Profile of ThoseDeafMutes

How do people feel about this unit?

Playing USF, it's one of my favorite indirect fire units. It comes late, so it needs to be much better than say, a mortar halftrack, but really this unit is kinda wierd. When it arcs highly, it's pretty average. But when it has a 'direct fire' angle, it just obliterates things. Not just infantry, but light vehicles. I've soloed Luchs with an M8, it's that effective when you're microing it properly. The smoke ability to get away is a lifesaver too.

In longer games, it's probably my most efficient unit. It's also the only really "good" indirect fire the USF get, and it DOES come late. But I'd take 1 Scott over 2-3 pack howitzers any day.

I broadly agree with OP. I hate that they have (intentionally?) made part of the asymmetrical balance related to the stage of the game you're in. It makes the game impossible to balance equally in different game modes, since the modes (and to some extent the maps) dictate how late games will go on average. While Relic probably doesn't care much about 3v3 and 4v4 balance, I think they do care about 2v2, and I certainly do. Team games almost always go late, it's much rarer for a game to "end" in ten minutes or less. So in team games, the factions that are stronger later get an advantage, and in 1v1, where you don't have an ally to "average out" your successes and losses, the games are much shorter, and factions that are strong early have an advantage.

It's going to be very tricky trying to juggle the blaance to make OKW and Wehr "equally good" as the Allies at all stages of the game. I am a 2v2 gamer primarily and main USF. Even though I spend most of my time in 2v2 with a more or less equally skilled partner, my 1v1 rank is enormously higher than my 2v2 rank, it's like 300 for 1v1 and 2500 for 2v2 AT. These ranks are not directly comparable I understand, although it feels so much harder in team games - double USF team games I might add, where the weaknesses in lategame get magnified.

Half the problem is that when we win games in 2v2, it has rarely been a "good fight" - we got some early squadwipes, sometimes because we got lucky and sometimes because of great positioning on our part, but the small victories cascade and we've wiped half their army in < 8 minutes. They drop, we win, GG. But these victories are only a fraciton of how satisfying it is when you win a 30 minute or 40 minute match that features several back and forths. Those are often frustrating to lose, because you're not losing because you're less skilled (well sometimes you do), it's because at that stage of the game your faction is simply weaksauce and all these supersoldiers are appearing on the field backed up by supertanks and you can't keep up, gradually watching your victories turn to nothing and your forces dwindle until they kill you on VPs.

Wins are often unsatisfying, and losses are often incredibly frustrating. That's bad design, conceptually!

If the KT comes out and you have little to no proper counters, you probably lost the game earlier already. I know that the only times I've had one used against me with success was when I got outplayed.

What's a "proper counter"? 2 AT guns, a captain and a Jackson is a typical AT force we might have on the field. Two jacksons as the game draws on longer. In some theoretical, sterile laboritory environment that is more than a match for a KT. But it's never just a KT.

We could have more, but if they're going an infantry/support weapon heavy strategy (and inf-heavy gameplay is very common in these strategies), we will be investing manpower and fuel in units to counter the LMG gren swarms (I don't call them blobs because they don't necessarily all move in a single blob, although often they do at least temporarily), the Sturm/Shrek blobs, Falschirm spam, and eventually Obersoldaten on the field. Sometimes they get double ISGs, sometimes they stay with more core infantry. There are a variety of threats to deal with, but the Pack Howitzer is still underperforming, and the T4 Scott, while one of the best arty units in the game (I love them to death), is 75 fuel and comes rather late in the tech tree. Ever since they "bug fixed" the US 50 cal it's been pretty hopelessly unsurvivable in the face of axis units.

We still win sometimes, but you can't act like stalling for heavies is some unviable strategy in 2v2s and higher. Suicide in a 1v1 probably. But not in team games. OKW gets everything they need to fight effectively without using much fuel on units, particularly if they've got Ostheer support.

The KTs are extremely annoying from the perspective of a double USF player, but this is primarily because the Jackson is the only unit in your arsenal that can reliably damage it. I would kill for a doctrine with a 3" AT gun (historically used in the western front) that was comparable to the Wehr Pak, for example. The 57mm AT gun is very effective at fighting Wehr T3 and light vehicles, but hopeless at killing heavies. I almost feel like APDS should be a vet 0 ability for them, even if they had to slightly raise the price to compensate.

LW ground forces -> Fast Puma is pretty typical yeah.