Profile of buttcheeksontoast

The B4 is hardly well-armored so 2 or 3 hits and you are good to go. Often they place it next to the base sector so you also get to land a few hits on nearby units as well.

I've found though that placing it next to base sector makes it literally useless though. While it displays a pretty long barrage range, honestly it's way too unreliable at longer ranges. The only time I've ever gotten at least some mileage out of it was placing it in pretty risky positions, basically as far away from a mid VP as you would park, say, a 120mm mortar or such.

And the poor (understatement, it will hit miles away from the barrage circle) accuracy would be okay if it had decent area of effect. However it's pretty ineffective unless it hits something spot-on. I've seen it impact right next to an MG team and they suffered a little tick of health damage but that was it...

Because you can equip any squads with those upgrades. Its not just OKW that has on field upgrades btw, even some USF units have it

Exactly, Rangers and Paras of course have Thompsons/LMGs field upgrade.

Combine this with the fact that Allied tanks get a TON of active offensive abilities, while Axis tanks get nothing but Blitz, and Panthers are just ridiculously weak and impotent by comparison to the Allied armor arsenal, especially late game.

You gotta be joking or trolling or something. I can't believe someone would unironically think OKW Panthers are "weak and impotent" compared to Allied armor, "especially late game." Also saying "nothing but Blitz", is like saying, "Yeah, I won the lottery but I got nothing but a million dollars, ugh." Combat Blitz is more or less the best tank ability in the game, crazy bonuses on top of the speed boost - 100% accuracy, -40% RA, etc.

Also I love me some Secure Mode, great active offensive ability :^)

True. But at the same time I'd say a team of four OKW players is really the best possible situation for efficient use of Panthers.

Auto repair pios and sturms > pios

Ain't no diving a jackson past a schwerer to finish off a wounded cat either.

I find that in teamgames at least one Ostheer can be a huge boon for the OKW players, provides great support and fills the few holes in the OKW arsenal. Access to caches and CAS/Luftwaffe supply drop spam lets an OKW rush out King Tiger before Allies have reasonable counters. Stuka dive bomb ('nuff said). Sturmpios rush garrisons and even if Allies get there first have a hard time holding due to Sturms hammering away with the STGs, and MG42 from the Ost player secures the garrison and surrounding area.

The Ostheer further facilitates Panther use by building a Brummbar or two, which are a deadly combo with the Panthers. Panthers deny all armor play in an area from Allies while the Brummbar ravages ATGs that would try to push the Panthers away and any infantry trying to cap a point in two or three shots. The Brummbar demands non-infantry based AT as it quickly wipes zook/piat blobs and has the health pool and damage to take down ATGs solo if necessary, but the Panthers punish any attempt to use TD's against Brummbars. You need infantry based AT to handle the Panthers, but the Brummbar kills those easily.... etc.

Allies
- the ML-20 gets countered by LefH and numerous offmaps, hence worthless
- Priest is decent in taking on OKW buildings and yes, it can occasionally scare away JTs and Elefants. You will just barely scratch them.
- the B-4 and Sexton don't even deserve to be mentioned

The general problem of the Infantry+Artillery combo is: It works until the axis bring the counter. The counter will usually be something like:
->KT+JP4+Stuka
->JT+P4+Stuka
->Ele+Brummbär+Panzerwerfer+Offmap
->Ele+P4/Ostwind+Offmap
-> so in general: strong AI tank + strong AT tank + strong Artillery unit/offmap, supported by sporadic infantry

Speaking about lower entity squads: ... tell that the USF/UKF players who go up against OKW with Pfusiliers and Volksgrens. Soviets are dead in the endgame anyways, unless they receive life support from USF or UKF.

I agree on Soviet howitzers. ML-20 never feels worth it in teamgames. Regardless of it's inaccuracy or vulnerability to offmaps, it's just too much of an investment and has too short of a window of time to function. You pay 600mp and hopefully kill more than 600mp worth before it is destroyed, and 600mp is such a huge hit to take.
The LeFH is more accurate and has shorter barrage cooldowns, which makes it great for taking down Sim Cities or general entrenched positions. And 400mp is significantly less hurt when the invetiable offmap comes to destroy it. And of course it wins howitzer duels with the ml-20 despite being cheaper and better in every relevant way.

The B-4 feels like a mistake of design. You're just rolling the dice on hopeful squadwipes, which isn't a great experience for you or your opponent. You will totally enjoy seeing the screen-shaking impact of a 203mm landing literally right next to an MG and taking off a smidgeon of health, and the few times the round does land right smack on top of a squad/OKW truck don't feel worth all those whiffed shots. The Direct Fire ability is an incredibly meme-tier ability. It's like Secure Mode on the KV series where the stars might align that one situation where you actually needed a KV-2 to cap a point, or an enemy heavy tank just kind of loitered around directly in front of your B-4 for long enough, but the majority of the time it might as well not even be there.

And both are countered incredibly easily.

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All the people linking that big game hunter video... That's like those casino commercials where they only show you some smoking hot chick rolling all 7's and not the wrinkled crack addict spending all her child support money on the slots and winning nothing. Hey look, you can come kill some JT's Elefants! They will always be largely unsupported and badly micro'd, I swear!

I blame it on bad map design. General mud, without all stupid the mud, should be an example for map sizes in team games. Maps just need to be larger in team game modes. I hope they create a community map competition for larger game modes.

There isn't much incentive for mapmakers though since making huge maps like that involves much, much more effort than 1v1/2v2.