amount of play and counter play involved.

Infantry crushing prevents handheld at from firing since the infantry are automatically moved and their weapons aren't able to fire when moving. No risk involved. In fact it is far more risky NOT to dive in for the crush when you see handheld at blobs.

This was the point. It gave clear counterplay to handheld AT. You could target an individual and try to prevent him from firing. In exchange you left your tank very vulnerable to rear shots or snares, and you required high amounts of micro. The other player needed only decide when to retreat. Or, if you were near a building you could jump in and fire then jump out another door.

I fail to see how giving players a tool in which to deepen the game is so broken that it needs to be removed now. The problems that we are dealing with are specific to only a couple of tanks and not to the medium tanks as a whole.