Blitzkrieg Mod Forum

This happened to me a few times in the past matches while playing vs AI, so I'm not sure if it applies to PVP aswell.

Whenever a flamethrower pioneer squad shot just one short stream of fire into a building, all my soldiers instantly died. All 6 of them.
This was me playing PE vs US so I can't tell whether it's just their pioneer flamethrowers but it definitely is a tad overtuned if I may say so myself.

If you need further testing, let me know, will try it out then!

From 5.1.6 patch changelog:

MarKr wrote:General:
- Flamethrowers now have 80% chance to insta-kill occupants of a building, trench or emplacement when they hit them with the flamethrower

We plan to tweak it further but basically we want flamethrowers to be a very deadly to garrisoned infantry. They have a shorter range and infantry units with flamethrowers are not exactly known to be very durable in combat - because of the range they need to get close to the target and that often means they move over terrain without cover and that means they can easily get suppressed or killed with almost anything that shoots bullets.

The flamethrowers are hard to balance, they seems kinda like either useless or OP. Right now they can be a bit OP so as I said - we'll try to tune them down a bit to find that sweet spot where they are useful but not overly effective.

I see.
Wouldn't be a problem if the one guy with the flamethrower wouldn't always sprint to the building for no reason (With the rest of the squad staying behind) and get completely ignored by infantry.
At least vs AI that is often the case.

The thing is that the squad has weapons of different ranges - flamethrowers have range of 20 while the rest of the squad has rifles with range of 60. I think that when the AI moves units around it always uses "attack move" command. This means that the squad encounters an enemy squad and the engine (basically) says to the squad "all of you, use your weapons to attack the enemy unit" - then each of the soldiers finds a target they can attack with their weapon and, as a consequence, the 5 dudes with rifles shoot at their max range while the one dude with flamethrower tries to get in range to use his weapon.

I am not sure if this can be prevented.