Profile of Stein Grenadier

My argument was ignored in order to cherry pick details. Sob.

Are we really comparing apples to oranges?
X can do x. Why can't Y do x?
What do you mean Y doing y justifies that?

The premise of this thread is pioneer combat potential past early-game.

The question is: "Why?"

Mid-late game, engineers are often either on sweeper duty to screen for avenues of approach for vehicles or are repairing vehicles or building some doctrinal building or making fortifications and mines.

They already have their niche filled out or have a distinct role in a player's army, with combat units doing all the actual fighting. If an engineer unit is being treated like a core combat unit, then their purpose as utilities aren't being completely fulfilled to their fullest.

A munitions investment into a weapon upgrade is less mines to plant, and locks them out of sweepers, which are quintessential to their purpose as a utility unit, both for repair boosts, as well as spot for mines.

You can chuck weapons upgrades onto a engineer unit, but they'll only fulfill specific niches that could frankly be done better by a proper combat unit, and if they are better than a combat unit, then there's a clear investment in resources and veterancy to get them to that level.

In summary, if your engineers are just hanging about, not being used to lay mines or fortifications, the problem isn't because it can't double as a combat unit, but because the player using them isn't using them to their fullest.

Alternatively, we could bump the damage up, or do some other rework, but that's a different discussion entirely. I'd genuinely like to keep it to just the reload being far out of line with its counterparts.

The pack howitzer was chosen for comparison due to similar AoE profiles, and the fact it has more than 80 range on its barrage.

If we compare it to conventional mortars, its performance is still lacking despite the premium price tag. Where it loses in every respect aside from added range (Which can't be exploited due to its naturally worse accuracy), the AoE and the fact it can retreat with 1 man.

Frankly, a reduction of barrage size to 4 as well as reducing the reload amount by 2 second on the barrage would give a completion time of ~20.8375 seconds, which would put it on par with other mobile indirect fire units without touching any of its other aspects, and prevent it from literally taking as long as a howitzer to complete its barrage, which was more or less the only thing I'm after.

We've been crunching numbers to update the spreadsheet resource, and, to summarize, the HM-38 quite literally takes more time to fire a barrage than a howitzer.

In terms of barrage completion times, the HM-38 quite literally stands out in its category.



Where 4-shell barrages from conventional mortars finish in 13-20 seconds, it takes more than twice that time to finish a 6-shell barrage. Quite literally comparable to a conventional howitzer, with none of the power or range.



Naturally, we tested the values. Assuming that the weapon to be used is both already set up, is firing in its firing cone, and that the timer only begins after the command is issued, and ends after the last shell is launched, the numbers you see are accurate, with a minor delay of <1 second due to input lag and trying to run a timer using the in-game clock (which doesn't exactly have milliseconds for us)

Stat-wise, the closest equivalent to the the HM-38's performance (in terms of AoE) is the USF Pack Howitzer.



However, the Pack Howitzer is non-doctrinal, has a longer barrage range (100 vs 120), is more accurate on said barrage and has multiple offensive utilities. It also executes its 4-shell barrage in less than half the time it takes for the HM-38 to finish its barrage, and both have the same autofire range of 80. For autofire performance the HM-38 has even worse accuracy than its barrage. Shell flight time is also shorter for the Pack Howitzer due to non-mortar trajectory.

In a way, the HM-38 can also be somewhat redeemed with its veterancy accuracy bonus, which puts its accuracy on par with the Pack Howitzer's (Which doesn't have any accuracy bonuses on vet whatsoever), however, it still retains its terrible fire rate.



For what the HM-38 is, its vet1 ability is available non-doctrinally at vet0 on the PM-41, and comparatively, with how accurate the PM-41 is (Second-most accurate mortar, after the LeiG), the HM-38's performance probably only comes from the fancy sound effect when the shell does land. There's almost no merit to getting the HM-38 if you already have a PM-41. The only thing that the HM-38 has over its competitor is the ability to fire smoke at longer distances.

In my opinion, the reload value needs to either be lowered so that it's literally not howitzer level, and hopefully, the vet1 ability will be changed to a different niche. That or a different rework entirely.

Thoughts?

The sheet where I got the images from is currently labeled Sheet12 in the spreadsheet I shared in a different thread. The primary contributor wants to add more usable numbers (along with tedious testing) before finally renaming it and considering it "released"