artillery and late game squadwipes

Ignoring most of the discussion about history.

Isn't long range arty and the squadwiping potential of certain units the exact thing that allies kinda need to rely on thanks to a lack of effective general purpose infantry in the lategame?
There are airbornes but that is commander specific and only available for USF.
Same with regards to allied AT infantry or the lack thereof.

I see this squad wiping things as a direct consequence of poor overall design. Allied strong early, axis late. And arty wiping squads a way to try and lessen the snowballing effect of the axis factions.

It sucks but it is the result of more underlying problem with faction design.

I'm sorry but you are speaking pure nonsense. The entire purpose of tanks is to fight infantry. That's why tanks always had more HE rounds than AP rounds. IRL EVERY tank in ww2 had HE rounds, no matter if it was a tank destroyer or anything. 95% of a tank does is fight infantry. That is the entire purpose of tanks. Kill and destroy infantry, fortifications, while being immune from infantry themselves. Tanks were developed solely for the purpose of being infantry killing machines and being immune from infantry themselves.


Valnuarable to infantry attacks? Most anti infantry weapons were only effective from 50 meters or so. It's practically impossible to get so close to a tank in a combat situation , especially SINCE tanks are usually supported by infantry.


Oh, and in WW2 tanks also had something called a HATCH, that they could peek out for good 360 degrees vision.

Educate yourself, troll:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_tank

Don't stop there though. You have so SO much to learn.


"I'm sorry but you are speaking pure nonsense. The entire purpose of tanks is to fight infantry"

No you, as usual, as always, are speaking pure nonsense. Tanks were designed to be invulnerable to infantry while performing various other roles (transport/wire breaking/trench hopping/bunker busting, etc)

They had anti-infantry capabilities of course but their "ENTIRE PURPOSE", as you so stupidly blurted, was not anti-infantry.

Educate yourself, troll:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_tank

Don't stop there though. You have so SO much to learn.


"I'm sorry but you are speaking pure nonsense. The entire purpose of tanks is to fight infantry"

No you, as usual, as always, are speaking pure nonsense. Tanks were designed to be invulnerable to infantry while performing various other roles (transport/wire breaking/trench hopping/bunker busting, etc)

They had anti-infantry capabilities of course but their "ENTIRE PURPOSE", as you so stupidly blurted, was not anti-infantry. Two things that you listed trench hopping/bunker busting can be classified as killing infantry.. So i didin't realy understand you there.

And i have never ever seen a tank made for the purpose of transportation or wire clearing...

I wonder why exactly you have to slur out personal insults to make your point clearer or something... It's interesting how your signature says "lets keep it constructivee" yet you are the one slurring out personal attacks and insults and ad hominem.


And yes indeed the main purpose of tanks was to fight and destroy infantry or in another way break through heavily defended lines. Everything else was secondary.

Why does a thread about late game artillery wiping squads contain a lengthy discussion about the historical development of the tank?

Don't dismiss Bulgakov completely, everything on the battlefield, be they ships, aircraft or tanks, are designed with the ultimate purpose of supporting the infantry in some capacity.

Anyways, I'm fine with Arty's squad wiping ability, if it were nerfed the balance would skew even further against the allies, specially given how recently a KT one shotted one of my vet 3 shock squads when it was fully man and at near full health. Tank's effectiveness against infantry (especially german tanks) need to be looked at.

As it stands, Arty is required to knock out volks shrek blobs, nothing else exists to counter them these days.

Anyways, the notion that Player B has to go a specific doctrine in order to counter the doctrine that play A chose is poor design in my opinion. This is true for the B4/ML-20. The notion that indirect fire should have the capability to 1 shot squads with impunity is also poor design in my opinion. I play CoH 2 to satisfy my inner WW 2 nerd as well as try and tactically out-play my opponent. To beat Axis this patch you pretty much just make a couple 120s, bombard any forward truck on cool-down until it is dead. If there are no forward trucks just put the 120s somewhere safe and wait till you hear "We fucked up that squad!" over and over again. It's really dumb. I spent like 5 hours playing 2v2s with Sib as allies yesterday going strictly captain tier with a Pack Howi. Didn't lose a single game. My Pack Howis always 1 shot squads and generally ended games at vet 3 with a disgusting amount of kills.

I don´t think its problem if you have to pick commander A (who overs unit or ability B) to counter commander C´s unit D. Thats just fair. It´s nice if you can deal with unit D in several ways but as long as D does not kill all you units within a few minutes you are fine.

As you said, the big problem is their squad wipe potential. But this also applies to several other units. I think there should be a chance that a squad gets whipped with one shoot or salvo but this chance has to be very small. There should nearly always be a chance to react and save your unit. CoH2 often doesn't let you a chance.

Why does a thread about late game artillery wiping squads contain a lengthy discussion about the historical development of the tank?

Because a couple of people who completely lack reading comprehension decided to bring up the fact that tanks should be able to kill infantry, or something completely unrelated to the topic like that.

I'm not a big fan of how explosives are right now however its the only way to deal with bullshit OKW infantry at the moment.

OKW is a cockroach of a faction, unless you wipe squads outright they will come back even stronger with more vet. The stupid part is that OKW vet are pure stat bonuses compared to the other factions that get one utility ability ( most of them are total shit) and then two levels of increased stats. Volksgrenadiers get five levels of increased stats which is just too much. Those increased stats basically double the value of that squad yet reinforce costs remain the same and getting vet 5 is not too much trouble because the panzershreck gives you tons of vet for days due to a low value squad doing good damage to a high value vehicle.

Theres no counterplay to obersoldaten other than vehicles or lucky indirect fire because their damage is so heavily frontloaded at maximum infantry engagement ranges.

Ok. Enough of squads wipes but OKW inf can get vet 3. Seems fair for me.

To be honest it really sucks if you need one broken mechanic to counter another broken mechanic.

3 ideas:
-no more vet for damage a unit takes (just for damage dealt)
-no more Vet 5 units for OKW
-increase the reinforcement cost of vet units

I'm not a big fan of how explosives are right now however its the only way to deal with bullshit OKW infantry at the moment.

OKW is a cockroach of a faction, unless you wipe squads outright they will come back even stronger with more vet. The stupid part is that OKW vet are pure stat bonuses compared to the other factions that get one utility ability ( most of them are total shit) and then two levels of increased stats. Volksgrenadiers get five levels of increased stats which is just too much. Those increased stats basically double the value of that squad yet reinforce costs remain the same and getting vet 5 is not too much trouble because the panzershreck gives you tons of vet for days due to a low value squad doing good damage to a high value vehicle.

Theres no counterplay to obersoldaten other than vehicles or lucky indirect fire because their damage is so heavily frontloaded at maximum infantry engagement ranges.

+1 Yuuuuuuuuuuup.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the poor way OKW is designed.

Next up... flak HQ damage/range/ability to shoot for free, in-base flak emplacements, building PaK 43 next to Flak/Med trucks, walking stuka, kubel, SR StG ignoring extremely important game mechanics, blah blah blah.

Sure some of the stuff might technically be balanced because of the gaping holes in the faction (no faust, no medium armor, useless AT gun) but as Fanatic said - it sucks if you need one broken mechanic to counter another broken mechanic.

OKW is just a conglomeration of abominable mechanics and poor design decisions that somehow has been barely band-aided to relevancy on the back of bullshit units.

I agree 1 shot wipes are annoying but they can be countered.

Stuka can wipe static arty, mortars and pack howitzer etc. What's more a mortar almost never one shots a squad when it's full health, when it does get a hit you need to move your Squad. Pack howitzer for OKW can even scare off mortars etc cause of superior range.

Against mobile howie from US use a jagdpanzer, hell the thing even counters jacksons if positioned right. It has longer range then the howitzer.
To many times I see OKW try to skip all vehicles except a luch and stall for a KT. You can't just win with spamming and blobbing infantry. Relic needs to do something against the mass inf that players use like nerfing the pak forcing werh to build medium tanks.

Against priest you need to remember it cost a lot of MP, not to mention it's heavy pop cost, sacrificing AI or AT tanks in the process.

B4 I understand as well, but allies again sacrifice a lot of recourses and pop.

Game really needs the vcoh upkeep system that is connected to territory points.

Oh right and another thing that blobbers do, they tend to retreat the whole blob at once when they get targeted by howitzers or mortars which again is a huge mistake. When you got arty on the field you can just target the place were they reinforce. This count for ally blobs as well, OKW got it even better with stuka hitting retreat paths. Blobbing only works at the beginning without heavy weaponry, blobbing doesn't pay in the end. Spread out and flank more...

BTW speaking of Whermaht 81mm mortar. Please watch this Imperial Dane's cast and see what it does now.


I felt sorry for US guy.

Game really needs the vcoh upkeep system that is connected to territory points.

upkeep wasn't connected to territory control in CoH1, every unit had it's own arbitrary upkeep value in CoH1

Game really needs the vcoh upkeep system that is connected to territory points.

I prefer the COH 2 upkeep/pop cap system. Also not sure what changing it back to vCoH system would do to help fix anything that this topic has been about...

BTW speaking of Whermaht 81mm mortar. Please watch this Imperial Dane's cast and see what it does now.


I felt sorry for US guy.

Half-watched the first 32ish minutes. From what I saw the Ost mortar wiped a single rifle squad with 3 of 5 men remaining at what looked to be like less than 20% hp overall - that's not exactly an impressive feat. Ihitto had plenty of time to retreat that squad and didn't even need them where they were.

It got a nice shot on some guys entering a house, but still didn't wipe the entire squad - they only died because of the flame crit (not the mortar's fault).

Other than that it did a good job bleeding, overall it seemed fine to me - not a single full hp/full model squad down the drain in an instant - it is a good example of what a mortar should be. It punished a low hp squad being greedy and clumped up on top of another squad. It kept people out of houses and it bled slowly but surely.

Then we get to the part where m00nchild loses the *full* hp vetted mortar with a full crew from a single tank shot. Then the next tank shot wipes out his full hp, fully crewed MG42 - also in one shot.

I did feel bad for some of the other RNG the ihitto suffered, like all the flame crits on his assault engineers (I've also been asking for flamers to not randomly explode the way that they do - just another example of bad RNG).

Maybe I missed some stuff - I wasn't watching with 100% of my attention.

4:57

Ofc, 4v4, huge rng luck etc etc, still German mortars disgustingly strong for their 240mp cost and equal number of Soviet mortars always loses to equal number of German mortars since precision strike nerf.