I disagree with your opinions about AEC, commanders and the scout car. The bugs, however, made the game reach a new depth of unplayability. I started a new campaign on Skyrim andi have a backlog of games to play, so I'm leaving till it gets better. CoH2 is just unbearable. I'm very sad, because I love this game and, even with some design choices that make people cringe, I think it is a better game than CoH1.
I took a break once for personal reasons... Recently I got a little fed up with the game and started some RPG's. It's not the meta that bothers me - I play all factions and suck equally at all of them - it's the stream of patches that came on the 2nd semester last year, I felt alienated.
I like the idea of a unit built using the BG HQ that should be a 4-man volks with dual panzershreks; they could also lay tellers. Cost could be ~350 MP.
Volks now receive 2 side-techs, come out of HQ with the potato masher:
- Anti infatry: with SMG's, the flame nade and sprint (60 muni)
- Anti vehicle: receive 1 PTRS-like rifle, panzerfaust (40 muni)
I like to play the slavic opressed peoples resisting the fashist pigs. Unfortunately, they are very hard to pull weird strategies... But when I get to win with NKVD, it's joy.
I love table-top games, but here in Brazil we don't have this kind of game culture - we lack the environmental characteristics that make this hobby interesting, and usually the best games require a little more work than our patience and education permits. Personally, I never saw a game of Monopoly even close to ending.
BUT, I did play a lot when I was younger - I remember particularly well of a game similar to Risk, but that also had petrol, minerium and wheat, and you had to buy your armies. You could research atomic weapons and some kind of Space Laser that could act as counter for the nukes. It was pretty fun.
Also, soon after the release of the first Alien film, came a nice tabletop game about aliens, with eggs and larvae. The tripulation could use various weapons, from lasers per se to improptu things like canned food or kitchen knifes. The effects of every weapon were randomly assigned each game, and it could backfire like hell (RNG!).
Maybe a simple solution to the OKW start is exchanging the inicial unit - instead of Sturms, maybe they should get the kubel. OK, that would just scream Panzer Elite, but F*ck it, it's an inspiraton anyway