Osttruppen doctrine abilities

Hi, new player here, trying to get better at Ostheer 1v1. I'm messing around with Osttruppen these days because it seems to be easier to play the early game with them rather than getting grens. I'm enjoying having a nice constant stream of cheap troops that fight better from cover. The osttruppen alone make this doctrine worthwhile imo.

But what about the other abilities in this doctrine? Any tips on what they are good for? So far I've only used the supply drop in addition to the call-in infantry. Now I may be completely wrong, but this is what I've observed:

- Officer: has some nice abilities on paper but the fact that you have to keep babysitting him gets annoying fast. Only used him once. Having some kind of weak call-in artillery, like the light arty barrage would make him so much better.
- Trenches: I can see a good use for these especially on maps without many buildings, so you can give your osttruppen an ad-hoc cover to benefit from their bonus and lock down territory. Grenades and molotovs can still ruin your day though, but at least they are free.
- Railway artillery: This one seems quite underwhelming for a 12cp final ability. It takes ages to fire, it only has 3 shells and can be easily dodged, so I can only see it working against completely static targets or very very bad players. The most use I've got from it so far was demolishing annoying buildings that the enemy kept putting MGs in, but for 12cp and 200 muni I expected more.

Any tips on how to make the most of these 3 abilities or are they just meh?

The officer is pretty nice. It has about the firepower of a grenadiers squad and the abilities are rather nice. It's a heavily underused unit for some reason.
- Concentrated fire is just a nice DPS boost for your units. Use it during engagements where you have a few units fighting and it will pay off.
- Smoke drops are excellent for a variety of gameplay situations such as: trying to steal a support weapon during an engagement, quickly nullifying an enemy machinegun, or covering the retreat of one of your tanks.
- Vector arty is not spectacular. It's a very situational ability. It orders artillery units to fire on location, even when they are still on cooldown. So you could use it for example with the Panzerwerfer to get extra rocket barrages. The vector ability gives arty units extra range as well so the barrages are usually fired instantly when you activate the vector arty ability.

Trenches are alright. Not bad, but not particularly good either.

Railway arty is the best call in arty at taking out static targets. Excellent against British players who use emplacements. The first round will always hit dead-center so it's a guaranteed kill on things like enemy ML-20 howitzers, mortar pits etc. Even Bofor positions will go down to a single use of this ability IF you use if after the opponent has already used the 'brace' ability and it is on cooldown. So to take out a bofors for example, first do some damage to it with a panther or a panzerwerfer and wait for it to go into brace. Then, after about 20 seconds, get some vision on the bofors and call in the railway arty on it. Brace will have worn off by the time the first railway shell lands and the 2nd or 3rd shell will destroy it.

Ah, that vector arty ability sounds good indeed. It's too bad that railway arty seems to an anti-Brit only ability though.

There are some situational uses for railway.

- Use it on AT guns during big engagements
- Self-repairing tanks from brits/soviets
- Howitzers emplacements from Soviets
- Destroying Strong buildings

Also, quite importantly, it denies an area to the enemy. You really can't risk moving into an area when there are railway arty shells raining down. So you can use it to force the enemy out of certain areas during engagements.

Ostruppen + Sniper = best anti-Brit strat, execute properly Brit will be pushed back to base and it's gg after 5 mins.

If you want to have a good time, put a minefeild in front of your trench. Not too close or they will damage your entrenched squad.that way the trench will be unusable by the enemy. (If they try to go around the minefeild they die on retreat)

Railway artillery used to be very popular back when a lot of Soviet players were going for commanders with the big B4 gun. IIRC, the first shell from railway always falls exactly on the spot you targeted, with other 3 having some scatter; as such it's perfect for wiping out a costly point target.

While the B4 commanders have fallen out of favour, and hence railway arty gets used less, there is always the possibility that the balance will shift again at some time in the future, and so learning to use railway effectively could still stand you in good stead.