Profile of Lucas Troy

Yes, excellent question! I mostly play 1v1.

I think the ISU and the other super heavies have always been poorly implemented. Now, the Sturmtiger, that is a well designed unit. Massive power, massive drawbacks. If it were up to me, the ISU would work like the ST, except it'd be MUCH better (because it costs more). Basically a death cannon but with a really long reload time or something else like that to make it finicky.

And in my fantasy world the Elefant would get its range back, and then also a draw back, like, I dunno, it randomly gets engine criticals just for moving, or it can be decrewed with a molotov.

It's fine the way it is, you all looking for the change are really looking for something like Men of War.

CoH2 is a WW2 themed RTS; it's not supposed to have much verisimilitude. It's somewhere between games like Star Craft and more simulation oriented stuff like MoW. Just enjoy the niche that it's in, and check out other games (MoW) if that's more your thing. Both approaches have their advantages.

I used to complain about 30 dudes rushing an MG from the front and just DPSing it down, but then I realized that gamey though that might be, it's appropriate for where CoH2 sits on the "gamey-realistic" spectrum. Games that focus more on realism can be annoying in their own ways.

Based on my observations of recent patches, Relic focuses on inter-faction balance and tends to somewhat neglect intra-faction balance, as they should. So they're concerned with making the match up between factions balanced, and don't care as much if SU-76, Ostruppen, OH T4 etc, are mostly unused.

It's a reasonable approach but IMO results in the game becoming more fair (which is good) but also more repetitive and thus less interesting. It also artificially ramps up the learning curve because players need to learn which units are randomly worthless.

Example: how is a new soviet player supposed to know that the SU-76 is worthless? It's impossible to learn this in game without getting stomped a bunch of times for building it, which is stupid. If they're gonna leave units that are so weak in the game, then they should some text in the description saying "the SU-76 sucks and you should only build it if you want the match to be harder." As of now I feel that certain aspects of intra-faction balance are so quirky that going online is pretty much required = not optimal game design.

edit:

I bring this up because I think OH T4 is basically fucked forever because it's so hard to buff it without making OH too strong.

I thought vehicle crews were just intended for repairs? If they were combat capable as well, wouldn't that make them a little too good?