Profile of Blovski

Anyone know if the lack of grenade notification when playing Soviets is a confirmed bug? It seemed like it stopped working a patch or two ago and honestly I've gotten use to it but it's a bit ridiculous. I know for sure there is none at all with Gren's rifle nades. In fact I think the only notification I get is when one of my units throws a nade too close to itself!

There is a notification for riflenades, it just comes basically as the grenade hits the squad. Grenades are bugged all over the place. Guard and bundle nades frequently don't refund if cancelled, riflenade warning has been broken since they made them refund properly, I don't know about Molotov warnings and whether they work.

Aside from the obvious advantages of being mobile and its ability to be placed anywhere on a sector, does the Opel Truck offer a higher rate of return on the manpower investment (330 mp) with respect to the 200 mp paid for a fuel/ammo depot?

The Opel truck operates as both a fuel and munitions cache at the cost of 1.5 caches or so, and requires no build time, so I think it does.

Penal flamethrowers still have the explosion chance, though obviously because they have more models there's less likelihood the model with the flamethrower will get killed. Otherwise they are pretty good but getting Tier 1 and then penals will be time-consuming and manpower consuming enough that I'm not sure you'll have any map.

And there's a risk the Ostruppen player could just MG bunker the fuel or your cutoff or something. Penal flamethrower is arguably a decent answer in 2v2 games, though.

My problem is not so much the teching costs (because I like the current asymmetry I'm not in favour of an upgrade thing) but rather that building either of the Tier 1/2 buildings takes a huge amount of time (because build time is linked to cost) which sort of messes up Penal starts and the like. Similarly, side teching involves an awfully long wait and having a combat engi off the field for a long time. More often than not I'm as loathe to spare the engi as the resources, and side-teching as a reaction (to a tiger or whatever) is painfully slow.

I sort of feel like part of the issue is that Soviet players have strats which try to cover everything with 2 tech buildings and are uncomfortable investing for the flexibility even when they can afford to do so.

Personally I think more things like the molotov and AT nade upgrades (i.e. universal fuel upgrades) should be in the game rather than less.

This is something I'm fucking around with now. I have no idea if it will work against a decent player yet, as I haven't really faced anyone competent with it.

So, having messed around with Tier 1 play for a bit, I've been finding the old-school T1-guards-T4 approach very strong but also very dependent on you playing consistently well. You need decent fuel control, because otherwise the SU-85 comes too late. You need decent munitions control, because guards and mark target are munitions hogs. You need to not lose a lot of manpower because everything you have is manpower intensive.

So, my premise is that there are a few problems with T1 play right now if you don't execute it perfectly (good players can, I can't):

1) the scout car will put you back substantially for your first vehicle. Rebuying it, or having both AT nades and Molotovs as well as one even more so. If I see two scout cars and conscript tech as Ostheer I feel really comfortable just going for a fast Ostwind.
2) losing a unit as a conscripts -> Tier 1, guards -> T4 build without PPSH can often leave you in a manpower and munitions hole of doom.
3) your snipers will spend a lot more time retreating than firing. They have no solid base to operate from without either high DPS units to discourage chasing or MGs to discourage chasing.

I kind of think if you sit yourself out of the T3/4 rush by just side-teching to Tier 2 after some tier 1 action, being a bit behind on fuel isn't the huge concern that it is with T1-T3 or T1-T4 strats. And you get both the bleed of tier 1 and the more solid base of tier 2. You don't have any big muni sinks so you can happily leave mines everywhere and, then, you get the IS-2, which is really fun to use, incredibly good against infantry and pretty good against P-IVs and similar vehicles.

Anyway, something a bit different to what I've been doing the last couple of patches. No idea if it can work in high level play and it's probably not THE most powerful build for Soviets to go for. However, it's fun to do if you want a different pace to the vehicle rushing builds Soviets go for at the moment and to try out more combinations of Soviet units (flare + precision strike, for instance), and gives you a lot of tools to deal with what you see from the Ostheer player. Give it a shot if you like. Mines are essential.

(edit: my build order right now is 3 conscripts, T1, M3 Flamer, AT nades, Sniper -> T2 then mines on all your flanks and appropriate counter-builds. Personally I like having a maxim and shocks but you've got everything in the Soviet infantry arsenal to choose from. You'll want a minimum of 2 ZiS guns when you've seen a Tier 3 unit. If your Zis guns aren't covered by mines to stop them getting effectively countered you have done it wrong.)