Profile of Cabreza

At the VERY least we should be able to fire the smoke pots without the tank stopping in place FFS.

Pretty much this. The sherman is in an excellent spot atm but having to come to a full stop to fire smoke makes the ability tedious to use and often counterproductive if you're attempting to escape from an AT gun or enemy tank.

Well done Cruzzi. Hopefully Kyle or another relic rep reads this thread and some of these issues get fixed.

Awesome post

This was something I was thinking about the other day. The arrival time of the centaur is so early because Brits are assumed to have to spend fuel on emplacements or the AEC/Bren but as it stands those units are lackluster and emplacements are too easily killed to justify their fuel cost. I would add infantry upgrade tech to the list but USF and soviets don't take into account infantry tech when calculating teching costs so it seems likely that infantry tech is considered non-essential.

I see the solution to this issue being threefold.

1. The AEC/Bofors need to provide a stronger mid-game advantage. In short there needs to be incentive to get either a bofors or AEC instead of entirely skipping over both to fast tech a tank. These should be bonus tech used to gain a mid game advantage the same way a T70 or Luchs is.

2. The fuel cost of emplacements needs to be reduced and/or removed. The change to brace was necessary but has left emplacements hardly worth the large fuel investment. The mortar pit probably doesn't need a fuel cost since it is the only form of indirect fire a British player has access to that doesn't cost muni while the Bofors and 17 pounder just need to cost less fuel. Despite the cheaper price the large popcap of emplacements will ensure they are not spammed.

3. Increase the price of T3. British tank tech needs to be scaled so that if no fuel is spent it arrives around the same time as every other faction. This should be ~170FU for the first tank assuming no additional FU is spent. Building a mortar pit won't affect tank arrival time while going for the AEC or Bofors would be considered a timing attack meant to secure mid game advantage at the cost fuel and therefore would slow medium armor arrival time.

Put those three changes together and you probably fix the centaur arrival time as well as making emplacements and the AEC desirable again.

+1 to VonIvan for somehow making the most sense in this thread despite using 9 separate Nicholas Cage gifs.

What if instead of shifting the M20 and AT gun into T0 USF tech was just designed to be similar to PE tech?

What I mean by this is that T1 and T2 would both be buildable from the start of the game for relatively cheap (100-150MP/10-20FU) but the officer and M15/Stuart in those tiers would be initially locked. A USF player would have to spend additional MP and FU (200MP/30-40FU) to purchase the officer which would then unlock the M15/Stuart. T3 couldn't be upgraded untill a T1 or T2 officer is purchased and if relic wanted to adjust the arrival time of the sherman or jackson a similar tier/officer unlock scheme could be applied to T3 as well.

If you wanted to go further the pack howie could be replaced by a mortar in T2 and then shifted into T3 to act as a mobile barrage howitzer (no autoattack) in order to provide USF a rocket artillary equivilent late game.

The result of this change would be that USF would have early access to a MG/ATG/Mortar/M20 and could afford to have access to both tiers but would only be able to realistically choose one officer. The separation of officer and tier tech would also provide more levers for controlling unit/tier timing.