What to do against calliope?

So I played a 1v1 against a USF player (on Angoville) who went with a calliope. During the match, I teched up to t4 to get a panzerwerfer, and also a panther.

So I sent an ostruppen squad to scout to see if the calliope was in the base or not. It was outside the base a bit, so I brought a panther up to kill it.....but there was 2 jacksons guarding it, along with an AT gun.

Then during the match, he would fire the calliope into my base after a retreat, and basically during the match I ended up losing 5 snipers to the calliope (along with several other squads). So many barrages into the base it broke the med bunker and almost some tier buildings. At the end of the match, I had no troops due to them being wiped on retreat from calliope.

How would you guys advise I take out the calliope / prevent squads being wiped on retreat?

Screenshot of some unit death stats: https://gyazo.com/4d8761250fe245b2fee8559d625349c6

Your only chance is to pop out Fallschirmjägers or Stormtroopers from a nearby building and steal the Calliope when your opponent abandons the Calliope for repairs or abusing manpower income for another one MVGame

What i`m taking away from your explanation: is that you had one panther against an At gun, two jacksons and a calliope. This is a huge fuel disparity. It is also derived that you spent a lot of manpower on snipers and that he was in a position to consistently use his calliope on your retreat point.

So I can only assume one of two things, either you had very little map control (so his calliope was already in range of your retreat point) or this game lasted a very long time.

Assuming the former, you had already lost the game and he was just building calliopes to ~seal the deal~ and bleed out your only plentiful resource - manpower. The choice to continue to invest in snipers meant that he only had to kill one unit to wipe you of 360 manpower - squads would have a greater chance of surviving a bombard, mabye only losing one or two guys if the scatter is high.

Assuming the later, you likley shouldve had your own panzerwerfer to wipe his infantry at the same rate his calliope was wiping yours. A USF player that has gone tactical support won`t have mines so even mass T3 tanks + grenadier support to push on his artillery with would work (pulling tanks back as they abosrb a jackson hit or two, or using the paks to volley the jacksons).

As with all artillery, the best counter is to move out of its fire zone - or hit it with a fast flanking tank/offmap ability. Example: Getting vision with a quick unit of sorts (p4 flank?) then dropping CAS on it will probably wreck it really fast and help deal with any fast response tanks. Additionally, please avoid mass retreats (select everything and hitting T) your play should allow for staggered retreating such that he will bleed units advancing into you and be forced too choose between bombarding your front line units... or risk being farther up to be in range of your base.

Snipers don't counter Calliopes dude. A Stug or two supported by a couple spaced AT guns and an MG team probably would of helped (all outside of bombardment range from eachother so he has to be rather selective on what to hit and doesn't kill all the team weapons at once). Bait the Jacksons out into AT gun range with the Stug/s, and after they go down go in for the kill on the Calliope. Honestly though, countering Tac Supp commander starts the second you realize that he locked it in. You need to expect the Calliope first and have at least one unit that can counter it before 10 CPs (as Ostheer I like rushing for a P4 as it can chase a Calliope down and can also provide you with some anti-inf support). Once the Calliope fires its first barrage focus on putting out more tanks and mobile infantry rather than team weapons and high value squishy units; don't continue to produce these until the Calliope is down. If the opponent decides to put out another Calliope after you destroy his first and you are able to preserve your own armor you practically won the game right there.

in fact you cant kill calliope without teammate help

At this point, lose. Way to hard to kill.

Sorry for late response, but thanks for the replies everybody.

@Troyd, I wasn't specific enough in the first post, but I think I had 2 panthers and 1 PW. (Match was a while ago, I don't remember the specifics) The match was about ~1 hour long, so map control shifted pretty often. Thanks for the advice!

@Dope, I'll be sure to try this some time, thank you!

Please don't forget to save and share the replay next time so we may share more tailored feedback.