Hey, This is certainly the right place. I did a few quick tests and it seems to work as intended. The counter barrage is manually activated and, once the enemy starts any barrage, the howitzer fires at the position where the enemy fired from. It requires the position to be within range and after the counter barrage is finished there is a short invisible cooldown before it counter fires again.

It is hard to say why it does not work for you. Do you see the counter barrage icon in the portrait when it is active? And are you sure the enemy units are close enough to the howitzer?

Do you use any custom map or win condition at the same time? That could also have some influence.

Originally posted by SneakEye:

Hey, This is certainly the right place. I did a few quick tests and it seems to work as intended. The counter barrage is manually activated and, once the enemy starts any barrage, the howitzer fires at the position where the enemy fired from. It requires the position to be within range and after the counter barrage is finished there is a short invisible cooldown before it counter fires again.

It is hard to say why it does not work for you. Do you see the counter barrage icon in the portrait when it is active? And are you sure the enemy units are close enough to the howitzer?

Do you use any custom map or win condition at the same time? That could also have some influence.

Many thanks for your kind and prompt answer. I'm so sorry you took time to test it, but you've been very kind to do so.

We're using just your mod, maybe a few skins sometimes, we aren't using any custom win condition: just destroy all the enemy buildings as usual. We used both vanilla and custom maps.

I can confirm the enemy mortars are within range as we usually hit them manually with the normal barrage. To be noted that these units are not within the enemy base area.

The ability seems active in the panel, and when I deactivate it there's always a cooldown for the other two abilities.

By the way, thanks for telling me of the hidden cooldown, it's important for me to conduct further testing.

At any rate, the thing is that last time I decided to build five leFH, and friendly territory was being targeted by three soviet mortar squads and a rocket launcher truck, but, sadly, with all the howitzers set to counter-barrage (after I made them gain enough veterancy), none of the enemy artillery units got disabled.
I'm going to conduct more tests in more maps and see what happens.

I apologise for the post, I can confirm the ability is working, to a certain extent.

There are, however, a few issues that even brought me to think the ability wasn't working at all, below is summarised the test I did and how it went.

Map: Strike at Karkand, available from the Steam Workshop, featuring a useful bottleneck.

Players setup: myself, Wermacht (position 6), together with 2 Expert Wermacht AI (position 4 and 5) vs 3 Expert Soviet AI (position 1, 2 and 3).

LeFH Setup: six LeFH howitzers, all of them with three veterancy stars, grouped by two.

Enemy artillery setup: many mortar squads and many Katyusha trucks supporting enemy units trying to cross the bridge (bottleneck).

Results: friendly LeFH battery could not prevent the enemy artillery from firing most of their programmed shells.

Here are the issues I've noticed.

Rotation/reaction time: enemy artillery appears only when the first round has been fired. For the Katyusha trucks this is a problem because they shoot few rounds before (usually) changing position. Howitzers spend too much time at reacting and turning, meaning they're in the correct firing angle only when a few enemy rounds have already landed on friendly territory.

Shells speed: the time it takes for the shells fired by the howitzers is long as well, this contributes to a general long reaction time.

Precision: the precision of the counter barrage is highly probabilistic. A battery of 6 LeFH firing against the last known position of a Katyusha actually hit an area that is much wider than the one targeted by the normal barrage. Additionally, while sometimes they hit the enemy artillery with one of their first 6 shells (as there are 6 howitzers firing), sometimes it takes three rounds to hit the enemy, for a total of 18 shells fired. This means that the precision is 1 out of 18, which is rougly 5,5% of chance for every shell to hit the enemy unit.

Cooldown time: the cooldown time is long and putting all the howitzers to counter-barrage make them have the same cooldown time at the same moment, leaving the friendly territory uncovered for a long time. It has been common that friendly territory was hit by enemy artillery during the cooldown timer.

CONCLUSION

The counter barrage ability IS WORKING, however I think is NOT WORTH BEING USED over the regular manual barrage.

This because it's more efficient and more precise to manually control all the howitzers and order them a regular manual barrage over the enemy artillery. This allows too for a better handling of the cooldown timers as the player can order only a few howitzers to fire at the same time, leaving the others to spend the long cooldowns.

To be noted that this test has been conducted according to my own group's play style, which is very extreme and not very common. Fighting against three Soviet AI set to Expert is very caothic and, while the counter-barrage ability seems to need balancing in this scenario, it might get too overpowered for other, more normal, situations.

Thanks for providing the detailed testresults. That is very valuable! It is fair to say that the ability is underperformig in this scenario.

I really appreciate that you took the time to find out what happens and considered the behaviour for other scenarios.

I will add this topic to my list to think of a solution to improve it a little. One thing that comes to mind is more random reload times to put the salvos out of sync and not all at once. Other than that, the accuracy has to be reviewed, I don't know the exact numbers atm.

Please, don't you worry, and thank you again for your kind answers, in addition to a big thanks for the wonderful mod!

There would be one last thing to note: if the enemy artillery unit lies among other enemy units, then the six howitzers will achieve an insane ammount of kills (as they would do with a normal barrage).

The lack of precision can be countered by a player who simply fields more LeFH units, as that increases the overall hit percentage, so the howitzers remain a powerful unit regardless of the low precision against artillery.

To discourage LeFH spam, it could be an idea to make them more effective at counter barrage, with high precision, less reaction time, less cooldown times, but much much less rounds fired (also because they wouldn't be needed with other parameters increased).
In this way it becomes very possible that the enemy artillery unit will be neutralised but, if the opponent hasn't isolated it (as it happens usually for AI or in any bottlenecked maps), then it doesn't happen that all the other units around get destroyed.

High precision, in this way, would make the howitzer much more reliable against artillery, but much less effective against all the units around the enemy target.

I like that idea! Will keep it in mind.