Current gripes and complaints (1/31/2018)

This is a list of gripes and complaints I have about the current live game-play(I was told this was the place to put it so im doing that then, aye?). However, that doesn't mean the live-game isnt good. I might be slightly disappointed, but I enjoyed myself. I'm doing this because I love the game, not hate it. I didn't write this with the intention of having a 100% fact-checked perfect review, so dont expect that either.

(Its a shame I have to put this here, but, please be civil. This is just my humble opinion. If you disagree, that's fine, tell me why without calling anyone names and move on.)

1. Loosing the spirit of COH, damage and accuracy.

It seems that the heart of COH, luck/rng, tactics, and battlefield conditions is being replaced by a more streamlined, DOW/Starcraft style system that has hard damage values dictating the outcome of battle.

This is exemplified by the Conscripts and Osttruppen, who both have near-perfect accuracy, but very low damage. In COH1, this would be the other-way around, so these units still do the same damage as other infantry, but hit much less, especially when the target is in cover. This is a simple change, but it has profound effects.

This encourages spamming and blobbing, the contrary to what most people want. Shifting the focus from accuracy to damage means that they will do consistent, low damage to all types of (infantry) units behind/in any cover, rather than doing almost no damage at all due to not hitting anything. Units that, in coh1, would be used mainly as a defensive stopgap to punish a enemy trying to advance in the open, are now best at rushing a enemy en-masse, the thing everybody complained about in the first place.

Unit preservation is key, right? Well, now these units have a much, much higher chance of killing most retreating units (if they are already damaged, like most retreating units are), while better infantry dont because their accuracy is slightly lower. Why would the worst of the worst be better at finishing off retreating units than a elite SS death squad?

It even makes whole aspects of the game obsolete. Cover is pretty much useless if the accuracy is near-perfect. Why use effort, lose rate-of-fire and time to try and get my units into good positions when there are no good positions? Why garrison that conveniently placed building if its only purpose is to serve as a death-trap for my units to get stuck in? Why hold my position and not risk losing accuracy while moving when I dont lose any accuracy while moving?

Onto other units/weapons.
Mortars now do less damage and have a smaller AOE, meaning if they dont get a direct hit they dont do anything, and when they do it does less damage than a grenade. Meanwhile, in COH1, a good, direct hit on a clump of units would kill or critically injure them all. Mortars were a force to be reckoned with, something you wouldn't dare take on without some kind of mobile piece or counter-artillery. Now, its only a slight annoyance, and that feels wrong. The AOE is so small the explosion fx doesn't even match it.

TBE

In summary: Yes, RNG might piss you off at one point, but the satisfaction when you score a lucky hit somewhere else tops the rage you might have felt before.


2. The spice that made it nice

The new formations are nice, but there is a distinct lack of them. Each unit used have its own formation, and because of that each of them moved a certain way. Along with that, squad-AI is almost completely gone, providing no sense of individuality or uniqueness among soldiers. The "dynamic ai"(hard-to-handle nature) of infantry in the first game was a big selling point. I also recall the COH2 team boasting about improved squad-ai in one of the old 2013 showcases.

Animations are stiff and robotic, with enough bugs to fill a Louisiana swamp. The SMG animations bug out whenever they are moving in-combat, there's missing FX for the coaxial mg on the T-34 and plenty of other bugs that should be saved for a bug report thread. COH1 once again outdoes its younger brother, having less bugs and a bigger, better selection. Every game I seem to see a new combat animation, weather it be a generic "freaking out because im getting shot at" or a epic combat dive/roll.

Similar to animations, speech content is also lacking. I've must have heard the "He shot my canteen" line a hundred times. For so many canteens being shot, you'd think there wouldn't be any content droughts. (I hate to keep pulling this card) Meanwhile in COH1 there's a pleasant flow of new quips and screams being thrown my way every game I play. From "We unpimped his ride!" to "I dont care, run around naked if you want!" Its alot more quote-able than COH2, and that's for the better.

All the special game-play mechanics that were supposed to make COH2 unique have been stripped and hidden away. Every Commander feels like a clone because of ability overlap. Why do 3-4 soviet commanders all have the 152mm howitzer (that never gets used anyway)? It feels cheap and rushed.

Tanks/vehicles have almost no random criticals, apart from, maybe, the main gun being destroyed at 0.1 health. COH1 had a entire suite of criticals ranging from tread-damage to crew stun/kills.

Wounded soldiers serve no real purpose, only providing a laughable amount of sight. Why even have them if they dont serve any purpose? I do agree the zombie squads were a bit strange, but changing that to, say, half the MP cost of the soldier (or "model") being refunded when returned would be a much better system.
(Even if it was re-implemented purely visually, medics dragging a wounded soldier away from the battlefield looked and would look bloody amazing. You could even commit war-crimes if you were feeling like a a******.)

--En
So, this is the end of my humble opinion. Refer to the statement at the start of the document when commenting, aye?

--Edit
Apparently this post has become a place to generally discuss gripes with the game. I encourage this as-long as you stay respectful to other people and such.

Wounded soldiers provide sight and can detonate mines.

Also, I don't understand how higher accuracy and lower damage leads to blobbing or how it makes cover useless. Cover is a 50%, or 75% effective damage reduction, thats hardly insignificant in my opinion.

I preface this with the realization you are posting your humble opinion and placed disclaimers on it. I also understand you're just venting; and yes this is one of the "places" to post such concerns for debate.

However, I think your opinion is riddled with false hoods and logical progressions about the game that aren't helpful to people reading this forum.

It seems that the heart of COH, luck/rng, tactics, and battlefield conditions is being replaced by a more streamlined, DOW/Starcraft style system that has hard damage values dictating the outcome of battle.

Disagreed, by comparison CoH is about battlefield maneuvers, unit preservation and on the fly tactics. Having units you can consistently rely upon, does not change this formula - it only enhances it by opening up more tactical options available to you.

The RNG component of this game is very alive and kicking. It is shown every engagement, every directional bullet calculation, every tank/arty shot that scatters, every plane that is randomly shot down etc etc Most things in this game are statistically reliable, with proabilities of shit going wrong and right to a degree.

This is exemplified by the Conscripts and Osttruppen, who both have near-perfect accuracy, but very low damage.

The whole problem with these units before the patch was due to their unreliable damage profiles; you could not use them in a competitive setting. Specifically, you could not rely on them to exploit an opening in your opponents line that you created through some tactical brilliance.

A unit that isn't statistically reliable to a degree, will never be built - thus the change was needed.

so these units still do the same damage as other infantry, but hit much less, especially when the target is in cover.


This encourages spamming and blobbing, the contrary to what most people want. Shifting the focus from accuracy to damage means that they will do consistent, low damage to all types of (infantry) units behind/in any cover, rather than doing almost no damage at all due to not hitting anything

This is not how cover works. You and I are playing two different games my friend. For one: Cover significantly improves the received accuracy of your troops, meaning it reduces the accuracy of the troops firing at you. Green cover also reduces damage on top of that.

Therefore, contrary to your assertion... increased accuracy on troops makes cover even MORE IMPORTANT.

This is because being outside of cover puts you at a serious disadvantage in even contests. Leaving your cover to charge a bunch of ostruppen or conscripts in green cover over an open field, is a bad idea right now because they can hit you reliably as you cross over that terrain.

Previous to the current patch, conscripts would not hit you reliably, therefore you could just ignore their positional advantage and charge them. I do not wish to return to a game where someone with superior position is at a tactical disadvantage (lower accuracy conscripts)

It even makes whole aspects of the game obsolete. Cover is pretty much useless if the accuracy is near-perfect. Why use effort, lose rate-of-fire and time to try and get my units into good positions when there are no good positions?

See above, your arguments don't make tactical sense. Being in cover increases the durability of units and reduces the hit chance and damage received. Being outside of cover, regardless of accuracy is a disadvantage.

The above is why flanking is so important... because it negates cover!

Mortars now do less damage and have a smaller AOE

What game are you playing? This is simply not true. Their profiles are mostly unchanged.

https://clips.twitch.tv/WimpyLivelyBeefPeoplesChamp

Check out this clip, Wehrmacht mortars in the current patch just annihilate everything. It's borderline broken if your opponent doesn't move their troops. Tell me that I deserve such a powerful 240mp artillery unit, I don't.

USF - their stock mortar is also very powerful, but shorter rangesd and a slower ROF then the wehrmacht one (also essential in any top level build). The 120 for soviets is just as brutal, if not worse for its extended range.

This encourages spamming and blobbing, the contrary to what most people want.

Blobbing and spamming are inherently weak strategems. Blobbing is susceptible to suppression, this is because the received supression modifier is increased in proportion to the number of nearby units.

Ie. A blob of 4 squads will be insta suppressed by an RE with a bar using volley fire if its big enough, more commonly a single burst of an MG will suppress any group of squads moving together

Spamming of a particular units is also just as weak, since the shortcomings of a particular unit type now become the property of your entire army. Your opponent only needs to build one or two of the counters in order to deal with your entire army effectively.

Ie. Build 8 cons? 2 OKW halftracks effectively end for 20% of the cost of your 8 cons.

Using either spamming or blobbing of the above methods of thinking, will only return short term results and more importantly severely limit the strategic options available to you. thus, putting a ceiling the skill level you can actually acheive in this game.

in COH1, in COH1, in COH1, in COH1

There is a reason this is called CoH2, and not CoH1. The game design is intentionally different. I advocate you play CoH1?

Lastly: the game you seem to want to play is men of war (any version) where things are far more "realistic", and no care for balance thrown into the mix of the game.

"Huge bloody wall of text"

Bloody great rebuttal mate. If only everyone was like you, the world would be a much less noisy place.

As for your points, I do agree with your first one. I wasn't exactly sure what made COH feel so special, so I thought about it and at first I thought I had what did make it special there. Reading your response and thinking about it some more, It seems you are nearly on-the-nose.

As for your last thing, yes, I agree. Maybe I had the rose-tinted glasses on a bit too tight, and I was a bit worried about bringing it up so much.

What I was trying to get across in this post was a bit of fear, really. I dont want the COH series to become streamlined and lose everything that makes it different from all the others, and im just a bit nervous that with all this gamey-style balancing it might be.

What I was trying to get across in this post was a bit of fear, really. I dont want the COH series to become streamlined and lose everything that makes it different from all the others, and im just a bit nervous that with all this gamey-style balancing it might be.

I think most of the streamlining has to do with the poor state the game was in when it came out. A lot of the changes over the years have been about removing poorly implemented/horribly designed components that got stuck in the game. (blizzards, the squad ai and dancing, all of those ridiculous OKW things on release) Most of those could have been potentially reworked into more responsive mechanics that didn't frustrate the player as much, but I imagine Relic wasn't going to invest all that time into them instead of just axing them. I think it's important to look forward to CoH3 to address most of these. CoH2 had an abysmal release with the THQ bankruptcy and being sold off, and attempts to milk the community for more money selling commanders. Better to move on from the bad stuff.

I'm at a bit of a loss here.

You use loose instead of lose, and you use British terms while your profile says that you're an American, not to mention that at the end you write -E and your name here starts with L.

Anyhow these are just some odd things I noticed and wanted to point out.

I agree with your gripes and that's why I prefer CoH's gameplay and balance, the only reason why I'm keeping up with CoH2 is because I've invested too much money in it and most of the people I know play it, plus it has a bit more content than CoH, and features which is a huge plus but not enough for me to say it's a better game. 2 or however steps backwards and 1 step forward does not make a better game.

Anyhow a few of my gripes are Army specific:

The inability for the British to provide mobile indirect fire support for themselves without it being doctrinal or costing fuel, leading me to use the mod in my signature as well as be a big fan of.

And generally I just don't like the Army design of the USF, I much rather prefer their CoH one.

Other than that I won't share my opinion on the OKW because my biggest gripe is with them but I sound like a mad man to everyone else when I share them.

My only real gripe with the Wehr is their 4 man squads and certain useless units such as the 250 halftrack which has a simple fix that even a monkey can do but nobody seems to do it for some reason even when many people have voiced their concerns on the matter.

Sovi I don't really know about since I don't play them, human wave tactics and sometimes gimmicky commanders isn't really my thing, not to mention hearing comrade every 5 fucking seconds.

you know something is wrong when conscripts and penal batalions are better than soldiers and elite squads

Mortars now do less damage and have a smaller AOE, meaning if they don't get a direct hit they don't do anything, and when they do it does less damage than a grenade. Meanwhile, in COH1, a good, direct hit on a clump of units would kill or critically injure them all. Mortars were a force to be reckoned with, something you wouldn't dare take on without some kind of mobile piece or counter-artillery. Now, its only a slight annoyance, and that feels wrong. The AOE is so small the explosion fx doesn't even match it.

have u played this game ? mortar are x10 more accurate in coh2 and fire much faster, in coh1 squad would jump away before the mortar hit, so they could doge it a bit, here they just get wiped in cover (and here cover formation is 1mm from each other, in coh1 it was 2 m) so no mortar are strong and way more precise with AA than they should be

Get your All American Eagle ass out of here if all you can do is whine about American 'language'.

Mate, I think you forgot to read the "Be Civil" bit of the post.

The biggest gripe I have is people leaving matches in team games, oftentimes right after the match starts. I've played several matches where someone leaves and causes an avalanche of disconnects, meaning you don't get anything for the "win" and the round is over before it even gets good.

Maybe have a League-style penalty system? Where if you leave a game you have to wait twenty or so minutes to find a game next time you automatch.

The biggest gripe I have is people leaving matches in team games, oftentimes right after the match starts. I've played several matches where someone leaves and causes an avalanche of disconnects, meaning you don't get anything for the "win" and the round is over before it even gets good.

Maybe have a League-style penalty system? Where if you leave a game you have to wait twenty or so minutes to find a game next time you automatch.

Wait 20 minutes only for a load screen bugsplat because the game wasn't restarted after the previous match.

A lot of people in 4v4s ragequit when there is an afker. And there's usually at least one in 4v4s. I often dub 4v4s to be AI v AFK mode.

Most of the outcomes of 4v4s are decided in the first 5 minutes, so people usually won't want to play a 50 minute lost cause after waiting 10 to 20 minutes for a game.

Wait 20 minutes only for a load screen bugsplat because the game wasn't restarted after the previous match.

Yeah, the twenty minute penalty could really only be implemented if the game were better optimized. It would suck if you had to wait because the game decided to make you experience one of its many crashes.

There's another thing that baffles me about CoH2: the inability to rejoin a match after the game does inevitably fuck up and kick you out. Is that a difficult thing to program? (Legitimate question, not sarcasm.)

The biggest gripe I have is people leaving matches in team games, oftentimes right after the match starts. I've played several matches where someone leaves and causes an avalanche of disconnects, meaning you don't get anything for the "win" and the round is over before it even gets good.

Maybe have a League-style penalty system? Where if you leave a game you have to wait twenty or so minutes to find a game next time you automatch.

The problem is in team games you can tell pretty quick if your team is horrible. So drops are necessary so you do not waste 40 minutes watching your team getting rekt.

How many times do you see people:
1. who do not rush the fuel.
2. engrs are sitting in base until MG comes out.
3. three team mates are all capping the same point at the same time.
4. only makes engrs and puts a fuel cache on the first point they capture.
5. etc
6. etc

You can tell in under 2 minutes how badly you are going to lose. And as an experiment I have dropped out of multiple games and my win rate did not change. If anything it improved. Probably as you stated other players dropped? Or perhaps the game/RNG is rigged and it rewarded the players on my team? Or perhaps I am just that bad? Either way my point is you have a better chance of climbing the ladders in a 4v4 if you do not play at all #EsportsReady.

EDIT: If anything the ladder system needs some work. I have games where I double/triple everyones kills and score but my team sucks so I drop 200 spots.

I, for one, enjoyed the blizzards, the deep snow/mud, and OKW's resources/trucks at launch. It made the game feel that much more unique, and I miss all of them. I also miss the RNG shell shock in armored warfare and the much greater variance in counterpart units (such IS-2 being AI and Tiger being AT or 120mm mortar having higher base damage than 82mm). I miss kubel suppression and OKW's lack of MG (gasp!). I feel like the factions are becoming too similar to each other. Sure, there are still stat differences and pricing differences, and sure, there are good things from homogenizing the factions to a degree, but the factions no longer feel unique. I've spent a lot of time in the mod tools trying to rework the factions, but you can only do so much with those, compared to the amazingly flexible tools for CoH1.

I, for one, enjoyed the blizzards, the deep snow/mud, and OKW's resources/trucks at launch. It made the game feel that much more unique, and I miss all of them. I also miss the RNG shell shock in armored warfare and the much greater variance in counterpart units (such IS-2 being AI and Tiger being AT or 120mm mortar having higher base damage than 82mm). I miss kubel suppression and OKW's lack of MG (gasp!). I feel like the factions are becoming too similar to each other. Sure, there are still stat differences and pricing differences, and sure, there are good things from homogenizing the factions to a degree, but the factions no longer feel unique. I've spent a lot of time in the mod tools trying to rework the factions, but you can only do so much with those, compared to the amazingly flexible tools for CoH1.

Definitely with you here. Although I agree with many comminity members that some of these coused issues, they should have been reworked, but not removed or copy pasted from other units and factions. There are many more examples of that. Remember usf having no heavies? or ostheer weapon teams being 3 men but really powerful? Now we've come to the point when people even wanted to replace raketen with a pak... As if they could not choose the ostheer button in their menu.

The problem is in team games you can tell pretty quick if your team is horrible. So drops are necessary so you do not waste 40 minutes watching your team getting rekt.

How many times do you see people:
1. who do not rush the fuel.
2. engrs are sitting in base until MG comes out.
3. three team mates are all capping the same point at the same time.
4. only makes engrs and puts a fuel cache on the first point they capture.
5. etc
6. etc

EDIT: If anything the ladder system needs some work. I have games where I double/triple everyones kills and score but my team sucks so I drop 200 spots.

Too many damn times, that's for sure. Especially the second one. I have a friend that is convinced that the best place for pioneers is the base despite my many attempts to tell him to move them out. C'est la vie.

I agree on the ladder system. Sure, the after match stat screen gives you a generalist review on how good you did, but personally I want a muuuch more detailed analysis on personal stats; likewise, I think this individual ranking should obviously be reflected in the ladder system. It sucks getting penalized for having games where I'm the only one who didn't lose twice as many units as I destroyed, but I feel like it's more unfair when I'm paired with someone who knows what they're doing more so than I because I just inevitably drag them down. Plenty of games I can name where my ally's micro was spot-on and I struggled to keep troops on the field. So all in all less "higher ladder for winning" and more "higher ladder for performing well."

Even USF tank crews were partially walked back for the Pershing and Calliope.

OKW originally didn't have a snare, partially justifying their t0 at option, and making panzerfusiliers unique in the faction.

There's another thing that baffles me about CoH2: the inability to rejoin a match after the game does inevitably fuck up and kick you out. Is that a difficult thing to program? (Legitimate question, not sarcasm.)

Given that joining a live game as a spectator works kinda like a replay where you have to sit through the entire game until you catch up to the current events, my guess is that it's not possible with how the game currently works.