Barbed wire, tank traps and sandbags are in a difficult spot. Not only can you simply hold J to remove them, but they usually get destroyed by all the HE splash damage occurring on the battlefield before they get to have any purpose.
This suggestion has 2 main goals:
making non-weapon defensive structures more viable in the direct combat area
making the “tools” inventory item more competitive
First off, barbed wire and hedgehogs should not take any damage. During the world war period, it was deemed rather ineffective to remove wire using HE shells or bullets. Instead, wire cutters were used for the purpose and this is where tools come into play. It should remain possible to remove wire and hedgehogs by holding J, but take significantly longer. If your soldier has tools, though, the removal timer should be 1/3 of that new value. This gives more utility to tools and allows them to even be considered at all in the current medkit meta. It also allows tankers to still remove tank traps fairly quickly since they come with a toolkit by default.
Making wire and hedgehogs invulnerable to damage in the first place allows you to place them in locations where damage happens, i.e. using them to influence the battle directly. (They are currently used indirectly most of the time, e.g. to block in AI soldiers and stop them from chasing you once you walk >50m away from them.)
Sandbags must still take damage since that is their primary purpose. However, they need an increased health pool and I also suggest splitting them into 3 sections. That simply means sandbags would have a top, center and bottom row. While the top row is intact, only the top row of sandbags takes any damage. When that is destroyed, the sandbag stack becomes smaller and the middle row becomes vulnerable. And so on.
Dividing sandbags into these 3 sections makes it less frustrating to have them get hit by a high amount of splash damage since they no longer get removed entirely in an instant. They instead only lose one section - becoming less potent as cover - but they now require more concentrated fire if you want to destroy them quickly. Tools can be used to restore rows of existing sandbags.
The system is already too easy to cheese, you can build greyzone camping AT guns in long buildings such as Reich Ministry.
Hedgehogs in doors, place AP mines, block entrances via barbed wires.
A buff to engineer builds would only create more toxic stomps in which attackers potentially couldn’t even enter objectives.
I would keep it as is. No wire at the objective would mean no wire anywhere, pretty much.
The only thing i would change is making barbed wire resistant against artillery & mortars because that’s too easy way to remove it and further encourages placement of wire indoors.
Fully against a general buff for fortifications though.
I intentionally excluded such emplacements. And I agree that they’re often built in the greyzone, AA guns being the main offender.
Which I would argue is their purpose. You can always remove them from the side if you’re not getting rushed from a different entrance, since the defenders can’t walk through their own wire either. My suggestion only leads to wire not being a complete non-factor because it’ll get splashed away by the time you reach that entrance. Besides, removing wire with tools would be faster than what it is currently so I think there’s ample counterplay.
And let alone that, if wire becomes less susceptible to splash damage, it can suddenly be placed outdoors so the use cases where it blocks doorways will become less dominant.
AP mines are also a topic of their own and not very engineer-related, they’re just extremely effective overall.
Completely false statement. They should be placed on the line of the objective. Not to random doors in middle of the objective. Noobs only sabotaging their own team that way. And it’s extremely frustrating.
Completely irrelevant to what I have said. Placing barbed wired to “middle” of the objective is only good way how to sabotage your own team.
Yes, they should be allowed to be placed on border line of objective, but not to inside of objective.
Otherwise attackering team can literally chill on other side of barbed wires (while capping objective) and you no comfortable and fast way how to get to them. I’ve literally so many objectives because of someone eho doesn’t know how to place barbed wires effectively.
Defenders needs to be able to move freely across the whole area of objective. That’s pretty much essential.
Not at all. For instance using your church example, depending on the enemy approach direction blockading the church main door with wire could make sense to keep the enemy from just running in easily.
That would still count as inside the objective.
I just dont see the point of not allowing players to make decisions even if they end up sometimes doing something counterproductive or stupid.
Because that’s anyway at least 50% of the playerbase in general playing the game.
No, it wouldn’t. It would be considered as placing barbed wired at border line of objective.
Cap area isn’t outside of main door. Its is only outside of secondary doors.
Okay, in that case i will just keep deserting such teams. Because it’s definitely not fun for me. It only causes extreme frustration when I am trying to carry team full of noobs.
Not much change then? Think you deserted last game i saw you in.
Jokes aside, i just dont see this as a big issue because in my view i barely run into barbed wire anyway and would rather focus on how to encourage placing it outdoors (stop it getting pulverised by arty) than adding more restrictions to it.
hedgehog is op in door since it can block HE round and i love that about it. but in term of realism? yea that aint right but it nice to have some defense again HE spammer imo
I’m not ashamed of it. As long as desertion is more or less rewarded and not punished. I have no reason not to desert. (And I’d really like to see deserting to no longer pay off)
If this suggestion was implemented without the thing I have suggested, it would extremely toxic.
Literally lame placed barbed on objectives is the main reason I prefer to play high BRs over lower BRs.
Terribly placed wires at least doesn’t last so long at high BRs (because of explosions).
I still remember the time when you could use explosive bags to destroy sandbags and barbed wire fences.
Is it okay now?
A good player can always find a way to counter anything (except the defensive capabilities of Japanese tanks)
The problem is that there are 5 points. And the attackers have limited tickets. If you want to improve the defense, the number of points must be reduced.
Think you deserted last game i saw you in.