Popcap and units spamming

Here is the first of a series of post about concerns about the game and ways to improve them. (Sorry, English is not my main language.)

My main concern is about units spamming. While a legitimate way of winning, from my point of view however, it has neither the elegance nor the subtlety of a combined arms tactic.

Spamming is now seen in all kind of match, from 1vs1 to 4vs4.

Like an invasive rotting disease, it's slowly killing the game fun factor. The easiest, surest way to win is spamming. That must change. That must become one way of winning but not the best way.

Here is a re-post of 3 propositions to improve it :

1)-
Bring back vcoh style popcap. (Great, but it may be hard to go back to it)

2)-
Have a hard-coded popcap for each map. (A possible way to bring some logic, rather simple to implement, and their could be cap for inf, for tanks, etc. )

3)-
Give player's base a minimal popcap value and then increase it for each sector he controlled, for a maximum of 100 with 50% of the sectors controlled and connected.It still respect the 100 max pop as designed by the devs.

Ex: A map has 8 controllable territories and the base minimal pop value is set at 24.
So it gonna be (100-24)/8*2= 19. So popcap is increase by 19 for each sector a side control to a max of 100. (medium to implement and the one i like the most )

Plz share your comments and ideas about it.

So what you are saying is spam didn't exist in vcoh...?
In a game with so few units to build, spamming 1 unit almost cant be avoided.

No one remembers the airborne. No one....

Ex: A map has 8 controllable territories and the base minimal pop value is set at 24.
So it gonna be (100-24)/8*2= 19. So popcap is increase by 19 for each sector a side control to a max of 100. (medium to implement and the one i like the most )

Plz share your comments and ideas about it.

Great idea! Cap a territory get more grens =)

Great idea! Cap a territory get more grens =)

Maybe you misunderstood my post ?

The third suggestion say that you need to have at least 50% of the territories connected to have a popcap of 100 and 100 is still the max popcap. You need to cap and connect more territories to increase you popcap beyond the base minimal popcap. So less grenadiers in the beginning not more. the base minimal popcap is there to simulate the stockpile buildup that was done before the start of the offensive. (the match)

So what you are saying is spam didn't exist in vcoh...?
In a game with so few units to build, spamming 1 unit almost cant be avoided.

Unit variety is another subject that we will need to address soon.

Unit variety is another subject that we will need to address soon.

This game can`t have a huge unit variety because it will 1. fck up the balance of the game 2. you will have multiple units performing the same thing....

Also what you said with the popcap. You misunderstood me. Let me give you an example you get 2 cons at the start, reach 2 teritories at almost exact time with 1 cons and 1 engie. You cap them and get more population at the same time you get 260-280 MP so you make another cons squad. This won`t change the meta.
If by spamm you mean less units from start then a simple reduction to the MP rate will be sufficient imo. But this will make the game much much more slower and the early game most porbably will last longer.
But if by spamm you imply less exact same units then your idea will not work imo.

Intresting ideas, but they will not help against unit-spam. There will always be spamming of certain units. Why wont it work? Simply because current meta is to spam grens or cons. The first unit you can build more or less. They use up quite little pop and therefore are wouldnt be all that hurt by popcap changes. The lower the pop-cieling, the more infantry I would think.

Players tend to go with what gives them the best result. During the beta you could se a crazy maximspam, because for many, it did work. This isnt happening anymore since other units preform better and maxim worse. The ostheer FHT was also a nobrainer during beta. With the old vet system and old flame dmg it was a real pain to deal with. Its still used, but perhaps not the all in no-brainer-rush it used to be.

Other examples can be the the penal battalion is a great example of a unit that is quite expensive and yes, deals a ton of damage, but has no AT, and nothing else in T1 can provide you with any AT. This results in the penals being under-used since you sacrifice alot to get them. Also, pricing is a question. MG is same price as a grensquad but is likely to get a molly in its face and must be deploy/undeploy all the time. Why build it when you can have a mobile army upgradable with LMGs? If the MG42 was cheaper it might have been a diffrent story, but then again, this might lead to MG42 spam since they are cheap to buy.

Dont have any really good solutions myself, set apart from the pricing of units and or fiddling with abilities so there are fewer bread and butter units actually forcing you to get more stuff.

@voltardark: Do you mean spamming = I build a unit everytime I have enough resourcess, and get to 100 pop. Or do you mean spamming = I only build grens/maxims. ?

Keep the comments coming that why this thread was made.
Dynamic popcap is rather a way to fend end game spamming.

Normally, spamming units should be stopped with their respective hard counters, but those hard counters seem to be lacking ?

Mg42s, FHTs, scoutcars and Ostwinds should be enough to punish the conscript spammer.

Snipers, maxim, mines, and T70 should be able to handle the grenadier spammer.

If those don't work, then what is the bug ? Tell me what you think is the problem ? And how you would handle it.

Thank you !

You can't. Not in a asymmetrical game at least. Look gren/con spamm is not the only way ro play the game right now. Its just those are the popular builds. After this patch i see more ostheer players using variety of units. Can't say the same thing for soviets though. I believe some unit tweaking will change this but for now it is what it is

You can't. Not in a asymmetrical game at least. Look gren/con spamm is not the only way ro play the game right now. Its just those are the popular builds. After this patch i see more ostheer players using variety of units. Can't say the same thing for soviets though. I believe some unit tweaking will change this but for now it is what it is

Thank you for sharing your thoughts !

What is this unit spamming anyway?

Conscript/grenadier spam? This great attacking potential but can't hold ground against assaults.

Infantry spam before tech? This delays tanks and gives you a larger manpower drain.

Spamming tanks? Less infantry to cap points and clear out field guns.

I don't know, I barely play 1vs1 where I suppose cons/gren spam is the usual start, as maxims/mg42 can be easily flanked with a couple of units, or killed with molos/rifle nades.

Other starting units like snipers, penals, etc, can be easily overwhelmed by the more cheap and fast deployed cons/gren.

Luckily, in 2vs2+ there are much more versatilty to builds, though con/gren spam still is popular, is not the only start you usually see.

I do play 1v1 a lot, and from the germans I hardly ever see pure gren spam. There is usually a MG42 in there somewhere, and I see mortars in roughly a third of my games. Snipers are a bit rare, but panzergrens are also seen in 90% of my games.

For the soviets I do see a heavier focus on conscripts. This however has little to do with pop-cap. It's simply the cost of getting T1 or T2 early that puts you at a large unit disadvantage early on vs the cheap T1 of the germans. Not to mention that you need to save up 15-25 fuel before you can even get T1-T2 if you also want to have molotovs.

I think a good way to fight against spam is the increase in price so, every time you build the same type of unit you have on the battlefield you get a small increase in its price.

The exact numbers should be worked thru, but say you want to build your 5th gren (you already have 4 on the field) it should cost like 300 MP, so people would probably buy something like the mg or sniper. Because it would be harder and harder to have a cost effective green. In this way you could still spam, but you would be punished for it, and in this way you would encourage combined arms which this game should be all about.

Regarding OP's point 1 (and 3, also, sorta): I prefer vCOH-style popcap also, where your popcap was tied to your map control. It made popcap into a resource that had to be managed more carefully, since you could get cut off and not be able to reinforce or call on new units. (I imagine people who haven't played COH1 think that sounds awful, but it's great! I swear!).
So, yeah, +1.

Regarding spamming, I think it's a matter of getting a good unit balance more than popcap. I also like the characterization of it as an "invasive, rotting disease" so true.
I think some of the recent changes (houses are weaker, MG42 actually suppresses things) will help to move the metagame away from Conscript spam v. Grenadier spam.
In some of the recent patches, MG42s struggled badly as a blob-control tool. Thus, you couldn't reliably stop a giant horde of infantry and thus it didn't make much sense to make support weapons that would just get rushed by said horde. As a result, Ostheer players just made a bunch of infantry.
(Pace, prior to that everyone just made LMG grens because they became immortal at vet 2. That was also spam and was also bad.)

I guess we'll see how the metagame shakes out in response to the balance changes, but I'm hopeful that at least some of the early game spam will no longer be the no-brainer option.