Company of Heroes 2 – Sturmtiger and Vehicle Movement Mechanics Guide

This short guide covers about recent Sturmpanzer uproar and a little about vehicle movement mechanic.

Guide to Explained Vehicle Movement Mechanics and Sturmtiger

All credit goes to Flame-kun | Dirumah Aja!

Vehicles and You

Before we begin, let’s talk a little bit about vehicles in Company of Heroes 2:

Not like squad models, vehicles in the game have different movement mechanic: accelerating/decelerating before stopping completely. You can circumvent this behavior by ordering that vehicle to face into another direction after/near the stopping point. It will then goes into (almost) stationary while turning their bumper into the direction you just ordered.

Since the vehicle decelerates before it stops completely, sometimes you can see that your vehicles are unintentionally overextending. Or, it fires into the enemy before it stops completely. To get this behavior, the vehicle needs to be real straight to the target when engaging. If the vehicle gets a little bit off, it will then immediately stops to rotate.

You can see this behavior especially with any vehicle which can only fire from one direction: namely SU-76, SU-85, ISU-152, Katyusha, StuG series, Brummbar, Jagdpanzer, Flammpanzer, most half-tracks, and our main culprit: Sturmtiger.

Most tanks and some light vehicles (namely T-70, SOV/UKF’s upgraded M5, Axis’ 22x series, and Panzerwerfer) don’t really benefit from behavior above, since they have separate turret-vehicle movement. They will always attempt to stop first before rotating the turret.

The Behavior In Question

Let’s get into the main dish: do you ever witness a sturmtiger, just finished decelerating, it goes boom! firing its 38cm rocket to a poor squad that has little to no timing window to react?

That’s because the Sturmtiger takes aim while it’s decelerating. So when it stops it will immediately fires its honkabazonka cannons.

Best action to counter this behavior is making your troops move into separate direction while keeping your team weapon safe behind when you hear the roaring engine of the Sturmtiger. So even if it’s want to fire, it needs to choose between left, right, or stationary (bait) target.

Panzerwerfer Special Chapter

Since the topic is about Sturmtiger, I’ll just make it short:

Panzerwerfer sometimes goes like tanks or rotatable turret vehicles: its launcher can rotate to any direction while retaining its momentum when decelerating, resulting in faster barrage than expected.

This is especially useful if you want to do a close barrage, or even a point-blank barrage, but you need to know where will your vehicle stops to fire its barrage.

If you ever have that moment when Panzerwerfer don’t fire the barrage on its minimum range, it’s because the vehicle still decelerates and goes offside from your ordered barrage place, making the driver and the gunner contemplates about life and universe while you goes in rage because nothing happened even though you are sure you ordered that precise rocket half-track to barrage.

So Is the Sturmtiger OP?

Yes? No? I’m leaning to yes.

Why? Because when you hear the engine in the field, you really want it very dead before it really disrupts your game: bait them with a squad (or a team weapon, if you fancy), then rush into it with everything you have. Snares, AT guns, tanks, call-ins; anything to make it very very dead that moment. If you can kill it there then the OKW player don’t really have any manpower and fuel to retaliate, and you can call it gg there.

The recent Sturmtiger buff makes the tank’s appearance on the field shifts the opponent’s objective in that game, making them ignoring everything in the process and sacrificing so much. What’s with that armor and hp bonus in vet 2 anyway? And how do you even allowed to call a King Tiger when having a Sturmtiger in a field? It doesn’t make any sense.

So yes, I think it’s too much for an allies player to handle. This problem then increases exponentially in a teamgame. Even KT’s appearance don’t really tip the game onto Axis’ favor like Sturmtiger does.

I’m an OKW main and I don’t even find this funny anymore.

Avre, on the Other Hand…

It still took its sweet time to stop, then aiming, then firing. And it’s not even have the same level of disruption like Sturmtiger.