How's the Stuka doing?

I recently watched the intense langreskaya match between Helping Hans And Luvnest, where our favorite german brought the walking Stuka back into the 1v1 scene.

While he ended up losing the match, the stuka seemed to be doing a lot of good work and forced Hans to constantly micro his team weapons around.

This made me think of a strategy that I might want to experiment with, but as always I would like to get feedback from the salt of the earth that is this community

What I was thinking is to go both battlegroup and mechanized thus delaying the schwere and rely on at-guns and pumas for AT options for the first part of the game and preferably push out a stuka within the first 12-15 minutes.

I imagine that this would work well with the Spec Ops commander, as he gives access to both the call-in panther as well as the flares to spot where the opponent is camping his team weapons.

In general this might work better on maps with wooden buildings like kholodny so you could wipe some garrisoned mgs and obviously against somewhat support weapon heavy builds.

My idea is not much deeper than this in terms of general build order etc. and the ambition for this strat is not in the top league, but rather around the top 200.

So any feedback, advice or comments on the stuka in general and my suggestions specifically would as always be much appreciated

i think if we going to do stuka in 1v1 the safe way to do is isildur's Spec ops strat P2 > Stuka > Puma > CMD Panther

but to delay such as T4 without CMD Panther it's best to rely on HEAT round at least i guess

while you are at it please test panzerwerfer rush if it's work in 1v1

build like fast Panzerwerfer then back tech tier 3 to get stug

while you are at it please test panzerwerfer rush if it's work in 1v1

build like fast Panzerwerfer then back tech tier 3 to get stug

Oh man. That sounds highly risky! How would you recommend go about this? Something like a heavy t1, t2 build with either Mobile defense or mechanized assault to call in some panic armor if necessary?

yeah i think T-70 or stuart could just dive in for some kill maybe puma before tank could at least keep allied armor at bay otherwise i can only i think for regular build like go P4 first then go straight to T4 werfer lel

So I happened to also catch the match in question and in my opinion, the stuka did close to nothing. In fact, I would even label it as the single biggest reason why Luvnest lost. If he had not gone stuka, he probably would have won.

As for your build proposal, the main question is "why". What do you need the stuka for? It "can" work for anti garrison (mostly by just flattening every garrison on the map; that counts, right?), but that usually doesn't justify the 100 fuel investment (which, again, is most importantly a 100 fuel delay on techs + tanks). It also does great against weapon teams, but does your opponent really have enough weapon teams by 12-15 minutes to justify that kind of investment?

Assuming that your opponent has enough on the field for you to counter there still is the (relatively minor) threat that you lose your stuka. The thing is, it doesn't even have to be the stuka that you lose. If you lose your luchs, you're now facing elite infantry using volks instead of possibly the obers that you could have had.

Beyond that, it's actually a long time to wait until you get your command panther out. 100 fuel in battlegroup + mech + meds. 230 fuel in luchs + puma + stuka. 225 for the cmd panther. That makes for around 550 fuel before you get your own tank out, and thats assuming you don't double up on luchses or pumas.

I'm sure a stuka rush can work, but I just don't see any reason to do it.

HOWEVER, if you went mechanized and teched normally, I can see the merit in getting a stuka after your first medium tank. At this point in the game, map play becomes more static and weapon teams are setting up their camps, so I see a stuka having a lot more targets. Also, having your medium out means you can punish the enemy player when you do manage to decrew their stuff.

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I see what you're saying and you make some good points as always, but at the same time I can't help to think that you might see this from the perspective of a top OKW player facing top level opponents?

I'll trust your assesment that the stuka might have lost Luvnest the game, but if that is the case than that must to a large part be due to the intense micro of Hans, who managed to intuitively reposistion all his team weapons correctly while simultaneously manage all other important engagements happening at the time.

I think that it would be fair to assume that this amound of control is waay beyond a ~200 player, and require a disproporionate amount of micro compared to the queed move-fire-pull-back action of the stuka.

I do agree that this strategy might pose a problem when facing medium armor rush from especially soviets as the command panther will come out a lot later than the t-34s.