This causes issues with the general design of the faction:
- Royal Engineers with weapon upgrades are better main-line infantry than Infantry Sections because they do not receive the penalty, have better durability with veterancy (especially with Heavy Engineers)and lower reinforcement cost while costing 70 manpower less per squad.
- The PIAT has an extremely fast reload time for infantry AT weapons when not equipped on Infantry Sections. If it could reliably hit units without attack-ground micro, it would be completely OP.
- Infantry Sections are relegated to a utility role once weapon upgrades arrive.
- Literally every other infantry unit in the game is better with British weapons than Infantry Sections
These problems can be solved by changing the current penalty to a bonus and altering the current weapon stats to maintain the current balance.
Suggested Changes:
- Royal Engineers now use the Infantry Section version of the Bren gun
- Bren gun cooldown multiplied by 1.2
- Bren gun reload time multiplied by 1.4
- PIAT reload time multiplied by 1.4
- Vickers K cooldown multiplied by 1.2
- Vickers K reload time multiplied by 1.4
- Lee Enfield cooldown multiplied by 1.2
- Lee Enfield reload time multiplied by 1.4
- Scoped Lee Enfield cooldown multiplied by 1.2
- Scoped Lee Enfield reload time multiplied by 1.4
- Infantry Section cover bonus changed to the following:
Status | In Cover | Out of Cover |
Cooldown Multiplier | 0.83 (1/1.2) | 1 |
Reload Multiplier | 0.71 (1/1.4) | 1 |
An obvious problem I'm sure someone will (rightly) point out is that giving the Infantry Section a bonus will make them OP when using weapons looted from other factions. This is incorrect, for a few reasons.
Firstly, cooldown and reload bonuses are much more potent on bolt-action/semiautomatic weapons and AT weapons than automatic weapons. Given that the majority of droppable enemy weapon upgrades are machine guns or flamethrowers and that Panzershrecks would still have a lower rate of fire than PIATs (despite doing the same amount of damage) it is unlikely that the potency of the bonus would be an issue.
Secondly, looting enemy weapons from axis squads requires squad wipes (Volksgrenadiers, Grenadiers, Obersoldaten) or near squad wipes (Panzergrenadiers) and a fair amount of luck. The weapons in question have only a 33% (1 in 3) chance of dropping when they cannot transfer to another model making dropped weapons fairly rare.
Thirdly, this is not a major issue with a current unit that has a far more potent bonus. Osttruppen have their accuracy multiplied by 3 when in cover and, unlike cooldown and reload, accuracy bonuses have a direct relation to DPS across all anti-infantry weapons. This bonus is balanced by their rifle's extremely low accuracy when outside of cover but does not take into account either looted enemy weapons or their own lmg42 (same as the Grenadier's, 20% chance per squad when using Osttruppen Reserves). As Osttruppen are not currently considered OP, one can reasonably conclude that the suggested changes to the Infantry Section cover bonus are unlikely to significantly unbalance the game.
Thank you for reading all of this.
What do you think?