Slitherine

Fellow Comrades,

pls share ideas how you use Neubaufahrzeug? Unlike Veredja 2, I currently consider it hot garbage: it's expensive, has cardboard instead of armor and just like honey lures all the AI units.
I tried it in a few battles and then parked in my 'garage' as I cannot figure out how to use it properly (unlike Veredja which I upgraded to 13-strong, added 'Ignore ZOC' and made an ultimate scout /trophy hunter unit).

Vorskl wrote: ↑Wed Apr 07, 2021 1:51 pm Fellow Comrades,

pls share ideas how you use Neubaufahrzeug? Unlike Veredja 2, I currently consider it hot garbage: it's expensive, has cardboard instead of armor and just like honey lures all the AI units.
I tried it in a few battles and then parked in my 'garage' as I cannot figure out how to use it properly (unlike Veredja which I upgraded to 13-strong, added 'Ignore ZOC' and made an ultimate scout /trophy hunter unit).

1. Park a Provocator or Camouflage unit next to it and profit.
2. On a run with many captured units like my Paznermon, I found it very useful to draw fire away from my other units that do not have unlimited parts.

The offensive is pretty nice but in a long campaign defense wins. gets benched or ignored. even with decent heroes its 14/14 offensive with 1,5x shots is not worth 4 core slots.
4 Core slots equal a panzerIII L with 18 def and 12/18.

Grondel wrote: ↑Wed Apr 07, 2021 3:02 pm The offensive is pretty nice but in a long campaign defense wins. gets benched or ignored. even with decent heroes its 14/14 offensive with 1,5x shots is not worth 4 core slots.
4 Core slots equal a panzerIII L with 18 def and 12/18.

Ok, so I am not alone in finding it useless: 4 core slots and 560 cost and paper armor makes its a souvenir but not a weapon.

I love this thing. It has three critical traits:

• High attack
• Low defense
• High prestige cost

That seems like the magic formula to make the AI want to attack it. Perfect, let's make them pay for it.

I have an Aggressive Counterattack (+3 attack when defending) and a Readiness (strikes first when defending) hero on it. Those heroes are not very good otherwise, but they're spectacular on the Neubaufahrzeug. Enemy tanks (and infantry!) drive right into this thing's high attack value, and only get a swing at the low defense after that. There is usually not much left of the enemy unit by that point and so not much damage is done, if any. Here's mine at the end of 1941:

As Scrapulous has put it, unless you happened to have some defensive heroes like Readiness or First Strike, its low defensive value plus high cost would make it completely unuseable.

It's an historical curiosity. I think it's meant to be mostly useless, it's a kind of multi-turret heavy tank design that was abandoned for good reasons.

The way I found it to work well is with a First Strike hero, and a tank destroyer to pair up with it. Funny that, it's got the same movement as a Max or Emil, and it tends to hilariously shred damaged units and infantry, while the heavy TD backing it up makes sure enemy armor doesn't try touching it or pays heavily for it. Match made in heaven right there. Took me until Barbarossa to figure it out, but it's put in some serious work since. Those two and a KV-2 are my heavy spearhead for big armor clashes in the early Barbarossa scenarios.

Magni wrote: ↑Sun Apr 11, 2021 4:36 am The way I found it to work well is with a First Strike hero, and a tank destroyer to pair up with it. Funny that, it's got the same movement as a Max or Emil, and it tends to hilariously shred damaged units and infantry, while the heavy TD backing it up makes sure enemy armor doesn't try touching it or pays heavily for it. Match made in heaven right there. Took me until Barbarossa to figure it out, but it's put in some serious work since. Those two and a KV-2 are my heavy spearhead for big armor clashes in the early Barbarossa scenarios.

I tried to deploy it at 2nd Yugo scenario and noticed that infantry and tanks indeed got lured to it. BUT... that unit is expensive to repair so it requires either Cheap Replacement of Field Repair to survive. Moreover, in the Soviet missions I dont want an AT gun for active tank destruction: BTs and various Ts are easy to destroy with stock troops; KVs I'd rather capture: KV-2 for my own use and KV-1 for exchange with Kerensky in the Klin scenario. So I colored it white, called the White Elephant and parked to collect dust.

Vorskl wrote: ↑Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:28 pmI tried to deploy it at 2nd Yugo scenario and noticed that infantry and tanks indeed got lured to it. BUT... that unit is expensive to repair so it requires either Cheap Replacement of Field Repair to survive. Moreover, in the Soviet missions I dont want an AT gun for active tank destruction: BTs and various Ts are easy to destroy with stock troops; KVs I'd rather capture: KV-2 for my own use and KV-1 for exchange with Kerensky in the Klin scenario. So I colored it white, called the White Elephant and parked to collect dust.

If you have a decent TD, it will take chip damage at worst, at which point the difference in repair cost to other tanks becomes pocket change. Like, seriously, T-34/40s already cost 38 prestige/point for replacements compared to 50 for the Neubau. When all you commonly repair is a point or two of chip damage, the difference is barely even detectable. Prestige just isn't really an issue unless you're never capturing enemy units. And the thing about pairing it with a TD is that it will often outright stop enemy tanks from attacking the Nbfz, exactly because they'd get wrecked. Max or Emil (at overstrength) with Kerscher is the ultimately roadblock against big soviet tank pushes exactly because they'll just pile up in front of him realising they'd kill themselves trying to attack him or a neighbouring unit, and hence open themselves up for an easy surround. I'm not even that capture-crazy and I have enough KV-1/40s by Moscow, on top of dozens of KV-2s and and KV-1/41s plus about a hundred T-34/40 in reserve with another ~70 points of them on the field. This is all without Trophies of War, mind you.

If you're swimming in an abundance of prestige, as many of us claim, who cares how much it costs? I certainly don't. But if you aren't up to your chin in prestige, well, then it certainly would be a viable point of contention.

I attach an AT hero to it and it's quite nice to use.