Profile of Cruzz

The 75% build reduction actually translates to significantly less in-game. The majority of the construction time is spent on the engineers running from one corner of the s-mine field to the next, making the construction time less significant.

You do realize they halved the distance between the patches as well? The actual reduction in an entire field build time is pretty close to 75% even after accounting for movement.

You are not penalized in any way for only building one patch at a time except through being forced to manually give a command to interrupt building, so you can avoid even that little moving if you want.

The sweeping time on a s-mine is directly proportional to it's build time. It takes about 1 second to sweep the mine.. I don't know much much faster you expect it to be? The enemy spent 60 munitions building the mines - surely you can spend 30 munitions to clear them.

It's not, please take a look at how badly pioneers/engineers behave when you're trying to get them to sweep sometimes. They will often derp for several seconds before clearing a single mine, and with smines there are around 20 of those patches for every 60 munis spent so you're often looking at a >1 minute clear time for a field that takes <15 seconds to build. I've complained several times about the sweeping speed issues with soviet mines when playing as germans (in that a single squad lays them faster than the pioneers will sweep them at), and smines are several times worse than that.

And honestly it's not even about how long it ties up your engineers compared to how fast it builds. The real issue is that if a german pioneer squad gets to a cutoff point, they can make it completely impossible to recap without a vehicle or minesweeper in a couple of seconds.

s-mines are now on-par with Soviet mines and this change was one of the rare moments Relic actually proactively improved a useless ability.

I'd never make a soviet mine for anti-infantry purposes again if they had the current smines. The current smines also hugely penalize any strat that isn't conspam and allow for some pretty silly abuse with the extremely limited retreat paths on most maps.

Edit: I'm not sure why you said mortars aren't efficient at cleaning the s-mine field. They trigger from any damage source, regardless of the damage. This means a single splash of a mortar is enough to clear half the field.

They're honestly not. Not only is the accuracy of ground target all over the place, Most hits will only explode one or two mines at best. I'd always rather conspam than get mortars against anyone I know is going to abuse the new mines.

Jesus christ what is up with people thinking Assgrens are bad for their cost? Try making 2-3 assgrens without T1 and then straight to T2 for PGs and T2 vehicles, it's the easiest way to play germans really, you just attack move forward with your massive automatic weapon blob and the only thing that can reasonably stop it now that shocks are 2cp is several maxims, and one mistake with those will leave them all decrewed. If you try to use penals against this, you will lose pretty much 100% of the time because the following up scout car/flameht in a couple of minutes will laugh at your penal blob. For that matter even the assgren blob will laugh at penals because they'll have 3 squads for every 2 you field early game.

If you're complaining about how their price makes them hard to use in a balanced build, I guess I can kinda relate, but if anything they're too powerful for their performance when skipping T1 even at 320mp.

Oh and whoever thinks penals can actually beat an LMG gren squad, dream on. You need a flamer or a vet advantage for that to happen, and guess how much vet advantage a 360MP tech-requiring unit has over a 240MP one. Meanwhile with the flamer it's 360MP/60muni (and required tech and a more specialized unit) just to barely beat a 240/60 muni supergeneralist unit.

Oh God, Penals already raping non-upgrade Grens, if you buff them more, it is like forcing Ostheer to get elite troop in every game.

Try one of these advanced tactics if you're having problems with penals:

Build an MG42
Have two grens engage a penal squad instead of one
Buy LMG42 or G43
Build a scout car or flameht
Build PGs
Build smines

If I sum it up, penal battalions are suicide squad. They got flamethrower and satchel charge, they got enough options to be on par with the other russian units. Enough dps as it's pretty good medium-long range. What they need is a slight survivability upgrade. They're good early game but it's the medium-late game that suffers because they die QUICK. How about armor upgrade that cost munition? Not some good body armor op stuff, just some slight buff to make it viable in late game and not being affordable in early game because they are fine there.

They are *not* viable early game. Pure conspam is harder to counter than penal squads mixed in with the cons, scales BETTER later on with ppsh doctrines and even without ppsh scales about as well as making penals. All you need to counter penals is a single upgunned gren squad. Or an MG. Or a T2 vehicle. Though with a flamer penals can sometimes fight off the grens/PGs. Sometimes.

I use penals all the time. But this is purely for the sake of using them, I know that I'd do far better just skipping them completely atleast with doctrines that have any of the following: shocks, guards, ppsh. And even then you'd probably be better off with maxims in most situations.

I'd like ram RNG reduced a bit for frontal rams (so you only get engine damaged at most from front, along with the gun destroyed), otherwise I think ram is fine and is a very much needed ability in the current soviet base unit selection.

So? your supposed to use you AT units to kill tanks you know.

There are several maps (like Kharkov) where both of these units are pretty much useless. If they were the only way you could deal with any armor heavier than a PIV, soviets would pretty much lose every single game on tight maps with lots of shot/visionblocks.