Or, now listen to me carefully, it was a fucking MESS to balance 871 infantry armor types against 500 different damage types while every single infantry unit had a completely different amount of health on top of that.
CoH1 was balance mess and a nightmare.
This is why CoH1 is horribly imbalanced up until this day and was never anywhere near being balanced.
Sure, it was in better state then CoH2 during its first 2 years, but after that it and its messy balance were left so far behind, some people struggle to remember how much of a nightmare it was.
There was no RTS game in existence prior or post CoH1 which had as many different types of damage and armor and it was impossible to wrap your head around getting to know what does what.
You know a Hybrid system between that and one from from coh2 could also work. The base system would be the one from coh2 with target table of weights to each of the fields like pen, dmg, acc what not. If the target in question has an entry in that list then it's values to be modified with weights and if not coh2 style as usual(as I am saying this I have no idea of how coh2 is coded so..).