Profile of Mr.Smith

What you want is:
- The trench graphics showing for your completed structure
- Units should only be able to traverse the trench horizontally (along the walkway), but not vertically (from front to back)
- When standing inside the trench, you want to have directional green cover (i.e., green cover that only affects people standing inside the trench, as opposed to standing outside it

I don't know if this is possible, however I would approach this as:
- Study Pak43, and how the build action also spawns sandbags
- Create a trench entity that is pass through (i.e., remove the extention that blocks pathing; look at for Major antenna for a similar entity)
- Once the trench entity completes building, spawn two sections of invisible, uncrushable, unvaultable sandbags to act as green cover
- To make green cover affect only one side, you probably need to affect cover_ext and define the size of the green cover area by hand

Otherwise, if it's possible to build world-builder objects, look for the vaultable wooden-trench green-cover sections that are present in Lienne forest in the forest section.

In that case:
- Your units start building a Brit trench
- Once the trench completes, the trench spawns two permanent wooden-wall sections with the right orientation
- Then, the trench self-destructs and only leaves the inanimate objects behind

If the second solution works, this means that you don't have to worry about editing green cover sections by hand.

In both cases, you might have to create a terrain deformation action to "dig" the ground downwards. For this, I would advise looking at Soviet T2 structure since it does something similar.

PS: I can edit the title of the thread as you please. Would you be OK with the following:
"Creating ungarrisonable cover-based field defences (trenches)".

Since you posted this in the gameplay section, I doubt you did this to gather advice; else you should have posted this in the state office.

From my part, all I can say is that the following inconsistencies/bugs make the situation vs OKW even more desperate than what it needs to be:
- Infiltration nades costing 15 MU; on the most spammable unit. That allows you to stockpile munitions to use for..
- 60MU uncounterable, warning-free, Artillery flare. This is in the same game where EFA has to pay 80MU for AA-fodder plane
- USF/Soviet AT weapons suffering from a -40% movement penalty when crossing craters (which is what the Stukas will spawn)
- Walking stuka not suffering from the usual scatter when firing into the fog of war, unlike every other artillery piece in the game (yeah it still suffers a +25% modifier. However +25% of 0 is still 0)
- Walking stuka being pinpoint accurate regardless of range, unlike other artillery pieces (this makes those 320HP even more annoying since it can fire from max range).
- ISGs being able to use the barrage bug to double-tap
- ISG barrage bulletins making it possible for ISGs to barrage at insane-ranges non-stop
- ISG max scatter capping far too early. This means you don't get the usual quadratic penalties other indirect fire pieces get when firing further; you only get linear penalties
- Vet5 for the lulz

Finally, above all is the relative micro requirements to use any of the above abilities compared to the micro requirements counterparts the opponent has to constantly invest to dodge those units/abilities.

Note that the Elite Armour doctrine suffers from being a bad doctrine carried by an OP Sturmtiger.

HEAT rounds are OK, but why pick them when Command Panther gives you a generalist tank PLUS aura PLUS a better-scaling buff?

Same for vehicle maphax; Command Panther doctrine gives you a better version of it that also improves your indirect fire accuracy (since it clears FOW) and allows your allies to fire indirect fire at will.

IMO the solution for the doctrine is fixing Crew repairs and Tank Commander, make both abilities solid for 1v1, and then smack down on the Sturmtiger so that it's less OP, and if possible also less situational.

Why not to make it like a mobile howi?

Unit which cant shoot on move, and it must be set up to fire its round. Imagine it like marder\PIV from PE in vCoH or KV-2. Leave same range or maybe even increase it a bit.

Set up time into "firing mode" should take about 4-5 seconds and same amount of time to move out of firing mode. Reload can be started only if firing mode is active.

In this case, you would have to make good preservation and pick good location to be able to use ST effectively. You would remove ability to hit-and-run but still would keep unit at the same power and usefullness.

While the idea is good, what I'm afraid that will happen is it will make Sturmtiger even more situational than before.

If you have Recon, then you are basically hardcountering the unit, as you will never walk into its arc of fire. If you don't, and the map happens to have buildings close to an area of great importance, then you can do absolutely nothing.

If Sturmtiger can't fire through shotblockers, then yes. All factions have counterplay to the Sturmtiger.

Alternatively, if the Sturmtiger can no longer oneshot mediums, then you can always have the option of yoloing through a chokepoint; you will still take losses, but you have better odds of getting the Sturmtiger.

I would see having it not shoot through shot blockers.

As well as increasing fuel price

But the range on the other hand and anti tank capabilities are the only reason why this unit is being built.

That could work. Firing through shotblockers is what makes-or-breaks the unit in the "right" kind of maps. Due to its range, the list of shotblockers should also include forests, etc, however.

The sturmtiger could be given one of its vet bonuses already at Vet0 to compensate (e.g., allow it to reload on the move at reduced speed), and prevent decrews while that happens.

At the same time, we could also fix a long-standing bug that makes Sturmtiger shots collide with elevation difference (e.g., minsk pocket)

We could also buff its grenade so that it's useful (currently the grenade is only theoretically useful at stunning tanks, but I doubt that anybody knew how to use it)

In that case, the Sturmtiger could keep its high damage, but it would still have to lose its crits. The crits, in particular allow the Sturmtiger to practically one-shot heavy tanks. The Sturmtiger has no business doing that.

At a later point, once we've figured out a solution that works for demo-charges, we could see if we could apply a similar solution to the AVRE/Sturmtiger.

I'm pretty sure it only disables autofiring for the tank since it can't track the tank. IIRC I once got my comet to fire at the stug after having it turret locked. I just had to tell it to fire when the turret was facing its target. It definitely didn't take 15 seconds for that either. Perhaps I'm getting it confused with the puma one? Are they different?

What about the Puma TWP?

https://www.coh2.org/guides/52852/the-coh2-ability-guide