Profile of drChengele

You think this is bad, you should have seen it in CoH1. It was essentially "Make Hans the Tank Driver take a coffee break in the middle of the battlefield" button.

As a consequence the CoH2 button feels too weak and too short for me. Objectively that is not the case, of course, because antitank combat is much faster and more punishing, but some habits die hard.

The sheer value of being able to dish out damage from range without getting punished in return cannot be overstated.

You would need around 6 Brummbars to cover the area that a single ISU can cover. Obviously obstacles, movement and the slow rotation of ISU152 render these numbers moot, and I'm not trying to prove any specific point. But 2.5x range entails x6.25 area potentially covered by fire, maneuvers notwithstanding, and we should also think in terms of the amount of terrain being denied by just sitting a single unit at a point.

If I had to balance an ISU152 I would leave all the stats as they are, but I'd just MASSIVELY increase its reload. Like, double it. It would not at all be at odds with its artillery-on-tracks role, and would flavour it a bit differently from the other heavies. It would still be a weaker-hitting B4 on tracks, heavy armour and one sixth the reload time. This does not impact its alpha strike potential, while it significantly decreases the punishment enemy sustains while being in its arc of fire. Besides, people would consider using the "hold fire" button more in that case, because a shot at a passing pio squad would basically translate into 15 seconds of free maneuver time in the ISUs cone of fire for tanks and infantry alike. Then it's less of an area denial weapon and can still pack quite an offensive punch where needed, forcing you to eventually respond or keep losing manpower.

Now if your opponent is able to get a tank leverage on you, you will loose units and probably a lot. the ability to take out a tanks with infantry is next to none, Pgrens will die, Guards will die, Conscripts will die, Grens will die.

The German T2 building has a unit, it's called the PaK40. The Soviet T2 has a unit, it's called the ZiS. If you set them up in the general direction of enemy armour, they sort of shoot shells at it rather effectively.

So you want to be able to counter tanks with infantry alone. Cute. What's the investment for the earliest medium tanks, 200 fuel? 250? 300? Please tell me more how basic infantry available at 0 or 20 fuel should totally counter them into oblivion.

UNCORROBORATED SPECULATION TIME! Few things strike me as odd:

Ostwind was good enough before the patch to warrant choosing it instead of another PzIV quite often. Now it's cheaper. A bit worried there, but I suppose it's part of the new meta where Soviet has better medium armour on the field.

Su76 seems to be much more expensive for rather slight changes. Did you ever go "OHSHIII HE'S GOT ANOTHER SU76 I'M SCREWED MAN I WISH THIS THING COST MORE"? Me neither. Maybe the AoE profiles are in fact that good against infantry now.

Still not sure on late game viability of Soviet t3 without callins, but overall armour changes are just too extensive to judge without playing.

Panthers might still reign supreme in team games. Increased fuel costs will definitely limit its 1v1 availability, but in team games, what with trololopel blitz and fuel caches, the reduced MP cost might actually make them MORE spammable. And they will be better versus infantry (if you sink 175 fuel into a unit you will have no problems shelling out the 50 ammo for the mg42)

Oh and artillery changes just make me raise my eyebrow. Howitzers were annoying at times but they cost a lot of MP and are too easily destroyed with certain doctrines, and too difficult to destroy with others. We will be seeing even less of those, I fear.

HOWEVER

previously, vehicles incorrectly used deceleration to define the rate at which they accelerated, resulting in near instant max speed.

This small "change" is INSANELY important, deceleration is ALWAYS much higher than accel. Tanks should be considerably more sluggish.

If the replay has not magically vanished like all my other replays...

The replay is probably still there in the file system, but only the replays from the current patch are displayed ingame. From what I know it is possible to manually edit the replay file to point to the current version but that sounds to me like it could create sync errors when trying to replay it.