Sherman smoke takes time to use, not to mention about your tank stops when uses it. Meanwhile germans have i escape button that allows in one second pop smoke and 100% escape. it's fine for scout cars and halftrucks but not fine for panter that moves faster than T34.
Suggestion: make this ability 5 seconds to activate and tank should stop when uses this ability to increase micro requirements.
Sherman smoke, like most of USF's great amount of smoke abilities, is more of an offensive thing than a defensive one. A single Sherman can smoke an entire defensive line to cover for your rifles, from range. By comparison OH smoke only protects the tank, and is far easier to nullify with Attack Ground than USF smoke which doesn't so clearly betray the location of the tank.
The problem is that lots of people seem to only realize their Sherman can smoke when it's one shot away from death, then get upset when their offensive ability doesn't save them from losing a tank. Really, if you're at the point where your tank has one shot of health left and you're trying to pop smoke, you're better off just saving the crew in almost every situation.
About CAS doctrine - just replace conversion from instant to Windustry-like passive and it'll be fine.
That actually sounds like a very interesting and effective solution. The big issue with CAS Doctrine is that the player can pretty much choose whenever he wants to turn on the resource conversion, allowing him to stockpile fuel until he actually needs the munitions. By contrast, the weakness of Windustry is that while the player doesn't have to worry about fuel, their manpower limits are far tighter. Forcing CAS players to convert some of their fuel to muni instead of letting them convert at will would reflect a similar limitation. Of course it shouldn't kick in until CP 2 or 3, just to make sure that the OH can at least reach T2 without problems.
stuka close air support
See what confused me is that you were responding to someone who suggested that you could exploit CAS Doctrine's lack of armor with your own armor. You were saying that you couldn't in that match because of the Tiger, which CAS Doctrine doesn't have. So you see, Charlie and I were both referring to CAS Doctrine itself, thus the confusion.