I hate to say it, but if he lost that many squads and still almost won, it was probably due to mistakes on your part. I'll watch to replay to confirm if you like, but the cost of that many squads in sheer manpower should have bled him dry to the point where you could have easily overwhelmed him with your infantry.
Anyway, if you think squad preservation isn't punished enough what do you think should be changed to address this? |
I completely agree with you. There's no way in hell that this is 'working as intended' - Trucks are meant to be for setting up buildings only, and shouldn't give any kind of combat advantage. To my mind, truck pushing/demolishing are basically exploits that Relic needs to address as soon as possible. I am slightly concerned though - many people (notably ImperialDane) have complained about truck pushing since WFA launch and even before, but Relic has yet to patch it or even acknowledge its existence. |
Well, I guess that settles it then. I can't say I'm surprised - no idea how US is expected to play on that map. |
My attitude to Pathfinders is that I will build a squad if I am floating enough manpower that it won't interfere with reinforcement/other BO elements. They are really useful for scouting, and make decent fire support for Rifles in the right situation. Its also nice to be able to crew AT guns with them rather than REs (for the vision).
That said, I don't feel they are worth making space for. They are pretty over-costed for what you get: someone made a thread comparing them to JLI a while ago and its almost a joke how much more JLIs do for a tiny manpower difference. |
Langreskaya has been one of my favourite maps ever since the original CoH, but in the Age of the Kubel I'm finding it very hard to compete against high-level OKW players on this map. Since we are now locked into the north spawn, it seems very easy for the OKW player to lock down my cut-off/fuel point with the Kubel/Sturm combo (with trucks either pushing my troops or destroying buildings that would be useful to me), and then keep the momentum up by either rushing a Puma to counter my M20/AA HT or setting up the medic truck behind the hedgerow to ensure an infinite stream of Volks.
To high-level (ideally top 100) US players: what is the best response to this? Any advice would be appreciated: micro, BO, capping order, anything. Is this just a map I have to veto? 'Cause that's what it feels like to me at the moment. |
The approach you are describing is incredibly flawed because factions have different basic designs with different strengths and weaknesses, and a unit that plugs a gap in a faction might make that faction OP even if the unit itself is fine.
For example, OKW have Panzershrecks on their basic troops to provide AT. To partially compensate for this, their actual AT gun (the Raketenwerfer) is much weaker and shorter range than other AT guns. Given that they already have Panzerschrecks, it would be unbalanced for OKW to have an AT gun as good as the Pak. Does this mean that the Pak is overpowered. No. |
That makes sense, of course. Still, I was wondering if the Stormtroopers and improved mobility could be used to play the game in a different way than the usual Ostheer defensive/counter-attacking style.
Also, Semoisky? How so? Using Stormtroopers from any of the many, many buildings seems nice, but Close the Pocket seems a bit more useless on that map.
Stormtroopers do create some interesting opportunities, because they give Ostheer a good way to deal with AT guns and such (spawn nearby, use Grenade).
The Sprint ability is kind of nice, but in practice I find it less useful than it might seem because as Ostheer you are still relying on support teams, and so use of sprint on the offensive is limited by the fact that, in particular, you still need to wait for your Paks to get into position. It does have some nice small uses, such as getting Grens into good firing spots faster. Its also amazing on PGrens.
Semoskiy is good because it has a lot of buildings to spawn Stormtroopers out of, and its possible to cut-off very large sections of the map by decapping just 1 or 2 points, making Close the Pocket viable to use (on some maps, its almost impossible to get it to work). |
I wouldn't care to make such assumptions about how Relic does balance. We don't really know what the process is like, and some of the things you suggest are a bit unreasonable given that they have real, significant, monetary costs attached to them.
That said, there are some things that would be nice. A kind of 'PBE' environment where players (possibly a limited population, but larger than current testers) could try out suggested balance solutions. This would hopefully curb some of the more drastic and stupid balance changes by exposing the flaws before they go live. I believe that Relic actually said on-stream a while ago that they were looking into this, but naturally its gonna take time and may not be feasible at all.
More developer communication about balance would also be really nice. For me, the 'gold standard' for communication is Riot Games - they have a constant developer presence on forums, run AMAs on Reddit and make regular blog posts about balance/game design issues. All this stuff is very much appreciated by players such as myself, and at the very least creates a channel for developers to reassure the community that they are aware of and looking into balance issues. However, I fear that since our community is pretty hostile toward Relic a lot of the time (this thread is an example),they probably don't want to interact with us any more than is necessary. |
I think I would support using CP to delay the arrival of call-in armour, either by increasing CP costs or slowing CP accumulation. At the moment, the window for non-doctrinal, medium armour to be effective is quite small - if you are playing Ostheer vs. call-in Soviets for example, teching to get P4s is somewhat unattractive because relatively speaking, you probably don't have very long before T34/85s or ISUs hit the field and invalidate your resource investment. Delaying these call-ins would punish strategies based around holding out for call-ins by causing them to really struggle once their opponent has armour and they don't.
That said, in practice this would be a big nerf to Soviets, who hardly deserve it at the moment. So other adjustments would have to be made. |
Ostheer is the second most played faction after OKW.
My bad, should have made it clear I was looking at the 1v1 stats. |