Profile of achpawel

But the thing is that the field presence is mostly about what U spend manpower on. U must spend it on the pioneers instead of on other units. Plus I dont agree that pios are so terrible at fighting. Very often they'll win engagements for you as gren vs rifle is usually lost. Grend+pio vs rifles U win. You must remember that overall US has many more units on the field. The pio doing sth all the time behind the lines makes the situation even worse. Ì'm not biasrd sgainst USF but once again I dont think smoke amd blitz is wrong, especially for ost.

I do see it this way, however. Of course this is just an example. You can always retreat the crew just before the vehicle gets destroyed and still have the free bazooka. I know players who pop the crew out and replace it with echelon and they have a "free" bazooka squad early game. Remeber that m20 can be extremely effective when used properly for its price, even without using its crew at all. Bearing in mind that the crew can repair and cap points its super effective. When an ost player builds a vehicle they can neither cap nor repair with it (much less capping power, if you add the fact that you don't get units for teching, and you need to build sth with engineer! after teching). The fact that you have any vehicle very quickly back on the battlefield because of crew repairs itself is "getting out of jail". But to the point - we must kindly diagree - I really don't think blitz and smoke are OP.

It seems that ppl like playing the underdogs.

hi
I'd like to join the discussion.
I have a feeling that concentrating purely on calling both smoke and blitz "get out of jail abilities" is wrong. They can only be called in such a way when a player is competent enough to secure the retreat path and has picked a doctrine which allows smoke. Using these abilities effectively is difficult. You need to prepare munitions for each of them, plus after you retreat you must retreat another unit to repair the vehicle. Ostheer is usually starved for half-game and must really carefully pick what to spend munitions on. The opponent should prepare for the chase in exactly the same way; that is collect munitions on abilities plus plan how to conduct a chase using numerical superiority. The players who count on just rushing onto the enemy (some count on just waiting) and killing armour with massed AT, bazookas, jacksons, etc. should be aware that the beauty of this game is that it is not about spamming. Remember that most of American units have magic buttons that cost ammo and deal more than decent amounts of damage against armour. The thing is that you have to be a skilled player to use them well. Part of the problem is that very often the match involves a US player overextending and losing units one afer another while the ost player skillfully manages to repel all attacks save muntions and fuel for much more expensive equipment (teching etc). At the same time US player should have built a good selection of units that can be used to finish of any armour. You cant have both - losing expensive equipment for half of the match and than be surprised that something can defeat you.
Another argument would be that there are more and cheaper abilities on the US side. My favourite is: the bazooka crew in a minelying infantry killing vehicle who can cap while repairing a crit and be upgraded with thompsons. In my opinion, Rambo abilities like that should really be called "get out of jail free" ability plus they make the game completely not what it is supposed to be - no combined arms.

I understand every argument. Still, my opinion is that they are really fragile and you have to be much more super careful with them compared to other elite infantry. They excell in certain situations but not in as many as pure spam of GIs. Game skills are of course important but I really think that balancing an army with 4 man squads is difficult. Very often random performance of pzgrens or squad wipes etc that happen to them, make them very difficult to use. These are all facts. And I'm not as stupid as U assume. Actually U shouldn't be calling anybody like that.