Reworking 'Brace'

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.

Didn't we tried 3) for emplacements once and it pretty much removed them from the game? I remember Bofors having crapload of health but no brace at one short point, no idea when it was tho but it didn't made it to live.

Brace negates emplacements effectiveness to 0, maybe it should still be able to put out damaged but 50% drop in rate of fire? I don't remember by who, but I've seen this mentioned in a thread and this spoke to me more than these changes.

this game is better off with emplacements being useless

I think brace is fine as it is.

Mortar pit is ok but what we need now is non doc land matress emplacment

Although the suggestion would be an improvement imo there allot more changes that need to made so that emplacement become better.Their design simply luck depth.

Chances should be made to both the emplacements them selves and unit that can counter them.

For instance currently ATG are a good counter to them they out range the bofors and can move if it barrages, can ignore the the 17p and can under the right circumstance even be used vs the pit. So imo ATG should generally do less damage to all structures and create room for other unit also.

On the other hand their should be more units that are specialized in dealing with structures (AVRE and ST already do extra damage to them). Brumbar for instance is a great candidate.

In addition a number of changes can be made to them emplacement themselves allowing the player to choose how much he want to invest in their defensive properties.

For instance they AEC/Bofors choice could be replaced (or a new tech could be created) with an additional early Anvil/hammer choice allowing emplacement to get more HP, armor, improved brace or old the self-repair ability from engineer commander.

On the other hand the "two shot" kill from the mortar pit should be remove either by changing the timing of the mortar firing or by changing one mortar to barrage and the other auto-fire.


In sort in my opinion there not one magic solution but an number of improvement to design of emplacements giving them more dept and interaction.

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.

Surely this would make emplacements even more unrewarding?

The biggest problem is that OKW tech isn't very flexible. They usually need Mechanized, but back-teching to Battlegroup to get an ISG or two to counter the mortar pit is too expensive and time consuming. Ostheer can relatively comfortably avoid it and go for T4 and counter with a Brummbar or a Panzerwerfer (which can both shoot over obstacles and deal significant damage).

On top of that a major issue is that the Stuka is consistently ineffective against emplacements because its rockets have 0 penetration, which means that when directly hitting the 5 armor Mortar Pit they will "bounce" and cause only a measly 40 deflection damage (maybe 60 because of the target table but I'm not sure if the 1.5 multiplier applies to deflection damage) rather than the full 200 damage (it has the same issue against units like the Ambulance). This makes it noticeable worse against emplacements than the Panzerwerfer.


And another problem is simply bad map design, like on Arnhem Country south or the trialling Wolfheze south, putting big LOS/shot blockers to hide a Mortar Pit behind near 1 or even 2 VPs or other critical areas which makes the Mortar Pit next to impossible to kill with anything besides indirect fire.

On top of that a major issue is that the Stuka is consistently ineffective against emplacements because its rockets have 0 penetration, which means that when directly hitting the 5 armor Mortar Pit they will "bounce" and cause only a measly 40 deflection damage rather than the full 200 damage (it has the same issue against units like the Ambulance).

But... we've seen Stuka kill half health AEC and more then 25% health T-70 during torunament games, haven't we?

But... we've seen Stuka kill half health AEC and more then 25% health T-70 during torunament games, haven't we?

The rockets deal full AOE damage according to the AOE profile with near misses, because AOE ignores armor, which is why they can still severely damage vehicles (and the mortar pit too in rare occasions). The problem is that direct hits involve a penetration check, which Stuka rockets will always fail because they have 0 penetration. It's why an Ambulance can easily survive a direct hit from a Stuka rocket, but dies instantly to a near miss. And given how big the Mortar Pit is, it's more likely to get direct hits than it is to get near misses.

Here's an example of the Ambulance surviving a direct hit with only minor damage:

Huh, that's interesting.

Well according to cheat MOD it seem that Brumbar does get some extra damage vs emplacement and would do 200 damage most times vs pit and sometimes even 250.
(I had suggested extra damage years ago)

Main problem is the very sort range Brumbar has so that one has to wait until vet 1 and barrage which is simply too late.

The rockets deal full AOE damage according to the AOE profile with near misses, because AOE ignores armor,....

That does not seem to be the case if it was mortar would be far more effective vs vehicles than they are.

...

On top of that a major issue is that the Stuka is consistently ineffective against emplacements because its rockets have 0 penetration, ...

Why not increase the penetration to 50 as other rocket arty?

Why not increase the penetration to 50 as other rocket arty?

Wouldn't the Stuka then have a pretty good chance to 1-shot retreating medium tanks?

Wouldn't the Stuka then have a pretty good chance to 1-shot retreating medium tanks?

It the same penetration as other rocket arty and it would apply on direct hits. If it turns out to be an issue one could simply reduce damage vs vehicles.

I'd replace the brace with the ability to remove emplacements by sappers with some refund. It already exists but there should be manpower return - the amount could depend on a given battlephase (maybe even sappers vet). The idea would be to make the removal bleed UKF but to make the emplacement play more "dynamic". The emplacements would loose the brace ability completely in return (as imo it is just a broken concept). We could start with 50% refund after some battlephase is researched.

That does not seem to be the case if it was mortar would be far more effective vs vehicles than they are.

[edited]

Perhaps there is a weapons stat (not listed on coh2db) that allows AOE to ignore armor or not.

Why not increase the penetration to 50 as other rocket arty?

Because the Stuka is already very good as is and doesn't really need any buffs without reworking it, but that'd likely be too much of an undertaking at this point.