Hello,
There is no way around it: Artillery strikes and Mortars are somewhat broken right now. But instead of just whineing about i want to make a few simple suggestion to improve the situation without makeing both useless.
Artillery:
Reduce the 8 times faster call time for upgraded Radio squads to 4-5, this is still a lot faster than a regular radioman added to other squads but it would significantly reduce the amount of spam.
Mortar:
1: Reduce the amount of ammo you can get from ammo boxes, Instead of getting 10 refills from a box you would now only get 5.
2: a counter battery mechanic. firing a mortar makes a very distinct noise, allowing the enemy to get a rough Idea about you Location and allow them to fight back using their own motors/Aircraft or if not out of bounds with artillery/Infantry/Tank attacks. It would work like this: the location of a fireing mortar is marked by a 40-50 m diameter circle on the map However: the circle is placed randomly on the position of the mortar meaning that the motar could be right at the center of the circle; at the very edge or somewhere in between.
It’s more annoying how the radio mortar strike sound effects are repetitive, and the firing has no variation, its pretty lame. Other than that, I disagree about reducing mortar ammo. Mortars were used in war and its a war game. In wars they had more than 10 mortars lined up, they had a full box of mortars
So then should this game have 10 mortars lined up too? This game isn’t designed to be a simulator. Mortars need a nerf in this game, playing against an enemy team with a mortar squad is borderline unplayable.
For artillery, I personally think forcing the artillery dude out of hiding by rewarding him when close to his own barrage, but punishing him when he is far away, would be a better solution. Make it so the base accuracy and/or the amount of shells fired is much lower. Then, make it so that instead of the red circle, the artillery first drops a handful of spotting shells. If the arty dude spots them within a small timeframe of like 10 seconds, you’d get the artillery at full effect like we do now, but if he fails to spot, it would be much weaker.
Mortars are kinda similar. Their main issue is that they can shoot from inside their own spawns, outside of harms way from anything short of other mortars, or bombers. Making it so they can only shoot when they are in the common play area for both teams, aka non-gray zones, would fix that issue. At that point it doesn’t matter how much ammo he has because you can just hunt him down and kill him.
There should be two ways to call from Arty, the map based version which is more dispersed, and so suppresses in a larger area but is less lethal overall. The other way to do it should be with bino’s where the spotter can place a much tighter groupping on a seen target area, which can be more lethal compared to the other type.
With mortars, all the ammo reduction and other stuff is just gameisms. Mortars were infact the main killer in WW2 along with Arty, but in the short range it was definitely mortars, and so the way to balance those is to ensure that the round has clearance to fire - ie if the mortar guy is in the wrong spot the round can bounce off a tree or building and blow up in their face. This will ensure that mortars are sited sensibly with sufficient clearance for the desired angle.
Given the current overclutter of most of the maps the number of suitable spots to fire a mortar will be a limitation in its own right.