Countering JP4/Ele

Ok... that stuka dive bomb video made me snort a little. XD

B4 is pretty damn accurate when you have line of sight, I was doing that with my mate the other day. Anti concrete rounds are pretty effective against steel too.

Also you can't Stuka without recon. Build AA and don't build your ML-20s in stupid places and watch your flanks. It's not fool proof no, but it should be fine if you do that.

Aside from that, elefants and Jagdtigers have virtually no anti infantry, just snare and satchel them. If they have MG's to suppress you, smoke off with mortars and then do it. Or if they are bunkers, Katyusha them.

Russia don't really fall short in any area of their roster right now if you ask me.

I'm not sure where the AA comes in, stuka dive-bomb has no actual plane.

T34s + mark target, or if you can get a snare close you can IL2 bomb

Even better: ram plus IL2. Takes some practice to pull off though, as the ram stun wears off before the bombs come in so you have to call them before the t34 hits the other tank. Pretty sure fire kill though. I find heavy TDs much harder to deal with as brits or especially usf unless they somehow royally absolutely fuck up and hit an m20 mine XD.

Even better: ram plus IL2. Takes some practice to pull off though, as the ram stun wears off before the bombs come in so you have to call them before the t34 hits the other tank. Pretty sure fire kill though. I find heavy TDs much harder to deal with as brits or especially usf unless they somehow royally absolutely fuck up and hit an m20 mine XD.

When I play brits I just 2x tulips. USF is the most difficult I agree there.

P47s and Artillery are USF best option, or just constantly smoking the thing, M10s being cheaper will be a solid option next patch too.

SU85 is practically a hard counter to the JP4, JP4 is kind of a joke of a TD anyway. As for the Elephant, snare it and use 2 mediums to flank it, or hell you can even win one on one with a T34 if the elephant is not supported by driving around it. The Germans don't have the benefit of massing armor like the allies can, at least not by the time an elephant comes out, so you should be able to overwhelm pretty easily unless your opponent is extremely cautious.

I'm not sure where the AA comes in, stuka dive-bomb has no actual plane.

As I said, they need to have line of sight to use the Stuka ability, which requires either diving the ML-20 with units which should be difficult or you've built it in the wrong place or defended badly, OR more likely they call in a recon plane commander ability.

The AA will shoot down the recon plane before it reaches the ML-20 and they won't get line of sight, thus they won't be able to use the stuka dive bomb, or any other strike (e.g.-zeroing/railway arty), on the ML-20, meaning they cannot kill it.

Recon abilities are EXTREMELY important and powerful for a multitude of reasons.

Elefants are not difficult to counter as Brits or USF.

With all these german units that people complain about, artillery dominance is key, it gives you options.

USF go Infantry company and Priest it to force it to move. Priests can quite easily squash it anyway but once you've forced it to move either attack it whilst it's moving with jacksons etc or when it goes for repairs, shell it again and kill their engineers.

UKF it's also not difficult, go royal artillery for sextons and do the same, or use them to gain artillery dominance to allow you to build a 17 pdr emplacement, the emplacement outranges both the elefant and jagtiger and will beat them 1 on 1 forcing the super heavy TD to fall back giving you more space and prevents TD creep. Alternatively force it to move like with priests and attack with comets or cromwells.

Fun fact- it takes 2 AVRE shots to kill an elefant as well... get a mate and go double royal engineers. Not as effective as the other solutions and more difficult to pull off but holy **** is it funny. XD

But this post is about Russia. Russian solutions are definitely more fiddly due to no mobile artillery guns so I get the point of this post, but they most definitely are there. Satchel spam works great, artillery works great, Il2 bombs works great too.

Also: JP4 is a very good TD, the main problem with it is that it's not a panther, imo late game best rule to follow is any vehicle that isn't a Panther, Brummbar or Panzerwerfer/Stuka zu fuss is probably a waste of fuel most of the time unless you know what you are doing +Tiger 1s/ace. 1 Superheavy TD per team is good too but no more than that. It's not that the units are bad at all, it's that the units I mentioned are too beautifully perfect not to be buying right now.

SU85 is practically a hard counter to the JP4, JP4 is kind of a joke of a TD anyway. As for the Elephant, snare it and use 2 mediums to flank it, or hell you can even win one on one with a T34 if the elephant is not supported by driving around it. The Germans don't have the benefit of massing armor like the allies can, at least not by the time an elephant comes out, so you should be able to overwhelm pretty easily unless your opponent is extremely cautious.

Ehh what? JP4 is arguably the best TD in COH2 if you use it right. I sense a L2P issue here. SU85 especially has no chance vs JP4 because the JP4 will always get the first shot of thanks to camo. Then it also has significantly higher ROF than SU85 which means it reks it hard.

Generally JP4 also has a ton of armor and can´t reliably be penetrated by medium tanks, meanwhile P4s pen SU85 with almost every shot. JP4 also gets a HP boost to 800 at vet2. Again no other medium TD has this.

So in what world is the JP4 a joke of a TD?

Ehh what? JP4 is arguably the best TD in COH2 if you use it right. I sense a L2P issue here. SU85 especially has no chance vs JP4 because the JP4 will always get the first shot of thanks to camo. Then it also has significantly higher ROF than SU85 which means it reks it hard.

Generally JP4 also has a ton of armor and can´t reliably be penetrated by medium tanks, meanwhile P4s pen SU85 with almost every shot. JP4 also gets a HP boost to 800 at vet2. Again no other medium TD has this.

So in what world is the JP4 a joke of a TD?

JP4 has a very good chance to win vs SU-85 that is correct on the other hand:

Reload for SU-85 is 5.4 while for the JP is 4.3-5.2 (4.75 average) so it is not "significantly higher" can even be pretty close.

HP bonuses (and armor) for TDs especially ones with 60 range might be unique but that are not really that useful. Penetration, accuracy, reload, speed, acceleration rotation can be much more valuable.

Comparing the penetration chance of mediums vs JP and and the penetration of JP vs SU-85 is simply misleading.

Su-85 has a 96% chance to penetrate JP4 frontally at max range so they are about equal.

Su-85 is actually a very effective TD vs most axis vehicles while JP lucks the penetration to deal with heavily armored vehicles, as cost efficiency goes they have the same pop and cost that is close.

JP4 will easily out-scale SU-85 thanks to camo, first shot bonus and additional hp, however JP4 is made to counter vehicles of SU-85 tier.

SU-85 doesn't stand much of a chance on the long run, only initially.
That being said, countering JP4 is as easy as bringing AT gun.

Ele is a different story.

The "first shot" bonuses of JP are simply overrated. The unit needs to vet to level 5 to get them and they are not that big.

Countering a Jagdpanzer IV is like countering any other tank destroyer.

You invest in tank destroyers yourself, making it a fair fight, or you accept enemy AT Armor superiority and shift your build to counter what they don't have. If they build a JPIV, they didn't build something else.

If you can't counter the unit, counter the build.

As I said, they need to have line of sight to use the Stuka ability, which requires either diving the ML-20 with units which should be difficult or you've built it in the wrong place or defended badly, OR more likely they call in a recon plane commander ability.

The AA will shoot down the recon plane before it reaches the ML-20 and they won't get line of sight, thus they won't be able to use the stuka dive bomb, or any other strike (e.g.-zeroing/railway arty), on the ML-20, meaning they cannot kill it.

Nope doesn't work.

Rails and Metal, from north to bot. Made 10 test with each allied AA (M5 HT, USF AAHT, Bofors and Centaurs). 5 been in front the arty (bot middle strategic point near east spawn) and the other on the middle VP. Best case scenario of aiming directly towards the plane.

Bofors is bugged and can't kill air vehicles.
USF AAHT is also on the sad part. There were times that the rotation of the weapon couldn't keep up with the rotation of the loiter. If it fired, it would kill it rapidly.
Centaur and M5 HT didn't had an issue.

Recon loiter planes gives LoS in a cone and 360 in a smaller area around it.
On top of that, they keep giving vision while they are falling down.

In all test, i had enough vision to use the Stuka. The window might be shorter in some cases, but I still got enough to use it.

Even more, there's a bug on which the plane will give vision in the area where it died, aiming towards a specific point in the map, north west. This seems to apply to all maps, all spawn positions, all planes.


Reminder this is only from the player picking the most common Ele commander, so there's no issues such sa having to "coordinate". Other commanders have other ways to bypass AA as well such as directional vector offmap or directly uncounterable flares.

If players are coordinating to destroy the ML-20s it should be killable, the same with LefHs. Like I said though, building AA isn't foolproof and depends on map. 1v1 and 2v2 maps may be too small for Recon to be shot down in time but I wouldn't say superheavy TDs were a problem in the smaller games and neither are ML-20s/LefHs common either. With less players flanking should be easier though.

Just to confirm in your test, where was the ML20 on the map and where was the AA placed? Using Russian AA halftrack I have had no isssues previously although on larger maps than rails and metal.

Bofors is bugged yeah, It does shoot down planes just rarely. On 3v3s and 4v4s shooting down recon is a lot more effective.

Uncounterable Recon does exist but is rare, only OKW commander with it is special ops for example, but that's why the other counters exist like satchels/Il2 bombs. Also when taking into account other players helping coordinate to counter ML-20s, the soviet player will also have allies to coordinate with, perhaps with Priests or Sextons, in which case the soviet player does not have an issue.

If players are coordinating to destroy the ML-20s it should be killable, the same with LefHs. Like I said though, building AA isn't foolproof and depends on map. 1v1 and 2v2 maps may be too small for Recon to be shot down in time but I wouldn't say superheavy TDs were a problem in the smaller games and neither are ML-20s/LefHs common either. With less players flanking should be easier though.

Just to confirm in your test, where was the ML20 on the map and where was the AA placed? Using Russian AA halftrack I have had no isssues previously although on larger maps than rails and metal.

Bofors is bugged yeah, It does shoot down planes just rarely. On 3v3s and 4v4s shooting down recon is a lot more effective.

Uncounterable Recon does exist but is rare, only OKW commander with it is special ops for example, but that's why the other counters exist like satchels/Il2 bombs. Also when taking into account other players helping coordinate to counter ML-20s, the soviet player will also have allies to coordinate with, perhaps with Priests or Sextons, in which case the soviet player does not have an issue.

The only place an Ele has a place is on 2v2 and up. The common place an Ele/JT can be an issue are on maps on which flanking is almost non existant aka corridor maps. Road to Kharkov, Rails and Metal or Redball are good examples.

On Rails, Axis was on top, Artillery was outside spawn/base between strategic point. AA was infront of it, 15 range, near the wooden house. 2nd position was near middle VP.
As i said, it doesn't matter. You have either vision through the direct ability, when the plane is crashing or due to the bug of planes giving vision towards NW. If you spawn south, you have an even bigger advantage due to this.

3 Bofors wouldn't kill a recon plane, even if you could visually see the shots hitting it so i doubt it can kill anything at the moment.

Finally, this is just to state that suggesting ML20/B4 against an Elephant (it's fine against JT) is bad, cause the most common Elephant commander has both recon and Stuka to counter it.

AA in the game is and has always been sad. Their only role is to counter loitering planes. Single pass planes work 90% of the time in the presence of AA because they can deliver or start shooting outside of the AA range.

Just saying JP4 "first strike" is a boost in damage of +40 with additional pen. The pen is useful because the JP4 lacks pen, but the damage is essentially useless unless you couple it with a 120 damage source, which is a puma shell or a shreck. Getting either of those as OKW is not very wise. I would've taken +5% accuracy at vet 5 over +40 damage. The damage is just garbage.

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Finally, this is just to state that suggesting ML20/B4 against an Elephant (it's fine against JT) is bad, cause the most common Elephant commander has both recon and Stuka to counter it.
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The combination of Super heavy, Recon plane and Stuka bombing should simply not be there. Relic should become aware of this and imo they should simply remove these combination before attempting further Commander revamps.

Removing such combination will be far more effective in increasing the diversity of meta and more faction design/balance issues will surface.

Just saying JP4 "first strike" is a boost in damage of +40 with additional pen. The pen is useful because the JP4 lacks pen, but the damage is essentially useless unless you couple it with a 120 damage source, which is a puma shell or a shreck. Getting either of those as OKW is not very wise. I would've taken +5% accuracy at vet 5 over +40 damage. The damage is just garbage.

The reload bonus other camouflaged units get (earlier) as a "first strike" bonus is better than the damage JP gets (imo anyway).

The reload bonus other camouflaged units get (earlier) as a "first strike" bonus is better than the damage JP gets.

Not to mention the XP required to get to vet 5 on the JP4 is double that of the SU85 to get to vet 3