Fall Balance Preview: Scope Additions

For anyone interested I did a little test regarding volks and their damage done to a fully upgraded mortar pit. (no advanced emplacement commander upgrades used)

2 flamenades with brace activated lowers the mortarpit's helth to 64%
2 flamenades without brace lowers the mortarpit's helth to 19%


It takes 2 volks squads, with no upgrade and no flame nade, 1 min and 11 seconds to destroy a mortarpit, no brace used
It takes 2 volks squads, with no upgrade and no flame nade, 2 min and 14 seconds to destroy a mortarpit, 2x brace used

It takes 2 volks squads, with weapon upgrade and no flame nade, 40 seconds to destroy a mortarpit, no brace used
It takes 2 volks squads, with weapon upgrade and no flame nade, 1 min and 16 seconds to destroy a mortarpit, 1x brace used

That's a very good piece of research.

However, lava-equipped infantry is not the norm; it's the exception; the true benchmark should be (LMG) Grenadiers.

As I stated in the original post, the only reason you even need brace vs infantry is because of lava nades. Remove brace and nerf lava nade modifier vs mortar pits, and the pit is already OP vs infantry. Hence armour would also have to be reduced; which is what we have in the revamp mod.

Enormous target size also skews infantry weapon effectiveness, punishing high-accuracy attacks (e.g., bolt actions) and heavily favouring automatics. Thus, target size would also have to be reduced to something around 1 (which is what we have in the mod).

The only way for OST infantry to have meaningful interactions with the pit is panzerschrecked equipped pgrens. That's a massive investment to make, and it's beyond wrong, in terms of counters.

There's absolutely no need for mortar pit brace to affect anything other than off-maps; and that's only because offmaps have specific modifiers to deal extra damage to mortar pits... because of brace.

The only reason brace exists is due to the following design process:
- Pits are immobile, therefore brace seems like a good idea to put them on-par with mobile assets
- (Permanent, release-time) Brace makes emplacements too durable; therefore, let's buff a ton of flame attacks/offmaps to specifically counter braced mortar pits
- Suddenly, unbraced mortarpits are too weak vs lava nades/off-maps, since pits were given access to brace

This is a vicious cycle, and it doesn't have to be this way.

I'm always willing to change my mind. However, imo, the point of emplacements is to force the other guy to attack at somepoint (since emplacements can't move), or to focus on a different area of the map (since emplacements have a smaller range). What emplacements shouldn't do is force players to attack with particular, slow-moving/situational units (e.g., panzerschrecks, AT guns, tanks), or reinforce an indirect-fire arms-race that will always end in a shitshow.

Low-lethality, short-range pits would be useless vs MGs.
Low lethality, long-range pits would be just as annoying as before when you go sim-city mode.

About the revamp-mod mortar pit? Any sort of evidence that proves that it is no better than live-version/FBP mortar pit mechanics in terms of gameplay/player frustration/faction synergy.

For both live-version and FBP mortar pits, you cannot build mortar pits in open ground. That's because the massive target size means that the mortar pit will get wrecked by Stugs/AT guns etc. This means you need to find a suitable shotblocker to place them behind.

For live-version mortar pits, this restriction doesn't matter, due to 120-range autoattack.

For FBP mortar pits, the restriction will matter a lot more; the mortar pit will only be able to control an area of 85 range around it; for anything beyond that, you require a 40-60 second barrage which can easily be dodged. This means the shotblocker requirement even more harsh than before.

We can't buff mortar pit target-size/hitbox, obviously, without nerfing brace, because absolutely nothing would ever be able to kill them, ever. However, without fixing target-size/hitbox we have mortar pits (and the entire Brit indirect-fire department) that is completely map-dependent.

Nevertheless, in both cases (FBP and live), if the map does have a shotblocker at the right distance, the mortar pit will remain immortal. Especially when sim city commanders are involved.

Emplacements shouldn't be immortal; they should be kinda-replaceable.

The ideal solution for the pit is one that:
- Doesn't require sim city for the pit to be useful
- Punishes players heavily for going sim city

Indirect fire is meant to punish overly defensive players and as support for a push. What indirect fire shouldn't do is win you any infantry fight that it is in range of. The mortar pit acquires targets quickly, fires accurately and hits hard. So much so that if you have a squad in cover fighting another squad (even for 20 seconds) the mortar will hit that squad and you lose the fight almost all the time. If not because the mortar hit you but, because you had to move the squad. The mortar pit currently counters all infantry, not just team weapons or camping.

As the mortar pit means the brits (for the most part) win every fight, your single objective is forced to become its destruction. The Brit player knows this so prepares accordingly. Knowing what your opponent will do, MUST do is an advantage that shouldn't be underestimated.

So how does a good Brit player prepare? Set up MG's in trenches or heavy cover and AT guns protecting the approaches to the mortar pit. Worse is a Bofors. Not only does the bofors ward of infantry, it also wards off any light vehicles. Add into the mix the repairing forward base for never ending fast repairs.

For an Ost player they still have some limited options. However, OKW is now fucked. With the shitty range and survivability of the Raketten an OKW player cant use them. The Stuka, as an alpha strike unit is useless vs emplacements; cant use that. The Puma gets killed by Bofors and AT guns, as with the luchs. The LEIG gets outranged and killed by the mortar pit.

The only option for OKW becomes an all in push with medium and upwards tanks, however by this time the Brit will have at least one AT gun, and probably a tank of their own (given how the mortar pit is likely to win them most engagements in at least half the map).

By nerffing the only actual counter OKW had to mid-late game emplacement spam, you have forced OKW into a do-or-die gamble for an early game win using the luchs/mech in general. Vs a Brit, no OKW player will ever go for Med HQ. Even that gamble is unlikely to work vs a good Brit player who uses AEC and/or AT sections.

Indirect fire is meant to punish overly defensive players and as support for a push. What indirect fire shouldn't do is win you any infantry fight that it is in range of. The mortar pit acquires targets quickly, fires accurately and hits hard. So much so that if you have a squad in cover fighting another squad (even for 20 seconds) the mortar will hit that squad and you lose the fight almost all the time. If not because the mortar hit you but, because you had to move the squad. The mortar pit currently counters all infantry, not just team weapons or camping.

As the mortar pit means the brits (for the most part) win every fight, your single objective is forced to become its destruction. The Brit player knows this so prepares accordingly. Knowing what your opponent will do, MUST do is an advantage that shouldn't be underestimated.

What you're describing here is live-version mortar pit with 120 range.

OST mortar has 80 range; FBP (and revamp) mortar pit have 85 range. If the mobile OST turbomortar can wipe infantry units, and relocate other parts of the map, why shouldn't the mortar pit also help win infantry engagements within its 85 autoattack radius (nerfed in FBP and revamp mod).

Yeah, the 120-range barrage will force players to relocate. However that happens only every 40-60 seconds; if you use the barrage to support an infantry engagement at one point on the map, it follows that you cannot use your mortar pit investment to do anything else until the cooldown receedes.

If at this point, we're discussing a carpet-nerf for the lethality of all mortars; sure. Otherwise, I'm not sure why the immobile mortar should also be the crappiest mortar.

So how does a good Brit player prepare? Set up MG's in trenches or heavy cover and AT guns protecting the approaches to the mortar pit.

Isn't this identical to MG42, pakwalls and mortars? Trenches should be neutral so that they shouldn't be spammed.

Also, keep in mind that the OST force is mobile and can relocate; the mortar pit is stationary and has an 85 range autoattack.

Worse is a Bofors. Not only does the bofors ward of infantry, it also wards off any light vehicles. Add into the mix the repairing forward base for never ending fast repairs.

Bofors benefits from brace, which I hope you agree, is OP.

If you remove brace and the FHQ aura, Bofors automaticall becomes balanced:
- 5 AT shots and Bofors is dead; no exceptions
- Requires a squad garrisoned inside to fire the barrage, which means that the squad is taking damage to indirect fire while you're dealing damage to indirect fire.

If Bofors feels too weak after effectively removing brace and the FHQ aura, just reduce the price. I never had any issues with Bofors performance in the revamp mod, because I was using it as a 2nd line unit, and the mortar pit could actually react to attack commands.

(We also toned down Bofors lethality by 50% in the mod, while upping suppression by a bit)

For an Ost player they still have some limited options. However, OKW is now fucked. With the shitty range and survivability of the Raketten an OKW player cant use them. The Stuka, as an alpha strike unit is useless vs emplacements; cant use that. The Puma gets killed by Bofors and AT guns, as with the luchs. The LEIG gets outranged and killed by the mortar pit.

The only option for OKW becomes an all in push with medium and upwards tanks, however by this time the Brit will have at least one AT gun, and probably a tank of their own (given how the mortar pit is likely to win them most engagements in at least half the map).

By nerffing the only actual counter OKW had to mid-late game emplacement spam, you have forced OKW into a do-or-die gamble for an early game win using the luchs/mech in general. Vs a Brit, no OKW player will ever go for Med HQ. Even that gamble is unlikely to work vs a good Brit player who uses AEC and/or AT sections.

I never experienced any issues killing emplacements as OKW in the revamp mod; in fact it felt way too easy to take down emplacements as OKW, given that we haven't toned down lava nade damage vs emplacements, yet.

Remove brace from bofors, and now suddenly it's at the mercy of raketenwerfers. Or kill Bofors with ISGs. Without brace Bofors will die faster than the mortar pit can retaliate on your LeIG.

This means that the Bofors can no longer be your first frontline unit; it needs to be in your 2nd line of defense.

If mortar pits are built too close to the frontline, to be able to cover the Bofors with barrage, then they become ultra-vulnerable when the Bofors goes down. If they're too far away, they can only contribute damage with barrages, which you can trivially dodge and not have to worry about them for another minute. This is at the same time while you're killing the Bofors; which doesn't benefit from 30-second brace.

Note that without the FHQ aura, you need actual units garrisoning the mortar pits to be able to fire at a normal speed. The cost of building enough sims to provide garrison bonus to your sim city is astronomical; people just won't bother with sim city anymore.

At the same time OKW has smoke, which you can use to sneak squads past the bofors and onto the juicy mortar pits, etc, etc. If you feel you want to use a commander, either go smoke & goliath, or spawn infiltration units to kill the mortar pits from behind.

In the revamp mod we've also cheated by giving Walking Stuka a cheap incendiary barrage at Vet0 (toned down of course), so that we can avoid the issue of alpha-strike being useless vs emplacements.

Just to throw this out, what about changing brace so that it lasts - say - 1:30 or even 2 minutes, so that brace has the serious downside of rendering the emplacement useless for a considerable amount of time?

Regarding the Conscripts: Ok, one goal for the changes in the revamp was to make them more consistent. However, the changes do also improve their performance (slighty?), right? Did you consider instead to change them more towards Osttruppen, i.e. making them cheaper/take less popcap/cheaper and faster to reinforce?

Be careful not to over buff cons, next min we will have spammed Ppsh with 1 shock thrown in and support from 120mm mortar, followed up by tanks, this is already powerful, cons need a buff, but it wouldnt take too much for them to become really fucking powerful.

If people want to see a reduction in use of penal spam, I think simply increasing their reinforce time would be a really nice option. It would take them longer to get back out on the field, which goes nicely with their delayed deployment time (due to tecking). But they still remain a strong unit, could still be spammed, but wont dominate the map for quite as long.

People could negate the increased reinforce time by using merge, which is good because now you would need some cons, and it also takes a little time and micro to do.


Nice to see a speed buff on the Tiger, this will really help it stay alive and make it a more attractive option.

Just to throw this out, what about changing brace so that it lasts - say - 1:30 or even 2 minutes, so that brace has the serious downside of rendering the emplacement useless for a considerable amount of time?

Regarding the Conscripts: Ok, one goal for the changes in the revamp was to make them more consistent. However, the changes do also improve their performance (slighty?), right? Did you consider instead to change them more towards Osttruppen, i.e. making them cheaper/take less popcap/cheaper and faster to reinforce?

Conscripts are a 6-man squad. Therefore they can't cost any less than 6 popcap, unless we start bending the rules. Making conscripts cheaper would have side-effects when used to recrew team-weapons or when used to merge with squads.

Thus, given that Cons are forced to cost 6 popcap, and that people should consider buying their upgrades, Conscripts should be able to do something.

For Ostruppen to work, you need really powerful team weapons/sniper to do the actual damage. While we did buff T2 weapons to make them decent, giving the amount of strength needed to Soviet weapons to make it work with this strat would essentially make them Ostheer v2.0.

Then, for spam-oriented Conscripts to work, we'd have to reduce the cost of their abilities, and think about how much to reduce the cost of their upgrades.

Finally, once these would be done we would have to figure out a solution for the PPSh, to make it not OP with cheaper cons abilities and lower reinforcement cost. That would be very difficult to solve, since PPSh is a short-range weapon, and short-ranged weapons suck at defense; and that's what you built the cheap Cons-truppen for, right?

Finally, even with all that and, without touching Mosin profiles, Conscripts would still completely suck at trading vs G43 grens and STG Volks; unless we also completely redo those two units.

Thus, we chose the simpler solution to buff the Mosin so that it can hurt advancing units and buff the molotov. Neither of those buffs have an impact of team weapons, ppsh upgrade or anything else. Thus, we avoid the need to completely redo the entire faction from scratch.

I suppose we can both argue about ideal or non-ideal situations.

However I hold to my position that a better solution to the mortar pit would be high range and lower lethality, meaning it could fulfill its role as a garrison and overly defensive play style counter but not force one player or the other to lose based on its survival or destruction. That way we don't have to worry so much about brace or sim-city, as players can build it farther back and not have to go bofors/rep's to protect their investment in a mortar pit.

I suppose we can both argue about ideal or non-ideal situations.

However I hold to my position that a better solution to the mortar pit would be high range and lower lethality, meaning it could fulfill its role as a garrison and overly defensive play style counter but not force one player or the other to lose based on its survival or destruction. That way we don't have to worry so much about brace or sim-city, as players can build it farther back and not have to go bofors/rep's to protect their investment in a mortar pit.

The moment you have a long-range mortar pit, destroying the mortar pit already becomes a matter of survival. And that's, the doomsday scenario you described with tommies/MGs dug in and the Bofors preventing stuff to go through.

Live-version ISGs have crap lethality (unless you get lucky vs clumped squads), but oh god, they're annoying. Now imagine ISG spam for a second vs Ostheer.

If you don't kill the mortar pit, it will continue to harass your troops in every single engagement, breaking their cover, causing them to dance, destroying your mines, not letting you setup an MG anywhere.

Then, problems become even worse when you start adding additional mortar pits in your sim city. You still have the long range and, at somepoint, you will have the critical mass needed to make all stationary units within your radius useless.

At the same time, I don't micro my mortar pit and it still deals damage for me. So, why not build more of them?

And that, still, doesn't address which units are supposed to kill the long-range mortar pit? Do we wait for tanks for this?

Just to throw this out, what about changing brace so that it lasts - say - 1:30 or even 2 minutes, so that brace has the serious downside of rendering the emplacement useless for a considerable amount of time?

Sure; this would nerf sim city. However, at the same time this would make building singular mortar pits completely useless. The only time you will be able to defend mortar pits successfully vs concentrations of enemy indirect fire is if you built multiple mortar pits.

EDIT: Though a long brace time as you describe could work for Bofors/17 pounder. Neither unit provide utility that cannot be provided by alternatives. Therefore singular Bofors/17 pounders failing is acceptable.

Conscripts are a 6-man squad. Therefore they can't cost any less than 6 popcap, unless we start bending the rules. [...]

Then, for spam-oriented Conscripts to work, we'd have to reduce the cost of their abilities, and think about how much to reduce the cost of their upgrades.

Finally, once these would be done we would have to figure out a solution for the PPSh, to make it not OP with cheaper cons abilities and lower reinforcement cost. That would be very difficult to solve, since PPSh is a short-range weapon, and short-ranged weapons suck at defense; and that's what you built the cheap Cons-truppen for, right?

Thanks for the response, but I was thinking about something less radical. The idea is not that one should spam more cons, but that cons should be slightly more MP efficient and are back on the field faster.

Ok, maybe lower the cost to 220 (which would bring down reinforcement to 18 per model, right?). If possible, use a -1 squad pop, so the full 6 man squad would have a total of 5. Reduce the reinforcement (and potentially build) time to - say - 80% of what it currently is. Reduce throw time of Molotov slightly and maybe merge Molotov and AT grenades. This shouldn't change the early game dynamic only slightly and also the relative performance of squads remains, but in the long run it should help the SOV saving MP.

I doubt this would make Soviets much like Ostheer with Osttruppen, given that the latter are more long-range oriented and don't have the utility of the Cons. And no, I don't think that cons are necessarily defensive troops. Uhm, I guess I better start another thread, rather than derailing this one...