Profile of comm_ash

I have no idea why this discussion has devolved into relic's wokeness, there is literally nothing in the game, especially in multiplayer that you can really point to as 'woke.'

Onto the actual discussion, I think COH3 has a solid gameplay core. At first, I was not happy with the changes to match length, and I still am not 100% on board, but it is nice to play matches that don't get dragged 20+ minutes even though one team is obviously out of their skill level.

In terms of the way units interact, I like most all of the changes, but would like to see some slight more lethality for infantry units out of cover against other small arms. I like that tanks take on average 5 hits to kill now, and that light vehicles have far more use in the lategame (especially units like the 8rad and chaffee being good enough to justify purchasing them in the lategame.)

What I think is really holding the game back right now is lack of content, and lack of polish. Lack of content is the number one issue IMO, as people coming over from COH2 have been used to 5 factions each with at least 7 doctrines each and a plethora of maps per gamemode. Having only 2-3 maps per gamemode is a serious flaw in COH3, and one that should be rectified as soon as possible, even if it means adding community maps. COH2 had the same issue early on (anyone remember steppes being the only 4v4 map for 3-4 months?), and it similarly caused a great decrease in playerbase. People are just bored, they feel like they have completely played the game, and are now sitting back and waiting for new stuff.

Polish I believe is also very important, and there are a few bugs in coh3 that are common and do a lot to add to the feeling that COH3 is an unfinished game. Seeing squads walking around with magic guns that float 3 meters behind them, or squads getting stuck when attempting to breach, are common enough occurences that players run into them often, and each time they do it reminds them of the poor state of the game. Common bugs and simple laziness like missing unit icons need to get ironed out sooner than later.

That isn't a thing in either COH1 or COH2. Armor works off of a simple value that is binary, either an incoming shell hits your front armor or rear armor. Angling just makes it more likely for a shell to hit the back half of your tank, IE rear armor. You want to face your targets head on in basically all situations, regardless of tank.

If you want some example of Games where angling is somewhat represented:
War Thunder
Men of War

Why did you even come up with the idea that the Black Prince is needed? On the example of CoH2, we clearly see that the Soviets and the United States are based on tank destroyers. Their heavy tanks (namely, the tank, not the ISU-152) are practically not used. As we know, Britain will have an Archer who can perfectly fulfill the role of the Tiger destroyer. Asymmetric balance.

Because why shouldn't the Brits have a heavy lategame tank that can frontally engage the Germans? It doesn't have to be the Black Prince, but more options allow for more varied playstyles on all sides. In 1v1s, that kind of asymetric balance works. But in teamgames, even to this day, we can see that balancing a game where one side only has to micro a small number of units vs. another side having to micro more individually weaker units makes for an imbalance.

In addition, it is quite silly to me that Axis factions always seem to need to have the heaviest units in the lategame. Hell, in COH3 the 'light and aggressive Africa Corps' looks like it gets a stock Tiger just to appease certain aspects of the Axis playerbase. Seems boring to me to want to go with the same old design yet again in COH3, especially when this weird idea of German lategame superiority isn't even authentic.

Penals are fine in 1v1s. They just suck in larger game modes, to the point of becoming an active detriment.

My issue with them (that will likely never get fixed), is how they act like riflemen, but without the snare or anti-infantry upgrades. They are so expensive that you do not want to engage outside of green cover or be bled past the 5 minute mark, and don't really fill any important niche in the soviet lineup. They don't even get sandbags. Why should you ever build penals when you can go for conscripts and supplement with guards for PTRS anyways?

Awesome voicelines though.

Great list. Agree on most of it. One thing I don't personally feel the same way about is grenade dodging, but I've seen umtiple people mention it. To me the bar that appears is almost too obvious, although it is probably a placeholder anyways.

I think what he meant is that the actual animation of the grenade being thrown is almost impossible to catch, in part because of the farther out zoom, and in part because of the animations being very subdued compared to those in coh2 (which were very obvious, with long and animated windups.) In addition, I'm just not a fan of denoting something that used to be immersive (seeing a grenade being thrown and hearing the troops callout) with a simple UI bar. COH to me has always been great because of how alive the battlefield feels; that you don't feel like you are playing with toys on a map, but living soldiers.

I do however, disagree with his point about the audible warnings for grenades. No-one can spend 100% of their time watching engagements, and the grenade callouts make for good gameplay and user feedback.