And what are you planning for the near future, especially
the lategame
and weak doctrines like
Defensive (Ost + Soviet),
Soviet Industry,
OKW Firestorm etc.?
I can´t judge the current balance preview patch not knowing the context of other stages of the game. I don´t know why this is all kept a secret. It´s going to be a community created patch after all. You can be vague. Are you planning to nerf Brits, or buff Ostheer or none of that? And are you planning to redesign doctrines or just adjust their abilities?
Please don´t give me the "we will see after the early game has been adjusted" filler. I wouldn´t believe, that you haven´t at least thought about the lategame and doctrines already.
Some of the late-game topics that we have discussed that we want to address are:
- Striking a balance between OKW infantry scaling and availability of armour
- OST T4 living in the shadow of T3
- USF over-reliance on certain OP doctrines and abilities to carry it in teamgames (e.g., Calliope)
- Certain over-the-top British units and abilities (as a function of the Power Curve)
Regarding commanders, there are certain no-brainer picks for every faction. We should obviously address those first. Certain underwhelming commanders we can easily fix by adjusting the cost/availability of some of the abilities unique to them (e.g., Commando Glider spawning commandos, giving a niche for the Flamehetzer etc).
Other commanders can be helped by expanding the stock army. We cannot determine the full extend of the impact, but we expect several 2nd or 3rd-tier soviet commanders to become actually viable now, with PTRS penals.
However, certain commanders are irredeemably bad (e.g., community defensive commanders), in the sense neither are the contained abilities decent, nor are they coherent. Obviously, those will require the biggest amount of interference, thus we have to leave those for last.
None of this is going to happen this patch, though. Since, we indeed want to evaluate the impact of the choices we've made. It is very difficult to get people to play the mod in 1v1, let alone 4v4. Thus, I guess we have to wait for it to go live before we can evaluate the impact, e.g., squad formations will have on the late-game.
However, all of this is wishful thinking, since we do not determine the scope, nor can we determine in which order we want to attack these issues.
It is safe to say, though, that if I were to set the agenda, I would leave unredeemable OST/Soviet commanders all the way down in the list of priorities.