Let's talk pop cap

Pop cap isn't a "fun" mechanic it's a balance mechanic. It forces (or tries to) push for a balanced army composition, much like hard caps on heavy tanks to. Otherwise people would just spam the piss out of elite units that are not designed to be spammed.. Pop cap ain't glamorous but it serves a purpose

Lanchester's square laws takes into consideration both quantity and quality of opposing forces. So a numerically superior force can still lose to a force superior in quality. I think that's (usually) reflected quite well in CoH2.

Pop cap means you can't build a numerically superior force thus the game only rewards armies that can build higher quality units.

Axis will always beat a soviet player in the long game, not because they are better, but because they can build panthers at a better pop density than soviets can build t-34 76s. No skill is involved in this. Just arbitrary numbers.

Uhhh what careful strategic thought is there behind the principle of cram as much resources as you can into your pop cap?

I'd love to see a game where dominant soviet players respond to a king tiger and panther stall with 8 t-34s, but under the current system this can never happen.

Cost/time opportunity and versatility. You have at most 100 popcap to play with and you need to decide which type of tools you want to have. You can spread thin and be versatile (MG + mortar/sniper + 2x pak + artillery + main line infantry + engineers + elites + tanks) or play basic/brute force (main line + engineers + tanks)

Pop cap isn't a "fun" mechanic it's a balance mechanic. It forces (or tries to) push for a balanced army composition, much like hard caps on heavy tanks to. Otherwise people would just spam the piss out of elite units that are not designed to be spammed.. Pop cap ain't glamorous but it serves a purpose

It doesn't encourage balanced compositions though. It encourages min-maxing as many resources as you can into 100 pop. If I'm short a few pop to buy my heavy tank is this mechanic rewarding me for a "balanced" composition, or is it encouraging me to sacrifice some of my balancing units to make space for the heavy tank?

Upkeep mechanics do favor balanced compositions however.

Cost/time opportunity and versatility. You have at most 100 popcap to play with and you need to decide which type of tools you want to have. You can spread thin and be versatile (MG + mortar/sniper + 2x pak + artillery + main line infantry + engineers + elites + tanks) or play basic/brute force (main line + engineers + tanks)

That's a great ideal and all, but anyone being honest knows that the armies aren't even close to being balanced around their 100 pop performance and it's a lie to pretend they are.

What exactly are we losing by extending the pop-caps again?

Pop cap means you can't build a numerically superior force thus the game only rewards armies that can build higher quality units.

Please explain why UKF is not strongest faction in the whole game then.

Pop cap means better planned army that is adapted to countering what opponent does wins.

Axis will always beat a soviet player in the long game, not because they are better, but because they can build panthers at a better pop density than soviets can build t-34 76s. No skill is involved in this. Just arbitrary numbers.

This is why soviets don't spam T34s, but support them with SU-85 and ZIS guns that keep panthers well in check as well as katiusha that helps break impassable HMG+atg and axis infantry walls.

Planning your army and anticipating future units is part of skill.

If you are spamming a unit against a unit that beats it, its not "arbitrary numbers" its you being an utter scrub who couldn't adapt to situation and tries to blame everything but himself on the loss.

If you are spamming grens vs USF with expectation of winning on the long run, you're bad and balance has nothing to do with it.

This is why soviets don't spam T34s

Ah! How could I forget the deciding moment of WWII where Zhukov decided he had too many t-34s and began scuttling them to free up some of his pop-cap for more su-85s.

It is all clear to me now. The war was not decided by allied forces fielding 5 tanks for every German tank, but because

its not "arbitrary numbers" its you being an utter scrub who couldn't adapt to situation and tries to blame everything but himself on the loss.

It doesn't encourage balanced compositions though. It encourages min-maxing as many resources as you can into 100 pop. If I'm short a few pop to buy my heavy tank is this mechanic rewarding me for a "balanced" composition, or is it encouraging me to sacrifice some of my balancing units to make space for the heavy tank?

Upkeep mechanics do favor balanced compositions however.

there isnt a whack of min maxing in the game though. you need to strike a balance of what your army can do or go all in on some sort of strat and hope the enemy doesnt counter it (i guess thats kinda min/maxing in a sense)

i do think heavy tanks take too much pop cap, but in the end they are high impact units and pop cap allows them to be counterable and prevents snowballing. something like okw would need a complete overhaul if you got rid of pop cap since they really have the best of most things and are limited by how many of those things they can have at a time.

i do think heavy tanks take too much pop cap, but in the end they are high impact units and pop cap allows them to be counterable and prevents snowballing.

I don't think they take too much pop. You can get barely two med tanks for one heavy one. It is as you said they have a high impact. A single Jagdtiger/Elephant ISU-152 in a 3v3 and 4vs4 can force the opponent team to search for alternate ways to take a position. Thats a huge impact.

something like okw would need a complete overhaul if you got rid of pop cap since they really have the best of most things and are limited by how many of those things they can have at a time.

IMO OKW would need some slight buffing at the the end of the day. I think their only redeeming quality is the pop value they can stuff into units. I'd much rather have 2x pios at the 10 minute mark, but at the 40 minute mark sturms are no question.

Ah! How could I forget the deciding moment of WWII where Zhukov decided he had too many t-34s and began scuttling them to free up some of his pop-cap for more su-85s.

It is all clear to me now. The war was not decided by allied forces fielding 5 tanks for every German tank, but because

its still a game.
in this game the average infantryman can take 4 2cm shots before calling it
the pak43 can 2hk a t34, but the elefant takes 3 and cant shoot through buildings, the tiger has less range than both those 88s and less range than a panther 75, and also deals the same damage as a stub dick sherman to other tanks, the KT however manages to deal more damage than the tiger, but less than the elefant or pak43
USF can get of their tanks but nobody else can
snipers can tank a literal rocket to the face
IRL the zis as a field gun had a longer range than the LEFH arty
ppshs, the most produced SMG of the war, isnt available stock
but the centaur, of which there was like 100 is.
the bofors can barrage, but not as far as a mortar
you can sit in a molitov cocktail and be fine
if you sprint too much the airforce cant drop bombs
the ostwind 37mm can only hurt 2 guys in a squad at a time
if you are standing behind a sandbag you can survive a grenade landing at your feet and it wont even stop you from shooting
a 25 tonne tank ramming into a 700kg car will disable the tanks gun and destroy its engine, but the car can drive away afterward

if you want to get upset about game mechanics not being realistic, pop cap is one of the least unrealistic ones to get mad at
if you want to ground it in reality, im not sure there would be nearly as much give and take in a battle of like 500meteres and im certain they wouldnt gate what they give you based on how long you have held certain points of interests

Is this some sort of Manstein apologism?

Sovs beat Germany for many reasons but there were most certainly 3 t-34s for every panther or PIV around the end of the war.

Apparently it's unrealistic or something to reproduce this in-game though?

For the sake of game balance all factions have the same popcap and are designed around that pop cap to provide them with a healthy balance of everything. Yes they could have given the Soviets more pop cap or OKW less pop cap or whatever idea of fun and balanced you had but they didn't, instead Sov t-34's cost less Fuel and OKW P4's more Fuel under the same popcap rules. The system in place works just fine.

If you're having trouble because of pop cap you are likely failing to push your advantage and close the game out or you just don't have enough of an advantage to actually claw the win. When you are leading on your opponent, especially in manpower or # of units you need to fight them religiously. Bleed their models, force them to spend manpower on reinforcing their squads and repairing their tanks. Do not sit around or the comeback mechanic will bring them back into the game and even it out again. With an advantage you should be able to push your opponent back steadily every time by just bearing either sheer numbers at different parts of the map, or simply spreading out and acquiring pieces of the map your opponent doesn't have the resources to control anymore.

With an advantage you should be able to push your opponent back steadily every time by just bearing either sheer numbers at different parts of the map, or simply spreading out and acquiring pieces of the map your opponent doesn't have the resources to control anymore.

Ah I see. I finish the game by beating my opponent with a sheer number advantage that I gained by being successful in the early and mid game.

How foolish of me to complain about an artificial mechanic that limits me from turning the advantage I gained in the early and mid game into a force that can overpower my opponent through sheer numbers.

Ah I see. I finish the game by beating my opponent with a sheer number advantage that I gained by being successful in the early and mid game.

How foolish of me to complain about an artificial mechanic that limits me from turning the advantage I gained in the early and mid game into a force that can overpower my opponent through sheer numbers.

Okay, let me explain this another way. Completely hypothetical situation here.

Lets say you wipe one of your opponents mainline infantry in the early game. Now your opponent has to make a choice on his next build, he might have to forgo his MG, his At Gun, or his LV to rebuild that infantry squad. If he forgoes the MG, you have free reign to put high pressure on strategic points in the map where your opponent can't deny your push. If he forgoes an AT gun you have free reign to ride around the frontline with your LV and trash his infantry, if he forgoes his LV you can afford to stay into fights with little health and just kite his At gun around without fear of LV retribution. and if he doesn't rebuild his mainline infantry at all you just simply out number his frontline somewhere and take advantage of a 2v1. Use the advantage you have to pressure your opponent into being weak for as long as possible.

You can apply these same basic concepts to the late game under a slightly different but more complicated design. If you wipe 2 of an opponents vetted mainline infantry squad. There are a ton of different ways he can go about replacing them, but all of them are often inferior to simply not having lost the squads in the first place because the manpower penalty in replacing the squads is absolutely massive in the grand scheme of things. Assuming the game is roughly equal, you haven't lost any squads, and your opponent has just lost his. Not only are you now up anywhere between 480 - 720 manpower by him having to replace those squads, but the new squads have no vet on them meaning they will perform very poorly against fully vetted mainline infantry (Even elite infantry by virtue of them trading roughly equally/slightly positive at a higher cost per model)

The point is that you are now leading in the current manpower war and you want to pressure as much as you can. It doesn't matter if you take 400 manpower in bleed on a deep push, if your opponent takes 300 with an already 500 MP deficient. You still have a 400 Manpower lead and your opponent is likely now struggling to reinforce his squads while you're stilling comfortably at 300-400 MP able to bring to bare your entire force vs his floundering army waiting to reinforce. If you sit around and let your opponent build his resources back without pushing the advantage on the field you never had an advantage to begin with. This is the tactical part of the equation. Building more units than your opponent is easy, knowing how to use that advantage with the units you have is why the system works, because it forces you, even when you have an advantage, to play correctly against your opponent instead of mindlessly rolling them, and it gives a weakened player a chance to mount a defense and outplay their opponent even on the backfoot if they are the better player. It's a wonderful system that provides a great deal of gamesense and depth to the endgame for both players.

I've said this multiple times that the pop cap on pretty much all late game vehicles is way too high.

Whole game will break without popcap. Too much to list, here are some:

* spam only 1 unit like snipers or Panthers
* undefeatably large armies
* performance: high rendering costs and server side computation costs
* network: high bandwidth will result in lags, fast forward hitches, and delays
* snowballing
* short matches as a result of snowballing.
* less strategic since this is one less constraint to worry about
* infantry will become obsolete late game and will result in pure tank spamming since it will be a game of army strength instead of combi ef arms unit composition
* sim city: imagine 19 mortar pits and fifteen 17 pounders and 12 bofors. In fact, if I was brit, I would never stop making emplacement until the whole map is covered with it. I'll even block all paths with them
* arty spam
* large armies may be cooler but requires more micro management - might become more of a Starcraft like game displeasing to players who cannot control huge armies
* Korean uprising and domination
* squads don't make sense anymore since we have infantry squads to keep # of units to minimum

just close this already
One whiney boy makes a thread, everyone tells him hes wrong and in the end Vipper and Katitof find themselves arguing about the size of their shoes.
I know Vipper wasnt here yet but you know what i mean.
build units, get rewarded
green cover is a hoax
axis OP
blobbing bad mkay
gg wp

The point is that you are now leading in the current manpower war and you want to pressure as much as you can.

This all sounds great except for the one arbitrary mechanic that kicks in around 30 minutes that prevents you from applying more pressure like what happens for around 99% of gameplay.

That cool decision making about whether to replace a lost squad and risk getting wrecked by vehicles or build an AT gun and risk getting wrecked infantry? The basic mechanics for 99% of gameplay? Suddenly they disappear from minute 30-40 vs a pop-capped opponent.

I'm not sure if you're used to playing closely matched games. A player can still be winning without fully wiping his opponents units. Unfortunately in very closely matched games the player with the better pop-cap density is arbitrarily rewarded.

Consider a game where one player makes decisions 2% better than his opponent per minute of game. Ideally the game would be won around the 50 minutes mark by the player 2% better, but around 30 minutes into the game a player with a better pop-density composition can suddenly be rewarded with a 10% advantage against his opponent.

The first player in this scenario is arbitrarily punished for not being overwhelmingly better than his opponent despite being marginally better than his opponent.

Whole game will break without popcap. Too much to list, here are some:

* spam only 1 unit like snipers or Panthers
-You can do this within the already existing game rules, yet no one is winning with a 10 sniper army

* undefeatably large armies
-Already exists within the current game rules. e.g. losing 3 squads before 10 minutes

* performance: high rendering costs and server side computation costs
* network: high bandwidth will result in lags, fast forward hitches, and delays
-4v4s have 3 times the number of 1v1 units yet no one is complaining about these issues. 4v4 is the only game mode that might struggle with an extra 10% units, but I sincerely doubt anyone already playing these will suddenly have issues.

* snowballing
* short matches as a result of snowballing.
-How exactly are you supposed to win games without any snowballing?

* infantry will become obsolete late game and will result in pure tank spamming since it will be a game of army strength instead of combi ef arms unit composition
-Pop-cap already encourages infantry to become obsolete late game in favor of tank spamming. 2 mortar teams are not better than a tank if you can afford the tank, but they have the same pop cap as a tank.

* large armies may be cooler but requires more micro management - might become more of a Starcraft like game displeasing to players who cannot control huge armies

I play COH because 90% of games are decided by upkeep costs instead of arbitrary pop-caps. I hate the 10% of games that are decided by pop-cap because they're too star-crafty.