Any player can aim artillery at retreat paths or bases.
No other artillery in the game is laser guided perfect accurate with that much damage in that many shells over that much area of effect.
Welcome to Trois point. A fight is going bad, you pull out with four or five squads. The woosh of a stuka firing for the first time this game happens and a competent player can precision draw down your retreat path and wipe 1000mp+ of vetted squads for an utterly trivial input.
No Kat or Werfer could do that. No field arty or offmap could do that.
No priest could ever pull that off- not even a vet 1 one that spends 50 munitions for a creeping barrage, because the priest takes a reload between every shell when it draws a line.
Funnily enough, retreating has to happen. That's the only time I usually fire my stuka- I know where his infantry will be and can be assured a squad wipe (or 3) my opponent cannot avoid because retreating squads are uncontrollable.
The firepower is not the problem.
The basic accuracy & area saturation is the problem.
Sounds like a blob of infantry that YOU set up for your opponent to take out. 4-5 squads, all taking the same retreat path at the same time?
Welcome to Trois point, where in many 2v2's it comes down to the island with the 2 VP's. Stuka has range but not that much range, if you're constantly getting squads wiped with a stuka on your retreat paths, you either have no map control or just let them drive that up to the front lines.
I agree that the Priest should have a quicker creeping barrage ability but it's a normal artillery piece that isn't shooting 300KG rockets.
Stukas are devastating but are not OP. Vetted support weapons can survive stuka strikes as well as infy.
What do you propose we do to the stuka, then? Make it less accurate, like the rockets go in a line but not perfectly until it's got some vet. Okay, so instead of a line, you'd rather have it hit all around that line, so instead of only killing 1 machine gun, it also gets the conscripts next to it without intending.
Let's make the bombs weaker. Stuka strikes no longer kill off squads, = maxim/AT spam and/or blobbing. Then OKW is left with the ISG, which is good but not great at effectively forcing an enemy off of a certain area as the rounds it fires are not that damaging until it's vetted up.
I play mostly soviet/USF 2v2's and I have got to say I have never had anyone wipe my squads on retreat with the Stuka. It's usually the thing causing the retreat. I've faced the stuka multiple times on Trois Point as well as other smaller maps and they are not that hard to kill or avoid for that matter.
Nerfing this would make it as useless as the rest of the mobile arty pieces in the game. In my opinion, i'd rather have to deal with a strong arty unit as opposed to never seeing it like a Kat or Werfer and having OKW just spam infantry into tanks.