Profile of drChengele

Precision strike against Howitzers...ñom ñom ñom.

Damage is going to be reduce and cooldown increased.

Katyusha is fucking overpowered, and I am a goddamn Soviet fanboy.

If you raise the rocket AoE radius from 4 to 6 you have increased the area of effect of each impacting rocket by 125%. Yes, they more than doubled the area of damage of every single rocket. AND they doubled the damage of said rockets. I literally whinced WHILE I WAS READING THE PATCH NOTES knowing what a clusterfuck it would be. Who ever works with numbers at Relic should be shot.

Even so, tossing away my poor gameplay and strategy, do you really think is balanced that damage output and huge AoE in a fast and mobile artillery unit? Yes, it's expensive, but in teamgames everything is affordable soon or later.

Thank you for a reasonable and argumented reply.

I can see how Stuka is more of a problem in team games, but then again, a lot of things are different in team games. I don't really know what to say on the count if it is balanced or fair. I would say I think it performs for cost. If it cannot kill static support crews, what precisely should it do to justify the cost and tier/faction placement?

What else would you have it do? If you reduce its damage or AoE, you are left with a fuel sink noone would ever use in their right mind. Area, non-linear barrage has been suggested and I suppose it could work. But please take a look at the average number of kills a Stuka gets in a game (even team games) and offset it with its costs.

To hear people speaking of the Stuka, you'd think it launches six tactical nuclear missiles that automatically destroy a screen's worth of support weapons without fail and without any sort of warning. Sometimes it fails spectacularly, killing a total of six crewmen while shooting at 4 perfectly lined up weapon teams or infantry blob.

Anything mobile / garrisoned that gets hit by it I'd say is not on the Stuka but on the receiving player. Static weapon teams though...

In my experience I can actually predict when a barrage is due if I keep my eye on the clock. If ~2 minutes passed from the previous barrage, and the enemy has sight on my positions (a firefight breaks out, or I am shelling with 2 mortars which are in proximity to one another, or a flare / scoutplane is launched etc.)... it is actually possible to dodge the worst of the barrage provided you move as soon as you hear the sound (Allied MGs especially pack up super fast, AT guns are a different matter but ultimately doable).

I consistently get more kills with Infantry support guns throughout the game than with Stukas. As I said before, obviously the problem with the Stuka is the shock value - it's not that it kills more than other artillery, it's that it has more of an alpha strike, resulting in more squad wipes than other artillery. I have no problems with this within the framework of the OKW faction. For example, Obersoldaten have an accuracy bonus versus retreating troops. This tells me that the faction appears to be designed to not only have uber veterans, but also have more ways to rid the enemy of veterans. This might be broken design, might not be - not mine to say.

But as I said, it is the most expensive rocket arty in the game, with the longest cooldown in the game, in a fuel starved faction (meant to have few, but effective, units). What do you want from it?

The funny thing was that mobile range 100 units were not nearly as huge a problem before the ISU buff, except maybe in certain limited situations (team games, large open spaces - steppes come to mind). So we have here a series of cascading changes made explicitly because a single unit was overbuffed.

My other gripes
- The most used ISU and Elefant doctrines also come with bombing runs / Stuka strikes, which directly negates the howitzers (which are a good soft counter for the armoured long range units).
- ISUs have focus sight, Elefant has spotting scopes (in the only doctrine with Ele worth getting ), which means these units can spot for themselves.
If this was not the case (I am aware doctrines and abilities are locked in and will never change, but still), these units would need combined arms to function properly, be it range 100 or 70. The problem would still exist in team games, but it would be less pronounced.

175 (265) Fuel for OKW panther

Could we not do this? If there was no scavenge and no resource conversion the OKW Panther would STILL cost as much as a Wehr Panther, and rightfully so. The scarcity of fuel functions to temper the quantity and availability of OKW units in the field, not their effectiveness.