More mortar round types

Suggestions
1

Currently there’s only 2 mortar round types, high explosive and smoke. Both have their uses but are both very situational. It’s be nice to add more variety to the round types to allow mortar men to be useful in different situations.

Before going into potential candidates I’d like to add that a system for the player to choose what shells they want to bring should be added. Currently a mortar man brings 10 rounds each (12 with perks)(20 for airborne mortar squad options) of HE and smoke. Perhaps split this to 4 groups of 5(6 with perk)(10 for airborne? Maybe just leave HE and smoke for them). Then allow players to choose which rounds they want. So if they want 20 smoke rounds go ahead, but they won’t be as versatile as a mortar with a variety of rounds for different situations.

Delay - allow mortar round to penetrate thin roofs to hit infantry inside. It wouldn’t penetrate a bunker but a hut roof wouldn’t stop it. It wouldn’t be as useful as HE for troops in the open as it would go into the ground before exploding, so less splash radius and damage.

Incendiary - less damage than HE, DOESN’T leave fire on ground like Molotov but will set infantry, objects, and vehicles on fire. Would give mortar men a good way to disable a vehicle forcing the crew to get out and put out the fire or risk burning to death and that would be it’s primary use, as an anti-vehicle round

Air-burst- good for dealing with concealed troops and infantry hiding in holes or bushes. Would be stopping by any overhead cover and do less damage than HE, likely needing multiple rounds to kill. Good for helping a team deal with snipers concealed in a forest or a field.

White phosphorus - leaves lingering cloud of damaging smoke. Mainly for area denial, use on a likely avenue of approach and force enemies to go a different way or take damage. Mainly to allow a mortar the ability to deny an avenue of approach without needed to constantly fire HE shells at it. I would worry about caps that are completely open though.

These are all the ones I could think of. With the system of choosing your own rounds it could be good to limit some round choices to only take 1 or 2 of the groupings(probably white phosphorus).

With only having 4 groups of 5 or 6 rounds and having 6 available round types it would make a player have to choose what they want to bring and whether they want to be very situational or more versatile. Some rounds may not be used very much though (probably smoke).

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  1. Airburst mortars don’t even exist today because that requires nose fusing and in WW2 requires a rifled barrel to spin the projectile to activate the proximity sensor.
  2. Incendiary mortars didn’t and don’t exist, though incendiary bombs might be cool.
  3. Delayed fuse man portable mortars didn’t and don’t exist because they’re impractical and defeat the purpose of a mortar, which is to send shrapnel flying out from an explosion and digging into the earth is a terrible way to do it. Also we’ve barely got working bunker busting bombs today and we didn’t start fabricating those until the 90’s. In WW2 we just made bigger bombs.
  4. White Phosphorus is a maybe because it’s basically a smoke round, so odds are the U.S. used it as their standard smoke mortar round anyway. (It’s not really that deadly to inhale the smoke but it doesn’t feel good either.)
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