"One-shot-wipe-potential"

I think the problem isn't as much about the late game, big shot (somewhat) predictable weapons: Railway artillery, KV2, ISU152 etc. all have very high chances to wipe squads but they come rather late and one of their main purposes is to kill infantry.
Even artillery barrages tend to leave a good chance to escape unless the first shot is really spot-on. Other very strong wipe potential attacks just have a way to telegraph that something big is incoming (e.g. offmap artillery).

It is more about completely unpredictable behavior like your guys bunching up just the moment they activate a mine or a tank shot that would normally kill 1-2 guys suddenly killing 3-4.

It is also about cost: Something expensive (e.g. demo charge) and specialized (e.g. big slow tanks that are also not very good vs. tanks) can be justified to kill a whole squad
whereas a standard price unit that just has a tendency to get lucky (random overperformance) or a cheap unit (mine) should not wipe a squad without a chance to react.

I think the problem isn't as much about the late game, big shot (somewhat) predictable weapons: Railway artillery, KV2, ISU152 etc. all have very high chances to wipe squads but they come rather late and one of their main purposes is to kill infantry.
Even artillery barrages tend to leave a good chance to escape unless the first shot is really spot-on. Other very strong wipe potential attacks just have a way to telegraph that something big is incoming (e.g. offmap artillery).

It is more about completely unpredictable behavior like your guys bunching up just the moment they activate a mine or a tank shot that would normally kill 1-2 guys suddenly killing 3-4.

It is also about cost: Something expensive (e.g. demo charge) and specialized (e.g. big slow tanks that are also not very good vs. tanks) can be justified to kill a whole squad
whereas a standard price unit that just has a tendency to get lucky (random overperformance) or a cheap unit (mine) should not wipe a squad without a chance to react.

For the most part I agree with you. The indirect fire system is unpredictable at best but it can be rather frustrating when you lose an entire squad on the move to the first mortar round out of the tube. I think that a metric preventing a wipe might be hard to implement however if there was some way to say is the squad static, yes, wiped whereas if the squad mobile 1-2 members lost. That would actually punish the units it is intended for static infantry.

In regards to mines I also see this as less of an issue as the game progresses I think I would prefer to see cheaper detection purchase on both CE and Pioneers lets say 15-20 that way defeating these systems with infantry only on the field would be more reasonable.

An additional but far more complex way to resolve this issue would be improving unit pathing.

Because mines keep coming up, I looked up the mine's stats both in the files and on the stats sites and it has a glaring irregularity:
The OSWP of Soviet mines is a result of their strange AoE Damage Far value: They deal as much damage in the center of the blast as they do on its edge. I don't know if this is an oversight (BUG) or just bad design because it breaks with pretty much all explosions in the game.
Reducing this damage modifier to a value more similar to other explosions (e.g. 0.2, see my suggested solution for large damage weapons) would mean infantry at the edge of the explosion would still lose a lot of their health and damaged squads would still die but it would be far less random and far less devastating and thus overall fairer (chance to retreat).

It currently presents a 40% chance to survive even at the edge of its explosion: It is the perfect example of how (binary) randomness should not look.

Assume your full health squad triggers one mine.You lose 2 guys because they are near the center, fair and square.
But the other two are not bunched up with the others, they are further away (up to 5 m!). It doesn't just damage them or reliably kill one guy and cripple the other. It just boots up the RNG casino.
You basically flip a coin for each of your men and if you are unlucky (if you can call 36% chance "unlucky", I'd call it rather frequent) both of them die, too. Boom.

Precision strike is really silly. I mean, any MG/Mortar/Pak (2/3 man squad) is wiped most of the time. (This is the reason why this thread started )

@Greeb 120mm has no longer extreme range till it gets to vet2/3. I dont know the exact stats but it would be nice to compare range from vet3 mortars in general.

Because mines keep coming up, I looked up the mine's stats both in the files and on the stats sites and it has a glaring irregularity:
The OSWP of Soviet mines is a result of their strange AoE Damage Far value: They deal as much damage in the center of the blast as they do on its edge. I don't know if this is an oversight (BUG) or just bad design because it breaks with pretty much all explosions in the game.
Reducing this damage modifier to a value more similar to other explosions (e.g. 0.2, see my suggested solution for large damage weapons) would mean infantry at the edge of the explosion would still lose a lot of their health and damaged squads would still die but it would be far less random and far less devastating and thus overall fairer (chance to retreat).

It currently presents a 40% chance to survive even at the edge of its explosion: It is the perfect example of how (binary) randomness should not look.

Assume your full health squad triggers one mine.You lose 2 guys because they are near the center, fair and square.
But the other two are not bunched up with the others, they are further away (up to 5 m!). It doesn't just damage them or reliably kill one guy and cripple the other. It just boots up the RNG casino.
You basically flip a coin for each of your men and if you are unlucky (if you can call 36% chance "unlucky", I'd call it rather frequent) both of them die, too. Boom.

Bumped for Relic to please investigate.

Precision strike is really silly. I mean, any MG/Mortar/Pak (2/3 man squad) is wiped most of the time. (This is the reason why this thread started )

@Greeb 120mm has no longer extreme range till it gets to vet2/3. I dont know the exact stats but it would be nice to compare range from vet3 mortars in general.

Even so, 120mm precision strike can kill not only its objective but any unit close to it.
I find it a really OP ability, alike to a single howitzer shot.

Normal mortars though also a bit OP, at least aren't as cost effective than the 120mm, requires T2 and is harder to reach vet1 with them.

The OSWP of Soviet mines is a result of their strange AoE Damage Far value: They deal as much damage in the center of the blast as they do on its edge. I don't know if this is an oversight (BUG) or just bad design because it breaks with pretty much all explosions in the game.

actually, all mines currently do full damage across the whole radius. according to brad, this is intentional.

Precision strike is really silly. I mean, any MG/Mortar/Pak (2/3 man squad) is wiped most of the time. (This is the reason why this thread started )

@Greeb 120mm has no longer extreme range till it gets to vet2/3. I dont know the exact stats but it would be nice to compare range from vet3 mortars in general.

i agree. precision is ridiculous compared to the german vet ability. not only does the shell hit almost exactly where you aim, they actually do more damage. the 82mm does 160 damage and the 120mm does 200 damage. normally theyre both 80.

vet 3 ranges:
81mm/82mm/82mm precision = 106m
81mm barrage/82mm barrage = 141m
120mm/120mm barrage/120mm precision = 133m

with the last 120mm nerf, the 120 barrage range is actually shorter than the other 2 mortars.

I don't understand why the damage is doubled.

Just a pinpoint mortar shell is good enough, imo.

Surely the OP has tried to have squads wiped by airattacks from both factions if he has played both sides?

I have been seeing this a lot lately. The problem seems to be the way that units are stunned so they don't get out of the kill zone - even if you ordered retreat immediately when the flare appears.

Maybe this will be changed by the new patch..?

Did any Relic staff see this post?

This should be fixed asap.

Just gonna bump this again for attention.

Replay to prove why the OSWP is so bad for CoH2.

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  VS

  JAA

  F15K

  I cant play like this...

  by: Stoffa map: Semoskiy

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While it is true that the soviets seem to have more possibilities for potential squad wipes, many here seem to forget that the German units on average do more damage than their Soviet counterparts. This in conjunction with the fact that the non doctrinal infantry of the Soviets is rather vulnerable has the effect that killing off squads with "conventional" methods works much better for the German faction.

One such example are PGs. I regularly kill conscripts squads with 2 of them before the soviet player even can react and if he manages to hit the retreat button you can still follow them and finish them off in many cases.

Mines are rather unreliable for squad wipes and it's been a while since I last managed to lose any squad or be able to kill one for that matter. Many lose their squads because they walk through choke points with low health squads expecting to get away with disabling mines with grens .

Shock grenades, listed in the introduction, are the worst grenade in the game in my opinion. Bundled and Guard grenades (and much less likely rifle grenades) are far more efficient.

I also don't see the problem with precision strike, at least not the one on the 82mm. The 120mm precision strike might be worth looking into. However, many here also forget the higher firing rate of the German mortar and that it is also capable of squad wipes, although it's not as likely as with a precision strike. That being said, a precision strike is only as lethal as the German player let's it be.

Last but not least one must not forget how the game is designed. Both factions are designed to be asymmetrical. The Soviet faction is as a whole (or should be) rather good at fighting infantry to delay or try to prevent a strong German late game, while the Germans have the best at capabilities with some ai on top of it.

That's how the game is intended to work and how it should work. If we were to remove the chance of one hit squad wipes for the Soviet faction (which are not as often as people make them: attribution bias), we have to maintain the mechanic that is governing the two factions. This might mean making certain units stronger vs infantry to compensate and maintain the ability of the Soviets to drain the Germans mp to delay the late game. Whether or not this is better is debatable, since the one hit squad wipe chance can be mitigated by clever play (using mine sweepers, not leaving an mg in the exact same spot, dodging nades (problematic due to unit delays and input lag, which Relic should resolve)).

To dismiss railway and sector arty as late game partially invalidates your own list, listing the is2 and isu (I've recently had a 2v2 against it and it managed to miss more than in hit, flanked it with a p4 and it was gone ). I personally like to use the light artillery barrage and stuka bomber (both not mentioned) and had several squad wipes with them (the light artillery in most cases doesn't kill squads with one shell but it often gets the rest with another). The fragment bomb also wipes squads.

I constantly get 1 shotted by shock nades. Those thinks have the blessing of the rng gods. I have seen bundled nades 1 shot but it is amazingly rare. Most of the time it kills 1 to 3 entities.

@sherlock

1-Even if shock nades are the "worst" of all nades i would put it on par or further ahead of wipepotential in comparison to a riflenade. Only when the units are pretty much bunch together is when this might happen (for both cases).

2-Precision strike. Scout or wait for any support weapon to show up on the map. Use PS...profit.

3-Theres a difference between EASY-Medium-Where did that shit hit me from dodgeable wipepotential situations. And here we are talking abouth healthy 6/4man squads.

Railway: it takes a while to land and after the first shot comes the rest are mostly useless.
Light arty: same as before.
Stuka: it takes a while. You just need to move anything which was on LOS of the enemy.
Fragment bomb: this things becomes undodgeable ONLY if you are near the enemy spawn. Further you are from his base, the longer the time for the plane to arrive.

I seem to get very unlucky with the shock nades then.

I agree with most of your other points.

I lost a gren squad on the move to a random 82mm mortar round.
My teammate lost one full-health PG with schreck to a TM-35 mine, and later 2 PGs with schrecks to a KV-8 despite instant retreat. Free schrecks for the shock troops!
Later I lost 3 gren squads with LMG42 and vet2/3 to one IL-2 strafing run despite instant retreat. That was all my infantry.

All this in one game.
We still won though, they couldn't counter Elefant with Ostwind/P4 backup. But the only infantry we had left was pioneers.

I lost a gren squad on the move to a random 82mm mortar round.
My teammate lost one full-health PG with schreck to a TM-35 mine, and later 2 PGs with schrecks to a KV-8 despite instant retreat. Free schrecks for the shock troops!
Later I lost 3 gren squads with LMG42 and vet2/3 to one IL-2 strafing run despite instant retreat. That was all my infantry.

All this in one game.
We still won though, they couldn't counter Elefant with Ostwind/P4 backup. But the only infantry we had left was pioneers.

That's the point I made in my first post in this thread. The point of the Soviets is to cause significant enough mp losses to delay or try to prevent a strong German late game. In your game they, despite all these things happening, were not able to prevent or delay it enough to win them the game.

I also would like to remind people of the attribution bias. I'm sure the Soviet team lost a lot of squads too but in these instances we attribute that to our skill, not that we got lucky, but if we lose a squad, the others were just lucky and we got unlucky (it's psychology and it's normal but one must be aware that we're not being objective, especially right after a game (CoH is one of the few games that can really annoy or cause joy unlike many other games )).

My god Sherlock u are completely missing the point of this topic.

Let's do some quotations shall we

One such example are PGs. I regularly kill conscripts squads with 2 of them before the soviet player even can react and if he manages to hit the retreat button you can still follow them and finish them off in many cases.

Shocks do this too, and faster and quicker too at the 1cp they come at. Also, I feel its besides the point of this topic which discusses OSWP, not the general balance of the game as a whole. If you're too slow to the the Pgrens closing in at you, and you therefore retreat your squad too late that's still a matter of skill. It's not a OSW that you can't react to at all. Having reaction time, how small that may be, makes all the difference to me.

Mines are rather unreliable for squad wipes and it's been a while since I last managed to lose any squad or be able to kill one for that matter. Many lose their squads because they walk through choke points with low health squads expecting to get away with disabling mines with grens .

Ok, it is time that we dismiss the "you bunched up your squad on a choke and therefore u got wiped by the mine" argument once and for all. I actually saved replays in which I lost FULL HEALTH Pgren squads to mines. I checked these replays afterwards and there was never a choke involved. In fact, only 1 man would hit the mine and the whole squad would go down anyway. How this worked was earlier explained in this topic by Roflthecat btw.

Shock grenades, listed in the introduction, are the worst grenade in the game in my opinion. Bundled and Guard grenades (and much less likely rifle grenades) are far more efficient.

Really? The worst grenades? Cause I lose squads to these regularly. Although I'll grant you they're not nearly as bad as Guard nades.

I also don't see the problem with precision strike, at least not the one on the 82mm. The 120mm precision strike might be worth looking into. However, many here also forget the higher firing rate of the German mortar and that it is also capable of squad wipes, although it's not as likely as with a precision strike. That being said, a precision strike is only as lethal as the German player let's it be.

I'm sorry but this time you're really starting to piss me off. Do you have any idea of how taxing in your micro it is to have your whole army constantly on the move? If you have, let's say, 2 paks, 2 Mgs and a mortar yourself it is merely theorycrafting to suggest you LET the precisionstrike be deadly cause you didn't move your units. I can assure you not even the top 10 players have THAT kind of micro. One moment of reinforcing your units in your base, and the precisionstrike will instagib your squad. And yes, that is op in my book.

Last but not least one must not forget how the game is designed. Both factions are designed to be asymmetrical. The Soviet faction is as a whole (or should be) rather good at fighting infantry to delay or try to prevent a strong German late game, while the Germans have the best at capabilities with some ai on top of it.

Irrelevant. The game should be about skill, not instasquadwipes to which a player can't react. It simply lowers the skillevel and should be taken out the game. If this means buffing the general Soviet damage output then so be it.

That's how the game is intended to work and how it should work. If we were to remove the chance of one hit squad wipes for the Soviet faction (which are not as often as people make them: attribution bias)

Errm yes, yes they really are as often as people make them out to be. Throwing fancy terms like attribution bias around really doesn't make it any less true.

we have to maintain the mechanic that is governing the two factions.

If by this you mean maintaining the constant OSW we are seeing today from the Soviets then no, we really shouldn't maintain this mechanic.

To dismiss railway and sector arty as late game partially invalidates your own list

I'm not only dismissing them as late game, I'm dismissing them as hardly used cause of underpowered for various reasons. Also, OSW in this topic refers to you insta losing squads without time to react. An ability that is preceded by flares does offer this time (and in case of RWA that is exactly why it is hardly used: the time to react is HUGE).
And to further clarify: the Sturmovik is also preceded by flares. But the funny thing is: if you react to that by instaretreating you will still get wiped. Also, it hits on totally different areas on the map from where the flares were thrown.

All in all Sherlock I'm going to ask you to post your stats here. I'm not trying to pull a Nullist on you here or anything, but I do like to know I'm spending time discussing the game with someone who knows and understands it at high level. If I'm merely talking to a casual player here I won't waste my time.

I constantly get 1 shotted by shock nades. Those thinks have the blessing of the rng gods. I have seen bundled nades 1 shot but it is amazingly rare. Most of the time it kills 1 to 3 entities.

Yesterday I had 2pgrens and mg42, shocks throw a smoke walked pass my pgrens, throw a nade on almost full hp mg42.

Bit off topic:

So 1000mp army cant stop 440mp unit from just walking inside of it, and its like this all the time, they just walk in and kill paks, mgs and mortars, who needs to flank!


[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHHPREmluek[/youtube]

Sorry for the quality my PC is too slow for recording ...

You missed the point of my post. I said it was important to maintain the mechanic of how the match up between Soviets and Germans works, nothing more nothing less. So if you remove all one shot capable assets you have to compensate for that factor of chance with for example stronger cons for example that are able to cause a similar manpower bleed on the German player.

I see you point about the precision strike. Maybe I was just lucky that I didn't have to deal with it being spammed against me. I don't see why you'd have to get "pissed off" though .

I never commented on the Sturmovik, it is absolutely too strong. It probably would help to either make it less strong or reduce or remove the LOS of the plane.

Regarding the railway, is2 late game argument I do appologise, I didn't see that you wrote your other argument.

You also misinterpreted most of what I wrote. I was offering perspective, I wasn't attacking you or your argument. I do agree that osw and chance should be reduced, however I kindly wanted to draw your attention to the fact that you cannot simply remove it and expect the game to still work.

(attribution bias is not a fancy term, it's just a term)