Bunch of suggestions (AKA arty salt)

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I won’t lie, this game has been a lot of fun and it’s still beta so a lot of things will be getting tweaked, I hope. So, here’s what I’d like to see happen

I reckon the end goal is to see the game play like this: The player gets to have heroic moments of mowing down squads, but the AI shouldn’t be too stupid.

The much coveted Arty rework
-Instead of click anywhere on the map. The arty calls should be spotted. Now there should be various ways to do that. Right now, 1-2 radio squads with the upgrade can easily pin down location or two due the ease and low cooldown with arty spam.

-One is to give radio operators binoculars, you point and boom. This would open counter play as the radio operator NEEDS to have a visual. Alternatively, maybe a marker smoke that needs to be thrown. Basically how Enemy Territory handled radio’ed in fire support. (You threw marker smokes for air strikes, bino’ed for arty)

-Second idea is to tie it to the pings. Radio operators can only call strikes pings, with bit of leeway. This also would give more option to counter play while keeping the “backline” aspect strong. Heck, even promotes more usage of pings.

-Third: Just… don’t make the frequent strike upgrade so strong. 30 seconds cooldown means around 11 seconds of downtime. Something like a minute of cooldown or even two minutes with the upgrade should help a lot.

Infantry and AI related shennigans
-Infantry Rearming zones. Now, I mention this first. These would serve as way to reload some specific weapons. Like rifle grenades and mortars. Also, way to stock up on regular ammo in case you don’t feel like suiciding and all friendly ammo boxes are destroyed for the time being.

-Enable friendly fire for big explosions. Probably needs a way to keep track on intentional friendly fire. Too much team killing and “High command” prohibits you from using big guns

-Mortars unable to stock from ammo box. It’s just so cheesy to park somewhere safe, slap down ammo boxes and just spam mortar fire all round long. You’ll pin down location with impunity and if you are savvy enough mortarman, you can rack up a respectable kill count with less effort than that one pro player with bolt action and reflex shots.
-With friendly fire for mortars, there needs to be way for the mortar player to mark their intended targets. When you have deployed mortar you can put special “Mortar zone here” mark on a map… Or alternatively, allies get the mortar mark on map the instant mortar is fired.

-The “Attack Armored Vehicle” order should make PIAT/Sturmpistol equipped squadmates switch to them. Maybe make the range when you can issue that order longer if you have said soldiers in your squad. Would make bomber squads more terrifying or if anything, the bomber charge would make it less obvious who is the player actually aiming for sweet spots.
-For AT rifles, same thing, but even more range?

-Coordinated grenade throwing. Not sure if it’s planned in the upcoming orders, but ordering your squad to prepare grenades (They’d switch to a grenade type you are holding if they have any), you throw the grenade and the AI tries their best to throw theirs too to roughly same location with huge dispersion. With luck, they might even get their grenades through a window too!

-Low/No ammo indicators in the squad icons. Just so you know that your AI buddies need more ammo.

-LoS Respect. Probably in works, but nothing more infuriating than AI sniping you through few bushes just because you alerted them with your dummy thicc garand ping, ain’t it? AI has spurts of being way too accurate with their fire anyways, oddly enough it’s the regular infantry men with starting guns that do this. Sure, there’s plenty of players who can snipe reliably with iron sights, but you can tell those apart from the 360 noscoping snipebots.

4 Likes
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This option would be the best solution imo.

That would be wierd. Sometimes there is need to mark something without instantly calling artillery on that marker. So option with binoculars wins.

That would be way to much. WIth that kind of cooldown there will be no need to bring radio squad anymore. Again, binoculars win.

There is FF present for artillery and plane bombs. Not sure about mortars. But nothing more is needed imo.

They need to be forced out of the dark zone. Then they can have as much ammo as they want, because they would be counterable instead of sitting in safety.

Agreed

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You have a lot of awesome suggestions, the rearming zone, attack armored vehicle, coordinated grenade throwing and the ammo indicators are all great ideas. That said I don’t agree with the mortar and arty bit.

Arty
I think increasing the cooldown would be a mistake, as it will very quickly go from pretty powerful to downright useless, I very much regret getting a radio operator on my one non radio squad, as the cooldown is so long I at most get to use it once, and even then only if I didn’t spawn with it on cooldown.

Making it rely on vision is alright, it means you can’t just sit in a bunker somewhere and call down artillery strikes. I don’t think it will help much as any good player will already be playing in vision of the majority of their artillery strikes, both because you can’t rely on teammates pinging and because you can get more kills sniping than the artillery will net you.

Mortars
We just need bigger maps so mortars can’t hit objectives from the dark zone. Maybe some smoke generation when they fire so they can more easily be found.

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Oh, what I meant by tying arty strikes to pings was that you could only call arty strikes in roughly that location. Like each ping generates 5-10 meter radius where arty can be called via the arty strike button.
But yeah, I’d definitely want to see binoculars or marker smokes for radio operators. Handwave it as troopers relaying coordinates or something.

I also totally forgot that the out-of-bounds ain’t equal at all. Mortars do need hella fix and it just feels odd they don’t have friendly fire. In hotly contested objective, you can just fire bit behind the objective to deny access and rack up kills.

In my experience, I don’t find the long cooldown of arty strikes too useless. It can be great lifesaver or at least breathing room maker on regular squads. In fact, once I maxed out radio squads, I took them out of my squad menu because of the cheesiness.
I’ll proceed to do the same with mortars once they got fully leveled.

Heck, make mortars reach only 150 meters, make the deviation double the amount, the splash about 20% smaller… BUT implement the ability for AI to fire with you. Basically, you as player end up ranging the shots and the second mortar man follows suit.

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Well, that is all up to the personal preferences. For me artillery strike purpose is mostly area denial. I use that squad a lot even though I am a lot further in the campaign but instead of sitting somewhere in the back I treat it as “special forces” of some kind. It’s job is to get quickly into objective, dominate it with MG34 and then simply don’t allow enemies to get close. With longer cooldown it would be pointless, because any other squad will do the job better.

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It might not be completely useless, but I would rather have a regular trooper with a backpack than a radio operator. Carrying 2 extra grenades is great for storming buildings, or two extra medkits do wonders for survivability, especially combined with the op’ness that is medpack usage speed and health restored by medpack.

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All good suggestions, I have no complaints with any of these.

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I agree to a 1 min cooldown because its not LOCKED on a squad limit unlike the vehicles multiple players in a match can bring their own comm squad and just spam the hell out of the obj, others don’t really understand this because and say it will become “USELESS” eventhough you can have “MULTIPLE” arty squad in a match

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I do see useless arty strikes from time to time. Good luck calling a strike on the church when it pretty much offers coverage to most of the strikes.

I also can see why people want to keep that 30 sec cooldown on radio squads. Their MO is to call strikes after all. Nerfing the arty upgrade is just simplest method of combating the spamfest that happens a little too often.

But yeah, to me, tweaking some of the spurts of AI snipefest, arties and mortars oughta make the game a lot more bearable.

(Oh, also, faster AA turn rate…)

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ok i explain what the job of the raido operator was “you need arty to bomb a trench to hell you get the radio operator who calls i to an in german its “funkwagen” in egnlish i think radiotruck or some other radio Central for your sector and that one gets the coordinates ofthe target and give them to the arty” on the field you dont give coordinates mutch you only give describtions of distant to target from your position and your own coordinates because you are under FIRE and cant get the map out and most of the time you dont even know witch arty unit is near you to support so why should i need Binoculars

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Yes, we all can google what radio operators actually did in WW2. They also logged in plane movements and if assigned to field, kept their squad updated on other friendly unit movements, reinforcements and whatnot. And yes, if unit radop was calling in arties, they certainly didn’t deliver coordinates where to bomb, but instead used call outs relative to their position. And no, it did not work like seen in most WW2 movies.

And they certainly didn’t call artillery strikes willy nilly.

But I digress, this is about game things and suggestions. At the moment, artillery is too powerful due the spamfest without real counter play involved.
At least you are able to shoot down planes before they bomb the hell out of your friends.
And planes can sorta eliminate a mortar squad. Heck, few matches I’ve experienced few savvy bomber pilots who took it as their personal job to bomb possible locations where mortars might lie. That had made my mortarsquad leveling a little difficult.