This heavily depends on how effective the auto fire really is.
If the "power value" of auto fire is below a fighting squad, you are better off with the fighting squad.
Costs and popcaps of indirect fire could be adjusted as well to match their usefulness.
The roles of mortars :
to provide support by firing on enemy HMG/strong points
to deal damage to suppressed squad
to provide smoke
...
By adding more micro to HMG/Mortar combo you would simply make brutal force of more infatry a an even "safer"/better option.
You are correct that that is the role of mortars on paper. However, because of how autofire works, what happens in practice is that they become a microless force multiplier effective against all infantry with 0 input from the user and in all circumstances. Right now the mortar does all those things you mentioned on top of automatically punishing any infantry within their range.
If this allows me to get more out of my arty pieces, I'd like to see this.
That's the idea, you get more performance in its intended role but at the cost of not killing infantry with 0 micro input.
Indirect fire and especially mortars should have had a zeroing mechanic on both autofire and the barrage. The first shot would scatter wide with each consecutive shot becoming more and more accurate. Providing line of sight with other (recon) units would reduce the amount of zeroing shots, decreasing the amount of time it takes to zero in and increasing the amount of accurate shots on target.
This would make (autofire) indirect worse against mobile/moving infantry, while making it better against idle (team) weapons, while also providing a better user experience for both sides with higher reliability for the user and better counter play for the receiver. No more RNG with entire barrages completely missing their target or the first shot hitting an HMG for 50% damage.
Obviously not something that can be done for CoH2, but it would be a big improvement with indirect fire if there's ever a CoH3.
That's not a bad idea either, personally I wish autofire was just removed but that's a great idea too.
If this is so easy, you can counter it exactly the same way. Auto-fire range has, most of the time, less range than barrages anyway.
Countering indirect is not a problem, the fact that it does what it does reduces many infantry engagements to "welp, you got hit by an autofiring mortar and lost hundreds of HP in one instant, you lose".
If you actually can just put down a mortar, not micro it in any way and have it be useful and gain kills, then I wish I had your opponents
Because in my experience, if you don't pay attention/reposition you mortars
they usually die VERY quickly to pushing inf, or enemy mortars, or LeIGs, or Pack Howies, or rocket arty, or howitzers and god knows what else.
OR they are so far from the front line they aren't being very useful anyway.
Of course oyu have to reposition it once in a while, especially when there's counterfire, but in the grand scheme of things they really take almost no micro for the amount of killing they do on autofire. Compare the amount of micro required to use even snipers, which are widely considered super cancerous and hard to counter, to the really really minimal effort it takes to use a mortar.
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