Panzer Support Doctrine - Panzer Assault Grenadiers

[MenciusMoldbug]

Panzer Assault Grenadiers

250 MP 1 CP
4 Men Squad Size, can upgrade to 5 with 'Increased Squad Size' upgrade

Equipment:
Grenades (same as Assault Grenadiers)
AT Grenades (same as Assault Grenadiers)
Nebelhandgranate (smoke grenade, to provide protection against snipers)

Possible Upgrades in Equipment:
STG44's (maximum 2, with sets of 2 in a single upgrade)
G43's (maximum 2, with sets of 2 in a single upgrade)
LMG42 (maximum 1)
Maximum weapon slots in this squad should be set to 4.

Reasoning:

So after playing a few rounds with blitzkrieg doctrine, I realized that Panzer support in its current form lacks a lot of proper tools and counters to enemy play styles because they are so heavily locked and restricted to play in only a few forms. Think of how it would be if you picked blitzkrieg doctrine and Volksgrenadiers had disappeared from your Wehrmacht Quarters. You would only be left to getting Stormtroopers and with no chaff, and would be spread too thin to contain allied assaults from destroying your flanks. This is sort of the inverse for Panzer Support except they don't really have any cheap infantry and their mainline infantry, the Panzer Grenadiers, are not enough to contain or hold the elite infantry on the allied side or be any good at mitigating damage taken by snipers (since PS has no counter-snipers of their own except in the SS squad).

On Small Squad Sizes:

So it has been discussed before that giving PE squad small sizes for their units is not an option. So I thought what if as an experiment, we removed the only ability no one would actually care to miss (mark target) and replaced it with something more useful? Here I thought why don't we put a small squad for PS doctrine, which doesn't change any of the other infantry PE has available, thus still making the play style of 6-7 man PE squads the mainstay for them while giving options for guys like to me to play around with smaller squads. I would definitely build a squad like this if it was available to me as PS and it would become my favorite doctrine just because I would have an option to play 'small' rather than 'huge' in terms of squad sizes. Ultimately, removing mark target doesn't drastically change the game plan of PS as it's mostly about rushing the important unlocks such as F2's, mortar/artillery/hotchkiss, or the big tanks. Mark Target always came last in my priority-to-get list.

Reason I made a thread on this squad alone is because I think this is what PS is actually missing. A genuinely cheap infantry squad that still feels 'elite' but needs to be supported with other units as by itself it is not strong at all. It is literally the biggest thing they are missing and might be the only time we can try out small squad sizes for PE and see how people play around with it. You don't have to change anything else about PS, just remove the mark target and put this squad as a unlock where it was.

[Walderschmidt]

Yes.

Wald

[Warhawks97]

What's their base equipment? Mp 40 or k98? Coz if k98, they will lack a pure close range equipment load out with two stgs.

[MenciusMoldbug]

I wanted them to have MP40's because they arrive later in the game and not immediately in high resources. All the other squads are equipped with kar98k's anyway if people want to play with the rifles.

Also, I'd like to point out having at least one small squad in PS would make the infantry halftrack really useful, since I could put them in there and not have to worry too much about losing the squad and the halftrack together since it doesn't cost much. They also have an optimal use of the firing slots available on the halftrack (3-4 slots for a 4-5 man squad is a good combo).

[kwok]

I nearly stopped at "4-men squad" but I kept reading because Mencius makes forum posts which is more than can be said of the majority of the community.

After reading the whole thing, my opinion still stands as a hard NO on smaller squad sizes. The tradeoffs for small squads for the sake of "elite" is too large especially in the assault capacity... We literally tried this with Tommy assault squads which seem to hold a very very similar role as this squad here. I'd even go out to say that they are better than this squad because they require no munition investment to gain access to weapons like SMGs. The only direct 4-man combat squad, which is still rarely used, I've seen is the blitz doc LMG stormtroopers. They are over equipped with long range weapons so they can fight and do their role "safely" but even still are hardly built because of how easy they are to kill of with 1 of any kind of explosive weapon. The risk to reward ratio is too great.

I'm honestly getting quite tired of these petitions to have smaller squads when we've literally tried in on a micro scale and they were so openly regarded as trash by the community. The Tommy assault squad has almost everything going for it as claimed by this idea:
is higher-tier level inf available when only basic inf is available entering the field with full SMGs (SMG's already considered OP in the early game as found in the recent changes to blitz doc and old availability of combat engies in armor doc). Yet somehow STILL manage to suck. We've bumped it to 5 men and I still haven't seen people use the squad.

Small squads didn't work in my old mod, it still hasn't worked in BK. I think the only context it works is in vanilla COH because of how forgiving the damage system is and how you can literally walk up to close range without losing 1/4th of your damage output.

[Warhawks97]

I nearly stopped at "4-men squad" but I kept reading because Mencius makes forum posts which is more than can be said of the majority of the community.

Nice. We agree in pretty much 90% of the things regarding the game and share very often the same opinion, knowlegde and experience.

It always makes me laugh when i say something but first when mencius has the same thought on it its suddenly "serious" although we both really share most points regarding the issue of the game.

After reading the whole thing, my opinion still stands as a hard NO on smaller squad sizes. The tradeoffs for small squads for the sake of "elite" is too large especially in the assault capacity... We literally tried this with Tommy assault squads which seem to hold a very very similar role as this squad here. I'd even go out to say that they are better than this squad because they require no munition investment to gain access to weapons like SMGs. The only direct 4-man combat squad, which is still rarely used, I've seen is the blitz doc LMG stormtroopers. They are over equipped with long range weapons so they can fight and do their role "safely" but even still are hardly built because of how easy they are to kill of with 1 of any kind of explosive weapon. The risk to reward ratio is too great.

You made three mistakes:

1. You did it for brits which are entirely different to PE. There small squad sizes make little sense because they have an different philosophy. So this squad is basically a "stand alone" unit in a faction not suited for that gamesytle while PE does have the basic layout to be played like that.

2. You view the 4 men PE squad as a "standlone" unit. Ofc this way it wont work.

In all my propsals (and those of others) the 4 men PE squads where never ever meant to fight alone, not to be expensive. It was always thought to fight in tactical groups with low punishment when losing just one of them and whos size is later going up to 5 with survivability buffs anyway.

For example this squad, srsly, i would have wanted such a squad for the entire PE faction.
The heavy assault grens would no longer be grens with bit more HP, better rifle stats and two more upgrades.

Instead they would always be a 250 MP squad that can be deployed from the Transport HT once the infantry Barracks are up.
So PE would be a faction that can deploy small tactical, well equiped and relatively cheap forces anytime and everywhere whenever the situation calls for a small tactical squad to do a certain task.
You always missunderstood the idea behind all that.


3. The Blitz LMG squad is whole different issue. Its a 4 men squad with over 400 MP in build cost. Ofc people think twice about it.
But a small, close range tactical squad for 250 MP deployable by cheap Transport HT´s without any CP cost or low CP cost? And which can be upgraded so that it can also fill other tactical roles if necessary? Thats a whole different world.

I'm honestly getting quite tired of these petitions to have smaller squads when we've literally tried in on a micro scale and they were so openly regarded as trash by the community. The Tommy assault squad has almost everything going for it as claimed by this idea:
is higher-tier level inf available when only basic inf is available entering the field with full SMGs (SMG's already considered OP in the early game as found in the recent changes to blitz doc and old availability of combat engies in armor doc). Yet somehow STILL manage to suck. We've bumped it to 5 men and I still haven't seen people use the squad.

You tried it for the wrong faction and there was no bigger concept behind it except "lets put random 4 men close range combat squad into a random faction".

Small squads didn't work in my old mod, it still hasn't worked in BK. I think the only context it works is in vanilla COH because of how forgiving the damage system is and how you can literally walk up to close range without losing 1/4th of your damage output.

"Forgivng". Where snipers were i think unlimited and quite often entire squads disappeared just like that bc of triple sniper or even more?

Sure, Tank HE is much more brutal here when it comes to insta whipes. But in turn these can also go "insta puff" without doing anything.