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I agree with this. You don't a Ranger hoping to take on a Mammoth Tank, so don't buy a Rocket Soldier hoping to take on anti-infantry units.

Put me in the camp of a rifle infantry SHOULD be able to beat a rocket infantry. Money isn't the only metric. Different units have different roles, and it has nothing to do with hoping your team picks up the slack (though a well oiled team is certainly rewarding). If you're a rocket infantry, part of the risk of buying one is being on the lookout for anti-infantry units.

Here's an example from forum games. I've circled two instances. In one case the button is kind of visible, but in the other I had to double check page 5 even existed. I think the difference is which row is highlighted.

Noted, may look at it a little more before axing it - but then what will replace it? Another minor thing that might be contributing to the stigma around naval combat - particularly on HW - is the fact that it is basically impossible to score kills. When a naval vessel is destroyed the occupant just falls to the bottom of the ocean and dies of natural causes. It's not just the naval vessels that can't kill naval vessel pilots - nobody can, unless a naval unit happens to be positioned just right to crush the pilot when they get ejected, or if the pilot is able to swim to shore. So naval maps can hold back your kills and KD stats because of this. The effect isn't very significant on CI/Pacific/Under since naval combat is only a small part of the total combat, but on Hostile Waters almost all combat is naval combat. Teams' scores near the end of a match can show them with a total of like 10 kills and 100 deaths and that's just on the winning team. Well that's another thing I'm solving. The logic for this has been kicking around for a while courtesy of moonsense715, but I had no clue how to handle it before. Of course, this will not happen if the destroyed naval unit is near a shoreline (same logic that subs/LSTs use for allowing ejection). This also means that Gunboats/Destroyers will finally be getting the same feature as LSTs/subs where being in open waters prevents you from accidentally ejecting (or deliberately, since doing so in subs led to a minor exploit) and you die instantly when your vehicle does (so no waiting to fall and no extra rocket shots in your death throes). No kills is also a much smaller issue with air units - smaller because aircraft tend to fly low enough when near death that the occupant survives (unless they're over water - again, mainly a HW problem) and can then be killed by someone else anyway. But this is harder to solve for those, since you can land them and this script doesn't care if you're Volkov who part of his deal is that he can survive falling from aircraft. You will be getting credit for killing Yak pilots though since they are subject to instant death.

Perhaps it might be an idea to play around with the Nader's RoF and give him a clip with a reload time? So he can throw, lets' say, 4 Grenades in quick succession before he needs to reach into his pouch for more. The Grenadier, Flamer and Shocky weaponry all have one major thing in common, which is the fact that they fire a single projectile and then have to wait for the next one to be ready. Shaking up the number of projectiles a bit by giving the Grenadier more Grenades to throw at once and giving the Flamer a stream-fire mode might be a good way of giving these units more of an identity past their damage types and the amount of splash they deal.

I always thought the Grenadier was generally better in infantry combat than the Flamethrower due to his faster speed and being cheaper, and I was using the flamer for attacking enemy buildings and vehicles due to better damage and easier-to land projectile (vehicles are big). Maybe my memory serves bad but I don't remember people crying about the Grenadier being a ghetto Flamethrower. About the Spy abilities, we should start setting up a page where the current unit lists and abilities are listed. Changelogs are one thing, but a "this is what everything currently does" would help a lot. E.g. I never noticed in the logs or ingame that the Spy is blocking ore truck incomes. Don't jump on the conclusion already that if people don't cry about it (maybe just not noticed) then it's all good E.g. in AR I tend to shut the radar, power down, then sap the enemy refinery constantly and nobody notices that in the tests.

Yeah Grenadier is admittedly in a tricky spot. "Now" is disingenuous though - before Delta he always sucked, except for Fissure where he was apparently deemed too broken because when I finally started playing in 1.4, he wasn't even available to buy on Fissure! Though all this did was just bring flamethrowers to the forefront instead, because the issue was not grenadiers, the issue was that the map layout put way too fucking much emphasis on splash damage. The issue with the Grenadier before the attempts to fix him, is that he has always just been a worse Flamethrower. Nobody used him because it is almost impossible to be in a situation where you can't just afford a Flamethrower instead - or even better, a Shock Trooper back when he had the splash of a Flamethrower. The only situations where you could afford a Grenadier but not a Flamethrower was early on in silo-only maps. But in the old days, spending money on infantry period at the start of Metro/Canyon River was a death sentence as it delayed your tanks, and on Forest of Illusion, there was only one piece of cover on the whole map: the church. Hanging around there was the only way a grenadier could ever hope to get in range to hurt someone as going anywhere else would result in being outranged to death - so definitely not worth the investment compared to just waiting for a flamer. In Delta the Grenadier has gone through many iterations to try to make him actually worth using, and a lot of these failed. The initial Delta Grenadier was basically like the old Grenadier except he actually had range (about as much as a shock trooper instead of less than pistols) and his damage against vehicles/building exteriors was no longer merely comparable to the rifle/kapitan. In spite of this, he was still almost never used. At one point I wondered "hey, Volkov is essentially a composite of several different units, what's the Volktillery supposed to be a clone of?" And so the previously forgotten Grenadier found a new lease on life as a "siege infantry" who could throw his grenades about as far as the old Volktillery. This got people to use him... because it wound up making him completely broken. So after that failure, I removed the Grenadier from the game completely while I tried to figure out how to handle him, and to make sure the Soviets still have a "grenadier", the RPG Trooper got renamed to the "Grenadier" (because he has a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher, see) and instead of a Makarov he had a limited supply of "old-style" frag grenades. The limited grenades were kinda controversial and people were still clamoring for a real Grenadier to come back, so... He found ANOTHER new lease on life: instead of just being a budget Flamethrower, he became more of a "jack of all trades, master of none" hybrid between the Flamethrower and Rocket Soldier; instead of just being worse than the Flamethrower at everything, he now has anti-tank power that's better than the flamer but worse than the RS, his anti-building siege is better than the flamer but worse than the RS, his infiltration is still bad because he doesn't get a weakpoint bonus like flamers do and he's liable to splash himself, and his anti-infantry power is - as you would expect - worse than the flamer but better than the RS. So now your question is probably "how does this deviate from the issue of being a budget unit when you can almost always afford the non-budget unit"? Because unlike a flamethrower or rocket soldier, he is still available when the Barracks is destroyed. Which goes all the way back to you 2 years ago bringing up how Rocket Soldiers were too overpowered to be available without a Barracks (which I can agree on). Of course, one team having more options with a dead building than the other team just doesn't fly, so the Allies got a Grenadier too, which I had also hoped would lead to slightly more diverse infantry loadouts than "rockets, mechs, and nothing else". The newest Grenadier still hasn't been a particularly great success on some of those fronts, but it's still seen the most use of any excluding the overpowered ArtyNader, and has been regarded with hardly any controversy compared to that travesty of a unit. So it's unlikely he'll go into a different role unless someone has a particularly great idea. Next build he's receiving the following changes: he's going back to 50 health with armour instead of 80 with none. This improves his durability against tank splash and all small arms except the Remington and machineguns, but worsens it against fire/tesla weapons and the aforementioned exceptions to the small arms rule. So most importantly he won't have to fear basic infantry, tanks, or his own splash damage as much. just like the old Grenadier, his grenades will bounce if they hit terrain too quickly. Which means that you are at a much lower risk of accidentally hurting yourself when trying to throw around cover (especially combined with the addition of armour). As for not exploding on death: he is not meant to be used in CQC, and this is another part of trying to make him a different unit to the Flamethrower. I am considering backtracking on having him as an Allied unit, but he'd have to become Barracks-required again so that both teams lose equally from losing their Barracks. And we'd have to return to Captains having more ridiculous anti-vehicle damage - the addition of a double-owned, no-barracks explosive unit allowed us to tone down the small arms vs vehicle damage.