Royal Artillery + Sexton Balance

I have been playing around with this doctrine a lot recently and want to share some of my thoughts. The commander is pretty fun but i am not sure how competitive it can be.

The Early Warning Flares are a great ability. It can reveal large swaths of the battlefield and is handy when paired with indirect weapons.

I have mixed feelings about the Coordinated Fire ability. The ability to place it in the fog of war is awesome, but i find the damage from the base guns lackluster. The base artillery is not very accurate as well. It is a nice ability if you have the munitions for it but i don't see much benefit in using the ability. I mainly use it against OKW trucks.

Valentine Tank - It's an okay vehicle, but i think it comes a little late. I haven't used it much to be honest, but i think the Valentine is good for scouting and spotting of enemy positions.

Sexton - I really want to like this unit. It should be the focal point of this doctrine, however, the unit is very lackluster imo. It is a cheap self-propelled artillery piece, but its performance is poor. It doesn't seem to have any great features. I really think this unit needs some kind of buff.

Perimeter Overwatch - Expensive ability, but seems fairly balanced. The duration lasts quite a bit. I wish there were faster volleys though. Not sure if this ability needs tweaking.

sexton:
increase range to 160
increase aoe profile to match priest (7/6/4/2).

Lol, a little late to the party, but welcome nonetheless.

As bad as the Sexton and Royal arty regiment in general are, i must say that its a pretty fun unit if you play team vs A.I tbh fam and...urrr thats about it

Make me feel really bad about the commander since he is just so much fun to play

I said before somewhere - just throw out from game base artillery and Sextons, cos they both are useless, no matter what you will do with them.

Remake Royal Artillery doctrine, place there and only there OF 25 pounder emplacements with 1-2 passive abilities to that, instead of "Sexton" and "Coordinate barrage".

Let UK have good artillery, but as for everyone - only doctrinal.

Valentine and Sexton were obviously designed to be used together. Problem is, not only is that rare in itself, but only really when you have multiple Sextons, and the Valentine is at vet1.

Some simple changes:
-Sexton can be used when you activate Coordinated Barrage like the base howitzers;
-Coordinated Fire ability can only be fired in LOS, but includes any Sextons on the field, it encourages both Sexton use as well as using Early Warning first;
- Valentine's vet1 ability causes the Sextons to fire airburst/ WP shells
-Misc. idea: Supercharged Rounds that greatly increase maxmium range

Sexton is useless. don't even use it till it gets buff.

With regards to the Sexton Artilley... go and test this thing on Vet3! Because I kid you not, it has NO reload time. Hard to get there though

I really like this doctrine because I use my fuel to quick tech up to 2 tiers ASAP to utilize artillery early on. Anvil Tactics for airburst rounds really help if you're trying to take on OKW defense areas (Battlegruppe etc).

The nice thing is that whilst your spending fuel on this quick tech you have the off map valentine which although isn't insanely strong, it's still more than good enough to hold it's own against inf and most mediums with good micro. I think the valentine perfectly fills that void though whilst your quick teching to still field a tank if you need something quick.

It's not as useful as the other commanders competitively but I certainly have a soft spot for this

sure vet 3 is great but the real problem is getting it to vet 3

Welcome to the "disappointed by royal arty" club, where you want it to work but always end up with inevitable disappointment.

The doctrine basically ceases to exist after the first two abilities, and even then you basically need anvil to make concentrated fire worthwhile. Try firing it at a truck without it for example - you'll be lucky if you get 1 direct hit out of 6 shells.

The valentine is just bad I'm afraid. Ignoring that it comes too late to be anything beyond a fog of war scanner, it's just worse than the AEC at every thing else on top of that. It's largely down to the gun damage - a mere 80 compared to the AEC's 120 and tanks which are generally 160. The low damage makes it useless against inf since it needs a direct hit to kill and has little splash damage. It also makes it largely useless against vehicles.

The Sexton is genuinely a case of "how did they design it this poorly?". It has low range, low barrage capability (fires less shells than the priest), low damage (for artillery), isn't cheap enough to spam and even if you could they come in at 14 pop cap each anyway.

As for perimeter overwatch, well, if you have too much munitions and want to turn your map orange it's great! For everything else it's completely pointless. By the time your howitzers turn and fire, whatever they were going to shoot at will have moved. Not that it matters much, the 25pdrs won't hit them anyway. That's if you're lucky enough to get a round off. It's more than likely that they'll have decapped the territory by the time the guns turn rendering the whole thing pointless.

Yes, I also have a soft spot for this commander. I badly want it to work. But the flaws with it, and the lackluster performance of the 25pdrs, valentine and sexton has glaringly obvious since launch yet the only change has been a slight CP reduction for the Valentine. Ultimately if you win with this commander, chances are you would have won without any commander anyway.

time to buff sexton.

sexton:
increase range to 160
increase aoe profile to match priest (7/6/4/2).

Fireparks, are you insane? the priest is 140 fuel and the sexton is 80 or 90.....the performance should NOT match at all due to cost. If anything, cost paste priest to sexton and cost. but that would still be dumb.

First - What for we need Sexton? For nothing, It is useless.

Second - What for we need base QF 25 pounders? For nothing, They are useless. (even as free unit)

Third - Throw them both out from my CoH 2, I don't need here useless units.

Forth - Make QF 25 pounder emplacement, place it in Royal Artillery doctrine. And do total remake of entire doctrine, cos UKF artillery will work as usual one.

Fifth - Everybody happy.

Sixth (Optional) - For God sake, nerf Land Mattress already! It alone makes entire "Royal Arty" doctrine look like a pile of dog shit, really. Make serious nerf of AoE of Mattress rocket and little less serious of their damage. Right now they are acting, like Katyushas, which shooting all their 16 rockets with 1 massive salvo, not with 4 pity small. Imagine that hell, which Katya could make like that... or just try to use Mattress.

The mattress is fine. It's slow, decrewable and doesn't have the alpha strike associated with rocket artillery. It's everything else the ukf has that's broken.

When talking about the Sexton it's generally accepted that the cost would go up if it matched the priest.

Personally I'd give the Sexton slightly longer range (5-10) than the priest and a longer barrage, but with lower damage per shell (160 compared to the Priest's 200). The AoE profile needs fixed for all 25pdr based artillery to make it an actual threat. The price would be similar.

For anyone who's curious, these changes would be to closer match historical performance (this is still a game vaguely based on actual history, right?). The Sexton could fire further than the Priest and carried more shells.

With regards to the Sexton Artilley... go and test this thing on Vet3! Because I kid you not, it has NO reload time. Hard to get there though

Cooldown is 90sec by default, it fires 5 shots per barrage and at vet2 gets standard arty -40% cooldown.
To feel like it has no cooldown, it would have to fire 1 shot every 10 seconds, so I wouldn't be so sure about that

Vet3 is standard range buff.

It also doesn't get +2 shells static arty gets and even priest fires 7 shots on same cooldown, but with much better range and AoE.

it's pretty hard to get to vet 2 even... sexton can't really hit anything. as much as i like this unit, it is really lackluster

Don't forget the valentine has a pretty great smoke ability. It's not like a simple mortar smoke, it fires 6 shells and blocks off a pretty big area.

Yep, Valentine smoke is brilliant..

Shame there isn't a willie pete option as the Valentine is seriously underpowered in every other way.

It's a shame this doctrine is so bad, it feels like it would be quite easy to make it good. Reduce Valentine to 4 CP, buff the Sexton and reduce the fuel cost, and fix Concentrated Barrage in some way. I suggest they make it so that instead of having to pay 100 munis for a barrage, the ability is a passive that makes it so that you can just manually fire the base arty on a long cooldown (basically so that you get a LeFH/ML-20) for free.

Cooldown is 90sec by default, it fires 5 shots per barrage and at vet2 gets standard arty -40% cooldown.

-40% colldown is anything but "standard"...

ML-20 152mm Gun-Howitzer -25% barrage recharge
B-4 203mm Howitzer -25% barrage recharge
10.5cm leFH 18 Artillery -25% barrage recharge
M7B1 'Priest' Howitzer Motor Carriage -30% ability recharge time

To feel like it has no cooldown, it would have to fire 1 shot every 10 seconds, so I wouldn't be so sure about that
...

Depends on what barrage one is using, if ones use normal barrage there is around 26 sec between last shot (vet2) fired and next barrage.

If one uses "creeping barrage" for 50 MU the weapon is ready to fire almost at the time the previous barrage ends, so Stormless might have been referring to "creeping barrage"

It also doesn't get +2 shells static arty gets and even priest fires 7 shots on same cooldown, but with much better range and AoE.

The only static arty that get +2 shot is the ML-20 and that is instead of vet 1 ability...The priest is also much more expensive...

Sexton on its own is rather bad but used with the Concentration Barrage (15 munition) valentine ability has very long range.