Brit Emplacements need a redesign. The current design (brace, counter-system) is an all-or-nothing system. This will only allow for fluctuation between complete irrelevance (and thus no indirect fire for Brits) or Sim City abuse (and high levels of salt, everywhere).
- OKW
This one's tricky because it could affect 1v1. One Schwer HQ on the field and you can still use air based munitions abilities (sort of). 2-4 Schwer HQs on the field and you immediately shut down all plane abilities. Many Soviet and the USF Airborne commanders are now firmly out of the meta.
The (first) AA, currently comes completely free to the OKW player, and is strong enough to withstand anything but a fully-committed frontal assault.
If a player is good, they can capitalize on the strong (and completely free) bonuses that this ability gives. However, if you are good enough, you really didn't need the enormous advantage that the T4 flak provides anyway.
If somebody messes up and loses this, they immediately fall on a terrible disadvantage, since replacing the T4 is way more expensive than the utility the free AA provides. This, again, is an example of an all-or-nothing design (see emplacements).
My proposal:
- The T4 comes with no flak weapon attached to it. (you need to upgrade)
- If you ever have to replace the T4, you can do it for free (the price of the HQ truck; does USF/UKF pay for anything to repair their base?)
- However, every time you want to redeploy the AA canon you need to pay some price.
- Paying the same price as an 17-pounder would do the trick, since the gun is great at deterring infantry, and also good enough to deter medium armour rushes (with 10 popcap, though, equal to Bofors)
- As a compensation, the gun should become controllable by the player (maybe even with attack ground).
- (The Bofors is currently way too underpriced, and everybody knows this).
Skill planes.
In 4v4, we can have all these different air abilities flying at once. We used to have a limit to how many p47s strikes could be in the air at once. With the Brits new abilities, you have 3 different type of OP plane abilities all flying around at once. Its unfortunately game changing and cheap play. Players now build ammo caches to stock munitions just for this very purpose. Its madness. Limit the air abilities to one per team at any given time.
Quoted for Truth.
Air Supremacy
Remember when Air Superiority was nerfed so that it wouldn't one-shot OKW trucks? That was a great change. Now it is an awesome denier ability, and if you want to use it offensively to wipe OKW trucks, you also have to follow up with an assault (otherwise, you just wasted 300+ munitions).
... unless of course you use 2 of them at the same time. No counterplay possible (if the map forces you to bunch up trucks).
OST JU-87 AT loiter
The ability alone is borderline broken. However, you can mitigate this by making sure your tanks are always at full health (and hugging the enemy tanks when the ability is used mid-combat). It also helps if you keep an AA unit in the rear to shoot the ability down.
... unless the enemy decides to summon two of these abilities
at the same time. This will instantly annihilate ANY vehicle present, in the first pass (including Churchills, or any unfortunate AA unit that you happened to be present). Because, counterplay. JU-87 spam waits for no man, woman, child or small furry animal.
agree with everything except Tech/Building Independent Call-in Vehicles
down with FRP already.
Since Relic seems to be actually reconsidering fundamental aspects of the game (e.g., vehicle crush), wouldn't it be a great idea to also trial removing FRPs? At least in the official balance preview patch?