Company of Artillery

I have nearly 2000 hours in game, been a lot of back and forth with balance but its just too much anymore. Every match is just mass artillery. 2-3 mortar pits, couple field guns, 6 mortar teams, land mattress, calliope...give me a fucking break. Its like there is more artillery units in the game then their is fucking frontline fighting units.

Nerf artillery into the dirt again, mortars for both sides, field guns, rockets, all of it, it takes away so much from the whole core aspect of micromanagement and cover.

And the best, most incredible thing that Relic has added yet is the British emplacement commander ability to have their artillery counter any indirect fire...for free. Try to counter a bofors with a mortar? Fucking think again guy. Were they smoking crack when they thought of this ability...no really what ever you were smoking when you thought this would be a good idea, I want it. Maybe then I could bare sitting 15 min in que to put up with how fucked they made this game.

How much i love when both okw players build 2 stukas in 2v2.

You need arty to stop OKW blob and you need arty to stop USF blob.
You also need arty to spam maxim spam.

Poor Ostheer. Always suffers the most becasue of other factions bad design

How much i love when both okw players build 2 stukas in 2v2.

That's what I'm saying, its not just allies, the brit artillery is the worst but both sides, its just gotten out of hand.

If you look at steamcharts, its the lowest it has ever been, average of 5000 people. It went down 25% when they added the new brit commanders. To give you perspective:

http://steamcharts.com/search/?q=company+of+heroes+2

There are as many people playing age of empires 2 (1999) as there are playing this pile of shit. That's even after the recent sale where it was like a few dollars.

If you look at steamcharts, its the lowest it has ever been, average of 5000 people. It went down 25% when they added the new brit commanders. To give you perspective:

http://steamcharts.com/search/?q=company+of+heroes+2

There are as many people playing age of empires 2 (1999) as there are playing this pile of shit. That's even after the recent sale where it was like a few dollars.

Did you even look at what you posted. It dropped 25% right after it rose 35%.

And in case you didn't know. That was because of the free weekend. So of course it's going to drop.

And it looks like the game is in fact gaining more players then it's losing and is currently peaking at 10,00. Pretty decent for a 3 year old game. Those charts are actually showing the game is doing pretty well. For comparison it was at 7500 last summer.

LOL YOU'VE CLEARLY NEVER WITNESSED COH1

Don't expect any sympathy here, people almost instantly show down my suggestions for limits on Artillery and in-direct fire units in general.

except sexton

Without arty, how am I going to break a PAK wall?

2 pak 43s covering a good amount of the map, no armour can pass through. Arty is the only way. Only thing I fucking hate is the counter battery, rest fine.

Too much arty you say? Have you tried Advanced Emplacements? It reduces the amount of arty by half

Sounds like OP plays a lot of 3v3+ games. That's why I went back to 2v2 since everyone blobs in 4v4, you get more resources to build arty, and it just becomes arty fest. However mortars for all factions perhaps should be changed to encourage more mirco in using barrage rather than letting them auto-fire.

Poor Ostheer. Always suffers the most becasue of other factions bad design

#Nerfeverythingelse

Spamming artillery is historically accurate. Sending in infantries to hail of bullets is retarded behavior. There are only two ways to break through enemies' heavy fortification, one is indirect fire, another is heavy tanks. However, ally is prohibited to access any heavy tank they should have in reality by Lelic, thus artillery is the only option. You should adapt to it.

tell me about it, in a 4v4 game today, 3 gardening mortar pits cover by a 17 pounder and 2 AT gun, and a HMG on both fuel and VP near it, can't even go in the mortar pit range until i got double LEFH to bomb them for 5 mins to destroy them. and my team VP is already at low hundreds and allied start sending their flood of tanks, all i can do is pak wall with HMG wall.

Yes, the vast majority of artillery in this game scale well beyond what they should in bigger game modes.

However, the bigger culprit here is map design which doesn't take into account the effects of:
- Territory lockdown from emplacements (Brit emplacements, OKW FlakHQ)
- Forward retreat points

That's not necessarily the map designers' fault, as many of these maps predate WFA. It's more of a question of why such maps are still in the map pool to begin with.

Thus, maps that would already be considered to be bottleneck heavy are completely annihilated by these two mechanics, and aggressive play becomes unattractive. In the end, the army with the better artillery will win.

Mortars and Stuff

One idea would be to at least nerf auto-attack stats. The idea is to force a user that makes heavy use of mortars to actually have to invest some micro into them as well (just like the opposition has to invest in some heavy dancing to negate their effect).

One idea I had was to reduce the AoE on autoattacks:
https://www.coh2.org/topic/49543/mortars-howies-nerf-autoattack-maybe-buff-barrage

However, I recently saw a better idea, which is reducing the range of autoattacks:

<snip>

Mortar Pit:

- Mortar Pit Auto-fire range reduced from 115 to 80
- Mortar Pit cost reduced from 400mp to 350mp
- The 2nd mortar weapon used for the barrage now has the same kill radius as the other mortars (bugfix)

The auto-fire change means that you must actually use micro to use the Mortar Pit to its fullest and the cost reduction helps offset the new micro requirement.

<snip>

(the quoted post was in an emplacements-themed thread, thus there was no mention at all of other artillery pieces. I'm sure we can come up with similar ideas about mobile artillery though).

Rocket Artillery

Without arty, how am I going to break a PAK wall?

This is a big issue. However, I don't think you need something stronger than 1 (maybe 2) Katyushas to really break a pak wall. If other artillery needs to remain stronger than the Katyusha (for whatever reason) their cost, and particularly their popcap cost needs to be nerfed to reflect that (e.g., 18-20 popcap).

To give you an example of what true Artifest Hell looks like:

LOL YOU'VE CLEARLY NEVER WITNESSED COH1

(Truer words have never been spoken)

The Walking stuka only takes up 4 Popcap in CoH1. Factor in some long stalemate matches, and try to picture what the current meta revolves around.

For every single thing that CoH2 seems to be doing wrong (e.g., sniper meta, call-in meta, pak-walling, artillery), CoH2 is literally lightyears ahead from its predecessor in terms of game design. Kudos to the designers/balance team for that.

I think the game modes need to end, and they need to be like COH1 actually. They need to remove 3 v 3 and 4 v 4 and only have 1 v 1 and 2 v 2 with randoms. The rest need to be with Arranged Teams, this way the map issues, gameplay issues will be somewhat neutralized due to only coordinated teams playing.

Lets be real here, the game doesn't scale well as we move up to 4v4 and the issues with arty only multiply so the above is really the only way to minimize the error or screw up that is clearly present.

Too much arty you say? Have you tried Advanced Emplacements? It reduces the amount of arty by half

I think there should be a limitation of artillery units per player. Like 2 rocket artillery units (katty, stuka, mattress, calliOP, werfer) of the same kind, similar to heavies limitations.

Static Howitzer can remain as is, they are easily countered by offmaps.

I think there should be a limitation of artillery units per player. Like 2 rocket artillery units (katty, stuka, mattress, calliOP, werfer) of the same kind, similar to heavies limitations.

Static Howitzer can remain as is, they are easily countered by offmaps.

Yeah, that would be good solution.