Profile of Mr.Smith

In my opinion, and after extensive testing in the revamp mod, there is zero reason to keep brace on Mortar Pits (or emplacements in general), if pits are rebalanced properly.

1. Brace adds nothing to the game

The only rationale for keeping brace is to make it so that offmaps cannot trivially remove emplacements. However, even then, there are better approaches:
- Make emplacements lower risk-reward; e.g., nobody is ever going to waste a 200MU offmap to kill a 200MP mortar pit (with one mortar). Remove brace from 17 pounder and make it actually affordable; that will make it useful for once.
- Adjust the damage of said offmaps vs emplacements; Relic has already given enormous bonuses for offmaps to bypass brace, which is meant to protect against offmaps. This is madness. Just remove brace and remove those damage bonuses.
- inb4 somebody says that Brace is there to add micro to emplacements; it's not. It's an one click ability that requires no investment from the defender to use. If you want micro for emplacements just remove the FHQ aura and have people hop their squads in-out.

A successful defensive structure is not necessarily an immortal defensive structure. It's a defensive structure that's cheap enough to hold the adversary back for a long time to be worth it.

Trenches die in seconds to AT guns. However, they are still extremely useful just because they are affordable.

2. Mortar Pit design is just plain wrong

That's because from a design perspective:
- It is futile to try to flank Mortar Pits with infantry because they will brace at any point in time
- You can't force people to wait for tanks until they can take mortar pits down, because that's gratuitous cruelty
- Therefore, Mortar Pits have been designed in a way to be extremely vulnerable to indirect fire
- However, the entire British faction is ridiculously vulnerable to indirect fire spam; and if Mortar Pits can't protect the faction against it, why build them?

The mortar pit has 700HP, which means 9 mortar shells will take it down. The Pit also has a gignormous hitbox, which means that any shells fired will hit the pit. The Pit also has a massive target size, which means that AT guns can also join in the fun and s tart sniping the pit.

So, now we have ended up with a mortar that is:
- Practically invulnerable to infantry
- Can be sniped by anti-tank guns and tank destroyers
- Can be rendered useless by mobile indirect fire

3. Mortar Pit doesn't have to be so horribly implemented

The goal of the Mortar Pit is to provide indirect fire cover for a faction that is already vulnerable to indirect fire. Therefore, the Pit:
- Should be very cost-efficient vs indirect fire units
- Should be wrecked easily by successful infantry flanks
- Should be cheap enough so that you are not knocked out of the game for losing one mortar pit
- Should not be snipe-able by AT guns and tank destroyers, ffs

That way we avoid the trap of all-or-nothing foolishness of emplacements, and you have a system of counters that make sense.

4. How to fix Mortar Pits

- Reduce their hitbox size, so that indirect fire has to move closer to hit your mortar pits with their turbobarrages
- Fix the responsiveness of mortar pits, so that they can respond to indirect fire faster
- Add +75%-ish more HP to fully-upgraded mortars, so that they can tank indirect fire damage
- Completely remove armour from mortar pits so that they vanish to small arms fire in seconds
- Reduce target size to 1 so that it's no longer possible to sniper mortar pits with AT guns, and forces infantry units to fight at their optimal range (e.g., you shouldn't be able to snipe pits with MP40's from 35 range)
- Add an option of building a single-mortar pit for 200MP
- Remove brace, or reduce its duration to 5 seconds.
- Remove the garrison aura from FHQ; it only promotes sim city and nothing else

To recap:
- Brace serves no useful purpose in emplacement design; any purpose that Brace can fullfill, picking the right stats would fill it better (e.g., does Pak43 need brace? Does FlakHQ need brace?)
- Brace is only there to make emplacements useless at performing their primary goal (e.g., 17-pounder is useless at anti-tank and mortar pits are useless at anti-indirect fire); unless you spam them of course
- Brace is harmful to the game, because it's only ever useful if you go sim-city; if you don't go sim city, brace is useless

So, I see no reason to keep the brace in a format that makes it last for longer than 5 seconds.

going for one faction at a time doesn't seem like a great idea... sounds like a great way to create imbalance.

that said, trying to adjust ALL the problems in a single patch also leads to unpredictable results. maybe focus on a single issue and go from there? also, some of this "no-brainer" stuff like infiltration should be doable in a single patch before all the crazy balance work.

I disagree.

1. The amount of changes needed for Soviets/OST/USF to reach from FBP-level to revamp-level is depressingly small.

Low-priority doctrinal changes are entirely skippable (except for Mother Russia which will need a nerf). You can also completely skip Conscript changes for the time being, and rely on synergy from the rest of the faction.

Conscripts have been completely useless for 6 months now; they can afford remain useless for another 6 months. With Guards/Shocks mini-changes you can at least start to see Soviet infantry that's not Penals.

Really, the core of revamp changes that are different from FBP are:
- USF: Lieutenant bar, M20 changes from WBP, Howitzer/Scott barrage cooldown
- Soviets: mini-changes to T2 units, Shocks/Guards grenades changes, SU76 changes, T34 cost
- OST: Grenadier/Pak popcap, T3-T4 changes.

2. Sure, OKW and UKF will require an actual overhaul to get right, each. But by just improving the other 3 factions you already have a solid baseline, and it's not making the game any worse than it currently is.

For the revamp mod, OKW early game is identical to live-version early game. The matchup seemed more interesting as a result of Soviet/USF changes, because there were more strategies that could put in use.

Sure, in the late-game OKW was face-rolling as usual, but that's already the case in live-version, and that's also going to be the case (or even more pronounced) after the call-in clutches are removed from the game; so we aren't breaking anything there.

We haven't really touched OST early game either, so the patchup vs UKF will proceed as it usually goes.

In all cases, when we've tested the changed version of Soviets/OST vs unchanged OKW/UKF the game seemed better.

3. If you're going for an all-or-nothing approach, you will most likely end up with nothing.

4. There's no other overarching change that needs to happen across factions for it to work.

If AT partisans are brought in-line and Fallschirmaegers are not, nobody will really care. Sure, it's going to be unfair, and it will be stupid if we can't change both at the same time, but that won't create a misbalance.

That's because neither AT partisans no Fallschirmaegers depend upon each other to get right. You can just change them individually; both are no-brainer changes.

That's the same for all gammon bomb/bundle nade changes, etc, etc. The only constraint that needs to be respected is that the changes in the affected faction make sense collectively. The best way to guarantee that such changes make sense collectively is focus on one faction at a time, but have the entire faction core in-scope.

the downside of smaller scale patches is that you have to plan ahead for how the future changes are gonna affect the small changes youre making now, because the game isnt a vacuum and everything is supposed to work together to balance everything. for example a faction can have weak infantry if they can make up for it another area, and this leads to asymetrical balance and imo more interesting dynamics. but if you just have a small patch that focuses around infantry balance, then the tendency is for infantry to become homogenized so that they are balanced when fighting each other without taking into account other factors because they are 'out of scope' or because they may not be as obvious. and as you say, smaller patches are ok if theres a higher frequency, but the reality seems to be that relic doesnt want to have frequent patches.

It's not possible to have high-frequency patches due to certain technicalities involved. At the same time, it's not necessary to have to wait 6 months before starting the new patch. This delay was uncharacteristically long due to a setback caused by Ardennes Assault breaking.

With respect to how to choose the scope. I think that we can have more interesting results if we are allowed to focus on one faction at a time, fixing the most pressing issues of that faction, and also addressing the immediate knock-on effects in other factions.

At the same time, the game is rife with an enormous backlog of broken stuff that will have to be addressed first before we can assess and reached a reasonable and non-biased conclusion. E.g., tying call-ins to teching is such an obvious change to include in the game. However, without it we don't have a clear indication about faction relative strength in the early-to-mid stages in the game.

Call-ins that allow people to skip tech allow factions to keep their foot on the pedal, apply pressure, and then apply the finishing blow with a call-in. For instance, Armor company enabled USF to stay afloat simply because they could get 2 free squads out of their teching, continue to apply pressure and still get their vehicles. Without Armour company meta, but with a purpose-fit Jackson USF players will have to make radical adjustments to their playstyles and that will help us better identify which parts of the faction to fix.

At the same point, with call-ins fixed, and some of the late-game wunderwaffe reigned in, I don't think that there is any other change that needs to happen across factions at the same time. e.g., we couldn't fix Call-ins just for one faction; that's because all factions were abusing the call-in system, and that would disrupt the equilibrium. Certain obvious fixes, such as repair speed normalization, can easily be fixed on a per-faction basis. The repair speed system is already completely broken; thus, even if we do incremental updates to it we are not in risk of breaking it even further.

So, hopefully, in some of the upcoming patches we will be allowed to focus on one faction at a time, fix the unit synergy for that faction and leave it at a level that it is no-more-broken vs other factions than it was before.

Before I go, i will get that replay for you.

Now we have that out of the way, why do I need to tech mayor? The point of the call-in is to by-pass tech and as such, you balance it around it.

If the bulldozer current buff is jusitfied because of the mayor tech making it cost equal to a brumbar, you need to tie it to that tech.

If the mayor is not accounted for in the justification, than the dozer is far cheaper to field than a brumbar (tech cost inculded, without mentioning the viability of ost t4).

The goal for this patch is to make call-in meta less dominant and/or disappear. The goal of this patch is not to lengthen the already long list of useless units in the game. We want the formerly-call-in units to remain viable; just not be call-ins anymore.

If you've teched Major, and you have the option to build a 110FU Sherman, a 80FU Scott or a 145FU live-version Dozer, would you ever seriously consider buying the live-version dozer?

Not a chance in hell. For 1v1 you would always get a Sherman that can also help you deal with tanks. That's because odds are that you probably skipped Lieutenant or Captain to get the Sherman in time, which means you are missing access to some team weapons. In 2v2+ you would most likely get a Scott; longer range; way more reliable, way faster and way cheaper.

Now on to some smaller questions:
Did the current dozer not perform well in GCS in your opinion?
Why does vet 2 matter? if i can get the cost out before that, it is enterily irrelevant to the subject at hand.
Lastly, do you want a replay of the live dozer (which i argued is fine) or the mod one?

The Bulldozer is an ultimate RNG cannon; it's way squisher and way more inaccurate than the Brummbar that costs the same.

The only reasons the Bulldozer performed the way it did was:
- USF gets 2 free squads while teching
- You don't have to pay Major teching costs
- You get access to both MGs and AT guns while teching both Lieutenant/Captain
- You still get access to the Bulldozer way faster than the enemy can get their tanks out, despite the fact that you got 2 free squads, access to MG and access to AT

Finally:
- Most of the buffs are about making Bulldozer vet actually meaningful (Vet2+)
- None of the GCS Bulldozers ever reached further than Vet1

Outside hardcore 1v1 call-in meta, you would never EVER buy a bulldozer (unless you want a troll unit).

The difference is that in any of those RTS games you mentioned:
- The longest range for any artillery unit is, at best, 1/10th or 1/20th of the entire map length
- They require you to acquire control over resource sectors that are distributed all over the map
- You can't camp those resource sectors forever, since resources tend to get depleted

Compare these to:
- 2 VPs being all you really need to control
- Mortar Pit/ISG range
- LeFH/B4/ML20 range

6/10. Nice attempt.

I think you might not be responding to me, or rather it seems you are agreeing with me on points i didn't even consider

Either way, I hope you can answer this: what would be a reason for me to not instantly get the 160 mp upgrade on the mortar?

And don't say "when you don't have the manpower" <.<

Actually, it really is about early manpower investment.

In the early game you might really only be wanting the mortar to harass MGs with smoke, or be annoying. Then, you can spend the remaining 160MP to buy, say, an AT gun, or upgrade PIATs or something.

By the end of the game, sure; it is no-brainer to upgrade a well-situated mortar pit that has survived. However, this arrangement allows you to be more flexible about when/whether you really wanted to spend 400MP in one go, or in parts. (note that the upgrade also increases the popcap of your mortar)

On the other hand, if you don't like putting all your eggs in one basket, you can buy a second mortar pit and get access to a separate brace ability, or be able to select individual barrage targets.

In the revamp mod we had mortar pits cost 200MP vanilla + 150MP the second mortar. Given that Relic doesn't let us touch Brace, Forward Assembly or Cancer Commander abilities, that would have been OP.

Therefore, we're forced to hike the price of the Pit to what we currently have.