Sorry to be the lone voice of dissent here, but I find Muddy Tigers to be no fun at all.
As the Germans, it's a turkey shoot. The Germans have the advantage of longbarreled 75s and 88s, they have the advantage of being on defense and therefore being stationary, and all of their positions to defend from are within cover. The fortified positions have tons of quick-respawning panzerfausts, so if infantry gets dug in, they're in perfect shape and are VERY hard to dislodge even with a truly determined attack.
The Russians have fast but weak tanks, and in order to actually fight back, they have to stop moving. This is totally counter-intuitive to the ONE Russian advantage: Speed. With the ground being full of divots and craters, though, the Russians can't maintain forward speed and even if they can, they have tons and tons of open ground to cover while approaching the German firing squad.
Their anti-armor capabilities from an infantry perspective are naught. PTRDs? Don't make me laugh. Those things are totally useless. Combat engineers actually have to be able to GET to a tank before they can use a satchel on it.
The Russians also lack artillery, which would be key towards dislodging Germand defenders.
Personally, in its current iteration, there is NO way I'd run this map on our server. It's just too heavily tilted towards the Germans. If you only ever play axis, sure, the map's a blast. It's a cakewalk to defend in. I've played several times as both Axis and Russians, and I have yet to see the Russians win. Usually they don't even make it towards capturing and holding Fortified B, and sometimes they don't even get that far.
Maybe this map would be better for clan play, but for average pub playing it's asking WAY too much of the Russian team. Can it be won by the Russians? I'm sure it can, but it'd take light years more coordination on the Russian side and you just don't see that on pub servers. Period. Not to the level that this map requires, anyway. Even then the map would still be heavily slanted towards the Germans.
If you want the map to play better, I'd suggest the following:
- Add more cover for the Russians on their approach. Part of why they all follow the road is because everywhere else you just make yourself a huge target.
- Remove the panzerfausts from Fortified A and B. The Germans can start with panzerfaust troops already. They don't need the extra firepower.
- Give the Russians multiple artillery strikes, say, after they take Fortified A (put a russian-only radio there).
- Make ALL the positions unrecapturable. Once the Russians take a position, slap a minefield down and make it unrecapturable. Doing otherwise further unbalances the map AND invites spawncamping which is NEVER fun.
- Remove the "We're under enemy guns!" warning and minefield zone to the left of the Russian spawn. If you want people to flank, give them the space to do it under SOME cover rather than demanding that they cruise out in the open to be cut down by stationary defenders with longbarreled 75s.
- Make the clock something like 30-40 min. Like Berezina and Black Day in July. Give the Russians substantially more reinforcements than the Germans so that one option is to simply outlast the Germans. This would be an ideal choice if you don't want to change any of the other things I've mentioned.
Right now, the major flaws in the map are:
- Germans can recapture all positions meaning that the Allies have to play a bit of defense as well as offense.
- Germans have a plethora of panzerfausts (do you know what a plethora is, Jefe?) and can dig into the fortified positions WAY too easily.
- Germans have positioning advantage of both cover AND being on defense, meaning they get to be stationary and play "shooting gallery" while the Russians try to maneuver and fire at the same time, or have to stop to return fire and slow their advance.
- Reinforcements and time also favor the Germans. Too easy for them to run out the clock with no worries of running out their reinforcements.
The ONLY thing I've seen that can POSSIBLY be called a negative for the Germans is that, from what I can tell, have only one exit from their spawn. Potentially, a Russian IS2 could position itself (if it got lucky) to where it could fire on the Germans as they leave their base and lock them down. However, the IS2 has to GET into that position first, which is no mean task.
The map has a lot of potential, but right now it's just way way WAY favoring the German side. You want a level of coordination that is more often than not completely unheard of in public servers. If you want to advertise this as a clan map, great. I think it'd make a killer clan map where people are used to coordinating. But for public play, this map just don't cut the mustard in its current form.
Take a tip from Berezina. That's a map that requires a lot of German coordination too, but you actually see the Germans win it. Why? Because the map found a good balance between the positioning/equipment advantage for the Russians, and reinforcements/time for the Germans. So, even if the Germans can't capture positions quickly, the clock is working in their favor because they have a good advantage in reinforcements on the Russians. Meanwhile, the Russians have to decide how hard they want to defend various objectives, or whether they want to cede ground and fall back to better positions to maximize what reinforcements they have left.
If Muddy Tigers added that kind of calculus into the mix, I think a lot of the other balance issues would disappear. Sure the Germans have positioning, equipment, etc. advantages, but they have to kill at, say, a 5 to 1 ratio during a 30-40 min period to win. The Russians can simply stay alive and whittle the enemy down, thereby using time and reinforcements to offset the fact that they have no cover, weaker tanks, bad positioning, and there are recapturable objectives.
If you made the Germans have, say, only 2/3 the reinforcements of the Russians (or some other number, whatever worked out as balanced), they'd have to really think twice about trying to recapture Fortified A and B once they're taken. Sure they could do it, but would they want to risk the same meatgrinder the Russians just braved when they're down to 30% reinforcements, the Russians have 50%, and there's still 17 min on the clock?