Arty rant

There's been several threads about balance recently, mostly centered around larger team games and the imbalance in win rates. The oddest thing about the imbalance is how Soviet win rates drop off in 3's and 4's. A lot of the theories have been about caches or the incomplete design of the WFA armies. I don't think that's the case given that OKW is a WFA, can't build caches, and still comes out on top of the 4v4 win rates. I really think it has more to do with the LEFH and Walking Stuka.

Here's a recent 3v3. I got around 90 kills with a LEFH. On the maps where the approach routes are restricted, it's easy to rack up a stupid amount of kills with the LEFH by just firing randomly into the approach path.

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  BMon Drink_to_Win Grumpy

  陣 thealert Partisanen 召虎

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  LEFH

  by: Grumpy map: Rzhev Winter

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Here's a cheat mod test of the LEFH versus the ML20. If just firing at buildings, they're about the same effectiveness. The LEFH starts to get great when firing at approach lanes like the one on Rzhev or the middle of Port of Hamburger.

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  Grumpy

  Snot Rockets

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  arty test 1

  by: Grumpy map: Unknown

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Interestingly, the Land Mattress was about equal to the Walking Stuka, but only if the units don't react to the barrage. However, the Land Mattress takes forever to fire all of the rockets and is affected by scatter like all other rocket arty. This replay also showed the other part of the problem with the Walking Stuka, as you'll see full Con squads get wiped by a single barrage. The all-or-nothing design of the Walking Stuka is problematic for Soviets in 3's or 4's. The games often go about an hour, so Soviets don't have to dodge just a couple barrages, they have to out-guess their OKW counterpart up to a couple dozen times. Nobody is that good so losing those vetted squads in the late game often results in a loss.

Here are the in-game numbers taken from Stein's sheet for ballistic arty, along with the few real world numbers that I could find for comparison:

Crewed Range Range Shell ROF DMG Near Mid Far Near Mid Far
(IRL) kg IRL (IRL)
ML-20 152mm 250 17230 51.5 3 200 200 30 10 2 4 6
B-4 203mm 250 25400 110 yes 640 640 96 32 2.5 5 7.5
leFH 18 Ost 250 10675 14.8 6 160 160 56 8 2 4 6
leFH 18 OKW 250 10675 14.8 6 160 160 56 8 2 4 6
M7B1 Priest 180 11270 14.8? 6? 200 200 56 10 2 4 6
Sexton 135 12253 11.5 6 160 160 80 32 1.25 2.5 6
(sorry if this isn't very readable, it doesn't want to keep the formatting)

A couple things stick out. The ML20 had a shell that was about 3x larger, but in-game has a smaller AOE and lower rate of fire. The B4 should have a massive AOE, not just a 7.5 radius versus 6. In another test that I ran, the B4 was consistently about 1/3 as effective as the ML20. I think people just like to use is because they think it's great on the random time that it hits a medium tank and brews it up.

I think the following changes would really help to balance:

Nerf the LEFH (both) from 10 shells to 8.
Nerf the ML20 from 8 shells to 6. Increase AOE ranges to 3, 6, and 8 and make damage at range equal to LEFH
Sexton - increase range to 180 (mobile arty should have shorter range than fixed or else gameplay will suffer)
Make all arty not decrewable. Put a limit of 2 total (so 2 LEFH or 1 LEFH and one WS, same for ML20 and Katy). Count rocket arty in the limits also.
Make Priest and Sexton so that they can't be abandoned.
Change the Walking Stuka so that it doesn't one-shot everything Soviet (or completely miss like it often does).

I'm not sure how the new B4 will be, but think the far AOE range should be increased. The mid shouldn't be increased unless the damage was lowered under 80.

just as a heads-up, some of the numbers you used for your comparison are quite a bit off. both the ml-20 and lefh are actually almost carbon copies of each other, though the ml-20 has a bit higher near AoE damage (180 vs 160) and slightly more far AoE damage (not sure exactly, but i think sth like 10 vs 8). unfortunately, Stein's sheet seems to have some of these wrong. this may not represent the real life proportions of their respective shells, but from a gameplay perspective i'd think this is a fair compromise.

another thing is that the AoE usually extends well beyond the value set for AoE far. for example, the b-4's radius is actually 10 instead of 7.5 (and 8 for both the ml-20 and lefh).

as for the new b-4, i think it will be much more potent against infantry, but not so much against tanks. it gets even more max AoE range and higher far AoE damage, but much lower near AoE damage. so the one-shot potential goes down, but since it now fires 3 shells the overall damage output per area will be greater.

I'd just like to stick this note in here, I was using the ML-20 today and the scatter of the shells is actually massive, WAY bigger than the UI indicator would lead on. Maybe it was the FoW penalty after I lost sight but it seems like shells can land exceedingly far from the center of the circle.

Can someone finnaly do something with early stuka abuse in team games ? After 3000 hours in coh stuka givme ptsd with cancer

I'd just like to stick this note in here, I was using the ML-20 today and the scatter of the shells is actually massive, WAY bigger than the UI indicator would lead on. Maybe it was the FoW penalty after I lost sight but it seems like shells can land exceedingly far from the center of the circle.

Yeah i think the in-game circle indicator is pretty inaccurate for judging the actual scatter pattern as it seems to be way too small. Firing into the FoW is also particularly punishing for on-map howitzers as they have a larger scatter penalty (1.75) than most other units. Hence, the actual area where a shot can land gets tripled whenever you lose sight, so recon is key if you don't want to pray to the RNG gods to hit anything.

Also, while comparing the in-game scatter with what would be predicted from the values in the attribute editor I've noticed something strange:

While none of the on-map howies have a scatter offset defined, all of them seem to overshoot by the same amount regardless of distance. This is quite different from units with a non-zero scatter offset, for which the actual extent they tend to overshoot scales with distance to the target.
I'm not exactly about the exact value, but it seems to be somewhere in the range of 3.5 +/- 0.5 m (at least on flat terrain). The pic below isn't perfect (I've eliminated the angular scatter and reduced the distance scatter to better visualize the degree of overshooting) but shows this somewhat hopefully. The red dots are where the shot was aimed and, as you can see, the center of the splat patterns is always offset by roughly 3.5 m.



Not too important overall but aiming a bit farther ahead will improve the chances of hitting your target, especially at close range.

https://www.coh2.org/topic/108461/why-do-axis-rocket-arty-have-to-oneshot

Discussed it a few days ago, 66% or so seem to think it's balanced when it cleaely isn't. This majority is clearly wehat the balance team lsitens to. No point discussing further. If you play team games and play most factions, if you want to win start playing more Axis and abuse arty. Pretty simple. I never used to use LEFH's, sicne that thread I've bought Overwatch and not counting the leavers (separate topic) in teamgames I've only lost one game when I thought about when and where to use Stuka and LeFH.

The maths might pan out, but ingame Werfers and Stukas are more prevalent, more effective at bleed, and more effective at wiping squads.

Can't beat em, join em.

just as a heads-up, some of the numbers you used for your comparison are quite a bit off. both the ml-20 and lefh are actually almost carbon copies of each other, though the ml-20 has a bit higher near AoE damage (180 vs 160) and slightly more far AoE damage (not sure exactly, but i think sth like 10 vs 8). unfortunately, Stein's sheet seems to have some of these wrong. this may not represent the real life proportions of their respective shells, but from a gameplay perspective i'd think this is a fair compromise.

another thing is that the AoE usually extends well beyond the value set for AoE far. for example, the b-4's radius is actually 10 instead of 7.5 (and 8 for both the ml-20 and lefh).

as for the new b-4, i think it will be much more potent against infantry, but not so much against tanks. it gets even more max AoE range and higher far AoE damage, but much lower near AoE damage. so the one-shot potential goes down, but since it now fires 3 shells the overall damage output per area will be greater.

I realize that Stein's sheet is out of date at this point, but don't know of anything that is up to date. How did you get the B-4 radius?

What website do you use to host the images you post?

I'd just like to stick this note in here, I was using the ML-20 today and the scatter of the shells is actually massive, WAY bigger than the UI indicator would lead on. Maybe it was the FoW penalty after I lost sight but it seems like shells can land exceedingly far from the center of the circle.

I noticed a tendency for the shells to shoot long, even with the FOW off. Also, I've had the same problem with the ML20 so I did the testing with FOW off. The FOW penalty does seem different for the LEFH compared to the ML20.

I realize that Stein's sheet is out of date at this point, but don't know of anything that is up to date. How did you get the B-4 radius?

What website do you use to host the images you post?

serealia's site is a really good resource for unit stats and usually quite accurate. otherwise the mod tools give direct access to all relevant stats, though, sadly, both haven't been updated in quite a while and are a couple of patches behind the live version. hence, there's no really reliable source for this kind of info at the moment apart from trying to keep track of every change manually via patch notes, which is highly error-prone and sucks pretty much tbh.

luckily, not much has changed for artillery pieces in quite a while, so serealia is still reliable here. i've taken the stats for the new B-4 from what has been posted in the patch notes (damage from 640 to 400, AoE max from 10 to 12, AoE distance (n/m/f) from 2.5/5/7.5 to 2/5/7.5, AoE damage (n/m/f) from 1/0.15/0.05 to 1/0.24375/0.1125)

oh and i use coh2.com to host images used here, just go to your profile, 'my files' and upload the images directly there.

serealia's site i...snip

oh and i use coh2.com to host images used here, just go to your profile, 'my files' and upload the images directly there.

thx

Can someone finnaly do something with early stuka abuse in team games ? After 3000 hours in coh stuka givme ptsd with cancer

I also proposed a way to delay walking stuka timing in other thread, but no luck.