Profile of ThoseDeafMutes

TWP was bugged and barely functional for ages. Now the Stug is in the best spot it's ever been, and TWP works as designed. This + heavy call in limit is why people are now complaining about TWP, it shows up in most team games featuring OH now and it's frustrating as heck.

Would also be cool to have a doctrinal ability called like "air superiority" or something that grounded enemy aircraft for the duration. So it would essentially be like a blizzard, but only affecting the enemy, for a munitions cost and a shorter duration.

idk. it sounds simple but it makes it hugely effective (or AA very ineffective). there's also the issue of what happens when you move AA into the target area before the plane hits.

In my opinion, every plane should be a single pass in the style of CAS, rather than a loitering strike. It would make things more deterministic (which I'm a fan of). In which case, the strike would hit as normal if you moved the AA into the zone after the plane has shown up, but the window would be so small it wouldn't "really" matter much in terms of looking weird.

You could still make AA function as normal and try to shoot down loitering planes if you decide you want to keep loitering (conceptually), but then still have the AA gun's "zone of control" being the small (or large depending on the specific gun I guess) radius around it being a safe zone that the enemy can't summon the planes towards.

The main thrust of the idea here is really to make airstrikes and AA sort of complementary mechanics that are part of the core game. Currently the interplay between them is, to be frank, garbage. You could even, in theory, make a small air-strike or bombing run or something part of a faction's core tech tree as long as other factions had the tools available to protect themselves from it in theory, which could be interesting.

If you want to take a case study for why I think this might be useful, stuff like the Pak43 would be actually somewhat resilient even in its current form as long as it was supported by anti-aircraft units. But an unsupported stationary emplacement would be child's play for an allied bombing run otherwise. The counterplay options might consist of the AA units being relatively fragile, and a raid with armor is targeted at dislodging or destroying the AA gun, which then allows them to instantly hard counter the Pak43 without its support.

Similarly, on-map artillery (should there be any? That's another question we might actually be able to discuss!) could be defended from the two-click recon-stukka counter, which imo is very frustrating when whole doctrines become useless because of the CAS meta. Rather than just making them so tough they can withstand a 50kg bombing run, you give the allies options to allocate extra resources to defending these vulnerable positions, at the expense of spending resources elsewhere.

This is a general proposal that is not really intended for CoH2, since it's too late to shut the gate once the horse has bolted. But I've been thinking about an alternate way to implement anti-aircraft in a "CoH style game".

Area Denial
Instead of AA guns firing at planes and having a probability to destroy them, what if air abilities such as strafes and recon passes could not be used on areas where there was an AA unit. So for example, you could not cast a stukka dive bomb within a certain radius of a USF AA halftrack, and you could not throw down an incendiary strike within a certain radius of an Ostwind flakpanzer.

I would like to reiterate that this is just a concept, and there would be a mess of balance issues if you just tried to shoehorn this into the current game. There's all sorts of nightmares like the Flak base for OKW and questions of what happens to loitering planes. But I feel like it would add more certainty and usefulness to AA in these games, which can be a total crapshoot that often harms you more than it helps with enemy planes crashing at random, and the general inability to guarantee that it will even shoot anything down. AA is not "really" AA, these units are just anti-infantry platforms mostly that also have the ability to shoot down aircraft. A doctrine in the fashion of CAS, where it's heavily based on airstrikes, would be easier to counter if you could actually establish something resembling a defence against enemy aircraft that could protect your units against them.

I dunno I like the call-in limit. I don't like seeing armies composed entirely of Tigers and IS2s, more wide spread use of mediums and assault guns feels more authentic to me and makes for more diverse builds. Will make playing USF with no heavies better too, since you're now fighting on more even ground all the time and don't have to focus all your efforts on countering the inevitable heavy swarms in team games.