Brace Rework

An idea to change the Brace ability to make it favour scattering emplacements around rather than building a Sim City.

• Brace is a toggle, like Focused Sight, Handbrake or Recon Mode. It has a 45 second cooldown when toggled off.
  
• While Brace is on cooldown, the emplacement cannot fire.

For a lone emplacement, this version of brace is better. If your emplacement gets overrun, you toggle on Brace. Your emplacement no longer does anything, but you have time for your mobile forces to move in to repel the attack. Once you've made the enemy retreat, your emplacement has time to go through its de-bracing cooldown.

If you're playing SimCity, this version of Brace sucks because this version of Brace breaks the Advanced Assembly/Bofors/Brace combo. Stick the Bofors on Brace and it won't do anything until you toggle it off. With so much invested in the SimCity, the enemy mobile forces will overwhelm yours.

If you do toggle it off, the enemy gets 45 seconds warning it's coming back online. That's 45 seconds to kill it with whatever indirect or AT weaponary they brought along.



Summing up, I reckon this could make spread out emplacements something approximating viable while simultaneously giving SimCity another kick in the teeth.

Thoughts?

That makes all emplacements instantly useless, regardless of how they are built.

How so? Emplacements without Brace at all aren't useless.

And your way of doing brace makes them so easily counterable its not even funny as you have massive window of opportunity where it just does absolutely nothing.

Its braced?
No problem, just wail at it, opponents army is that much weaker already.
Brace ended? No problem, just wail at it, its free kill now.

And your way of doing brace makes them so easily counterable its not even funny as you have massive window of opportunity where it just does absolutely nothing.

Its braced?
No problem, just wail at it, opponents army is that much weaker already.
Brace ended? No problem, just wail at it, its free kill now.

If you make a SimCity, sure.

A single Bofors is, what, 280 MP 30 FU?

The idea is if something attacks your emplacement that counters it (like a tank), you slap Brace on to triple the amount of time you have to react and move an AT gun over there.

It serves a similar purpose to retreating.

You're exchanging ability that gives a chance at preserving emplacement into an ability that makes it a free kill.

It does not serve similar purpose as retreating, current brace does, which also can be exploited for a weakness period, but not free IWIN button for opponent.

You're exchanging ability that gives a chance at preserving emplacement into an ability that makes it a free kill.

It does not serve similar purpose as retreating, current brace does, which also can be exploited for a weakness period, but not free IWIN button for opponent.

What weakness period? It's either got 75% damage resistance or it's firing.

What weakness period? It's either got 75% damage resistance or it's firing.

Yeah, in case you are not experienced with how to properly counter emplacements, first you force brace, then pull back and 30 seconds later you come back and nuke it.

Retreating units do not drop weapons on the ground and wait around until they get new ones, neither emplacement crew should reread the instruction on how to operate the weapon after ducking for a minute.

It has to be removed.

Or faction homogenisation only matter when it comes to overnerfing axis units ?

Assuming that the cooldown would be a bit more reasonable, like 30 secs, this would work

Assuming that the cooldown would be a bit more reasonable, like 30 secs, this would work

You could easily change the cooldown to tune the power of it.

It has to be removed.

Or faction homogenisation only matter when it comes to overnerfing axis units ?

I still think that the mortar pit is an integral part of Sim City so removing it and replacing it with a stock mobile mortar would end it once and for all. But as you mentioned, "faction homogenisation"...

I still think that the mortar pit is an integral part of Sim City so removing it and replacing it with a stock mobile mortar would end it once and for all. But as you mentioned, "faction homogenisation"...

That's a good call. I'll fork it off into its own thread.
https://www.coh2.org/topic/88508/ukf-stock-mortar

That's a good call. I'll fork it off into its own thread.
https://www.coh2.org/topic/88508/ukf-stock-mortar

Yeah, good luck with that, me and several others primarily on these forums have been trying since the UKF has been released with no result.

This new commander is probably the closest we will ever get sadly.

i want emplacements to be gone forever

i want emplacements to be gone forever

If the brits had been given a compolete unit roster from the get go, we wouldn't need emplacements at all.

As is, they don't, so emplacements are what we have instead.

Imo abilities like this brace should cost munition or manpower.

The implementation of emplacements is problematic from the start and difficult to fix. One could try to make emplacements weak and a cheap and allow the player to invest in them via the Anvil tree having invest fuel and manpower to improve them.

That would require redesign anvil hammer into 2 separate paths for the factions.

If you're doing a full redesign on the emplacements, I'd just make them all cheap disposable things like bunkers and OKW Flaks. Good for slowing down small forces, but they're not going to hold anything forever.

I was more thinking something straightforward enough to be realistically implemented.

That is why I said abilities like brace should have cost that is easily implemented.

Part of the problem is that there not enough units designed specifically to destroy emplacements.

For Brumbar, MHT and Stuka could serve as unit designed for that role.

Mortars work on all emplacements but the UKF ones. Without Brace or Advanced Assembly, they'd work just fine on those too.