Profile of Grumpy

When Urban Defense first came out, though, using zooked-up rangers with cover to cover was absolutely a blast. Most players didn't seem to realize the danger that they were in haha.

No argument there, but wasn't cover to cover nerfed because of that?

Hi guys

I need help with my build for USF late game (3v3,4v4). Commanders with rangers.

When it comes to the late game I usually have:
AT team - 2x rangers with bazookas.
Support weapons, tanks and all the other shit ...
Anti Inf team - captain with upgrade + bar , usually vet rifleman from early game with 2x bars


But when I lose ALL my rifleman, what unit I should replace them with ? I like my captain, it gets fast + it has useful smoke, but I don't know if I should put another rangers to him and if so, should I upgrade them thomsons or 2x bars to be more align with the captain. Or I should just throw away captain and have 2x thompson rangers?

Thanks for the tips

Trying to use rangers as your AT in late game is just throwing a match. One ranger to keep them from diving AT guns or Jacksons is usually enough. Most teammates will get annoyed if they see you chasing tanks with Rangers. Having 1-2 rifles along with your ranger is good for snaring. If you lose all of your rifles, replace them with the officers first. They're always better than vanilla rifles. After that, RE's to cap and build green cover. Vet 0 rifles generally suck late game, and almost as bad of an idea as rangers for your AT.

M-42 come with canister shot mode and in that mode it fire AI rounds as reduced range.

The current implementation has an issue where the when in canister shot mode the weapon will retain the engage vehicles mode and will not fire on soft targets.

Possible solutions:
make free engage the default mode for canister shot
remove the option for this mode
or
Since the mode is not that great replace with single AI shot.

As a QOL, toggling it to cannister should take off vehicle priority and toggling back to AP should resume vehicle priority.

That said, the unit is really bad. Canister shot doesn't do much damage or suppression so anything can walk right up to it and decrew it easily. It's too expensive for its current state. The pop cap is only 6, but even at 6 it will later prevent you from having another unit that actually does something.

If the unit is going to stay at it's current cost, it should get a little bit of suppression added to it. Maybe enough so that two rounds would suppress a unit. It would act a little bit like a MG. That would still give players about 4 seconds to react to keep from getting their units suppressed. It doesn't rotate very fast so would still be easy to flank. It would then be useful, but only with screening infantry.

AFAIK, tanks only had vision slits to the front. If they had an exposed commander, they should get 360 view, but the exposed commander should be vulnerable to small arms. It should cost around 30 munitions to get the commander, 50 if they get a pintle MG. Open top TD's like the M10 should have 360 view, but b
e vulnerable to small arms fire. One of the models should be the gunner resulting in a main gun crit. It would eliminate the BS of trying to crush with an open top TD.

One vast improvement would be to limit the number of arty pieces to 1 per player, or possibly one rocket and one howitzer.

Also, if both Axis factions have stock Panthers then the Soviets should have T34/85's and the USF have Easy 8's.

The Walking Stuka badly needs to be reworked. The all or nothing works badly in small game modes and much too well in 4v4's. The OHK radius is so large that it routinely wipes full health Soviet squads, including Penals. Spreading the shells out, increasing the AOE range but having a smaller OHK radius would work much better. Units that get hit should be suppressed, as that would help it to be useful in a breakthrough push.

Let's put this into a test setup: 20 meters distance (120 penetration vs 180 armor), flat terrain, only frontal shots possible, only actual hits counting. We count 50 hits, assuming that the players in the discussion above would have their last roughly 50 shots in mind when thinking about the engagements. We do 20 tests to form each player's experience.
Basic statistics tells us that the real penetration chance is 66.7%, meaning 50*(120/180) = 33.33 shots should penetrate with a standard deviation of 3.33 shots (10% of the mean in our case). This means that almost one third of the players discussing will have had the Sherman penetrate less than 30 times or more than ~37 times. One player will have had the experience of the Sherman hitting less than 27 times or more than 40 times and probably be screeching about the trash Sherman or saying it were OP.
Even if all discussion was fully rational (good luck with that), players will regularly report a penetration chance anywhere between less than 60-75%.

This is human nature - remembering anything that seems out of the ordinary. I once had 5 shock troops killed by a single Panzershrek shot because they walked around a corner and were stacked on each other when it hit. Clearly the Panzershrek should've been nerfed! I just couldn't motivate myself to start a thread over it so justice wasn't served.....

Normal people (meaning everyone that didn't have to take a statistics to get their degree) often underestimate how common "uncommon" results are. Take the normal heads or tails. Theoretically it's 50/50. Would you ever expect to roll 9 tails in a row? You can simulate this in Excel by putting "=rand()" in cell A1 and "=round(A1,0)" in cell B1, copy that down 99 cells. Rand will recalculate every time you hit F9. If my Sherman had a 50/50 chance of penetrating a Tiger and I fired 100 shots, I would've got 9 bounces in a row on my third recalculation. Streaks of 9 are somewhat uncommon, but 5-7 are really common.

Excel will also simulate your test. Replace the Round function with "=IF(B1>0.667,1,0)" and add "=COUNTIF(B1:B100,1)" to any cell near the top. Hit F9 a bunch of times and see how bad or good your Sherman is. In short, Excel is OP.

The two counter arguments I'd make against just looking at the numbers in Excel are about the effect of alpha damage and time to kill being irrelevant. In a RTS, alpha damage has an outsized effect because it greatly increases the risk of losing a squad. That was a lot of the problem with the old IS2. It seemed to go miss, miss, wipe on squads a lot, but sometimes it started with the wipe. The other problem is that people like to argue about the time to kill. I've seen multiple comparisons where people are comparing TTK times in the 20-40 seconds and trying to use that to make a point. In an actual game, 20 seconds may as well be an eternity, as nobody has reactions that are that slow. The bazooka was once nerfed because Relic thought the TTK was too short.

Back to original topic - Based on how often the commanders are picked, it doesn't seem like the majority of the top 200 think the IS2 is trash. It's just that the commanders have fallen into the "B" tier. Trash is more like Conscript Support, Tank Hunters, any Partisan commander, etc.