Profile of drChengele

Dismissing the obvious bias of the original post, Relic does seem to be handing balancing in a miopic fashion, with lots of changes that make you go "huh?" (which affect both factions) and this would indeed be a HUGE problem - were it not for a fact we get new balance patches regularly and the game is slowly progressing in the right direction.

If anything, I would say that they tend to err on the side that favours axis more (Tiger Ace? March Deployment anyone?), which then fucks up the meta, and then they overbuff the Soviets to compensate.

(double post, my apologies)

This is a brilliant idea.

I always thought it would totally rock if CoH had some sort of a global campaign mode that influenced all matches. One week - preparation for Kursk, tanks more expensive on both sides. Another week - Kursk started, tanks cheaper on both sides. Next week - it's winter, only winter maps on rotation etc. Another week - Operation Little Saturn, Germans are on the defensive and cannot win matches, only put up a resistance, so they can only decapture Victory Points and need to destroy a set amount of Soviet units to win before VPs tick to zero. Etc etc.

Probably would be impossible to balance, so it should be a separate mode from ranked automatch. Triple war spoils drop rate or something to attract people to this mode.

Snipers are different and wil stay different. Stop using german one as grenadier replacement and don't go YOLO with him, use him against USF or sov T2 and score 40-50 kills easily.

Yep. The issue isn't how the Soviet sniper compares to the German one or fares against him (although it is worth debating their relative efficiencies). The issue is that it is virtually impossible to play a 2v2 game versus Soviets without having 3-4 sniper squads shoved in your face, followed by Guards, followed by callins.

I've used sniper strats and people have outsmarted me and I lost all my snipers.

The fact you lost your snipers in a game, or the fact that sniper spammers are capable of losing games, has exactly zero relation to this discussion. Nobody claims snipers can't be killed. Hell, they might even be 100% balanced for all I care. (It is my opinion that sniper cheese with Guards into callins, especially vs. OKW requires much less micro for a much higher manpower bleed).

The question here is whether they make for a healthy meta.

Snipers remove an integral part of the CoH dynamic (and did so in CoH1 as well), which is cover-based infantry / weapon team game.

This is a world war two game. I do not expect realism, but I do not expect paradropped Shermans which oneshot Elefants with rainbow plasma cannons either. Soviet sniper teams lean more towards the rainbow end of the spectrum than the authenticity end.

It is not authentic nor iconic of world war two to have multiple highly mobile sniper squads working in tandem, invulnerable to return fire due to range advantage, dancing back and forth in the open, and sprinting away with ease from enemy line infantry when cornered only to turn around and shoot them in the face once they gain enough range on them.

The quadruple whammy is : two-man squads (of which both are sharpshooters) with relatively cheap reinforce, small axis squads (making it easy to reach critical threshold of retreat-or-risk-losing-150+ manpower), huge manpower penalty for a squadwipe inherent in the game, and Sprint ability obtained at Vet1 (which comes very soon for Soviet snipers).