Profile of JohanSchwarz

If anything, at the very least, Penal battalions should be given the Oorah! ability, if only to be able to run AWAY from their own satchel charges.

No. You're forgetting that they'd be able to Oorah up and throw a satchel as well which German soldiers wouldn't be able to get away from at all - you can just throw it slightly behind them since you're faster and they'll be caught in the explosion when retreating due to input delay and stupid pathfinding.

I don't really understand the in-game design of the penal battalion. In real life the most common use for shtrafbats was suicide missions which fits with the in-game unit's suicidal satchel charge throwing, no armor, and the flamethrower upgrade. But then Relic decides to also give them SVT-40s - essentially making them glass cannons - and a very high (initial) production cost, making them more effective as ranged elite infantry rather than suicide troops. These two design element types clash with one another and makes it very hard to find a scenario where all of the penal battalion's skills are useful.

Compare this unit design to that of Shock Troops: they have heavy armor, PPSh's, and two types of grenades, all of which can be used to great effect in any CQB situation.

Recall the old Rapid Conscription ability gave Penal Battalions instead of Conscripts. This leads me to believe that Relic did intend for Penals to be the suicide run-in-and-die troops (currently, that privilege is given to the regular conscript squad). What really confounds me is why they gave the Penals better weapons and higher cost to begin with.

See, this is the disparity between 1v1 and team games - certain units/commanders are not very viable in the former while being extremely effective in the latter due to resources not being shared (so one guy can just save up for the big guns).

The Jaeger Armour commander is not a good choice 1v1 due to resource constraints but is a godly choice in 2v2+ due to those constraints being negated by your teammates.

Personally, I don't use it ever since it's not very effective when I'm solo'ing and pretty unfair when I'm duo'ing.

that is only true if the building is wood build i guess, it won't work if they convert church or apartment into FHQ

Works on all building types on 1v1 and 2v2 maps including church; don't know about City 17 buildings as I don't play those modes.

But you don't really need to use the direct fire option - you can just use precision strike at vet1, no? It's really not hard at all to get vet (first one, at least) for howitzers since they only cost manpower.

Besides, it doesn't need to be only used against tanks - remember it still does its regular howitzer role quite well (it does cost the same as the regular one so any other features are essentially free bonuses).

I think it's less about the flamethrower detonation and more about these extreme RNG elements in general.

It's one thing to have a conscript vs. grenadier fight be random, but it's another thing to have random chance cripple a player out of no real fault of his own (whether it be destroyed instead of damaged engine from a nade, flamer crits, or house nade crits). It's pretty hard to say that CoH can be a truly competitive game if these things happen - on a regular basis, I might add.

Just had a game the other day where the enemy player rushed my MG42 with a flamer and 2 cons. The first volley of my MG suppressed no one but insta-popped the flamer resulting in the immediate deaths of that engineer squad and 4 conscripts. Instead of my MG having to retreat (which should have happened), the enemy lost his force and essentially lost the game right there.

You can say "it's war; shit happens" but this isn't real life - it's a game. It can't be truly competitive if "shit" is random to such an extreme degree.