Profile of squippy

You cut out the part where i said "Specially if you say you have been playing against others "pros"." Those kind of remarks are hard to believe when you have no replays/playercard backing those claims.

Well that seemed like a qualifier to the central point, so yes, I cut it.

I don't know that balance suggestions change that much by "skill". By game mode, perhaps, but this is not an argument I find convincing.

It's not an accident that this game, like most other e-sports, is primarily represented in competition by under-30's. Which is interesting is that the same is mostly true of "regular" sports. The physical demands of APM are real, and it is quite possible for a player with an inferior comprehension of the game, to defeat someone with a superior comprehension, by means of sheer physical prowess.

The practice of demanding that someone achieve a certain level of success in the game before being able to offer a criticism or opinion or suggestion therefore does not serve to ensure that the best thinking is brought to the fore. And quite often it seems to be used as a crutch to dismiss an argument that cannot be defeated by reason.

There's a difference between presenting a well thought argument, backed up by stats, and spewing personal opinions.

Agreed in full. But my point remains that player card demands are at best useless, and worst counter-productive, IMO.

Forcing your opponent to do something bad for them is good use of your tools.

It's good practice to show a playercard in order for people to know at what skill levels the changes are been thought off...

No, it really isn't. It would only be true if this was a game of pure intellect, but this is very much not the case. Even then, understanding wouldn't necessarily translate into being able to talk about it. This is a dumb idea which should be stopped immediately.

I think this confuses uncertainty with randomness.

In poker, the drawing of cards is random. Which cards an opponent has, and what they will do, is uncertain. But this isn't randomness as such.

It is certainly (arguably) true that CoH could do with putting more numbers in front of people. Total War unit cards are a good demonstration of how this is done. But its not automatically useful; all those numbers can be intimidating, and are arguably unnecessary for all but the highest levels of play.

Could CoH use some sort of short percentage display? Sure; it wouldn't hurt.

I don't think that's the only way. If Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain go just a little differently, Germany has air superiority over the Isles.

Dunkirk is irrelevant; Britain only deployed a token air force to the continent, so even if it had been entirely wiped out it would have made little difference. I've already discussed the Battle of Britain above; all I'll say here is that German fighters didn't have the range to even fly over the whole of the isles, let alone establish air superiority. I consider the suggestion laughable.

If the OKL and OKM weren't always feuding, perhaps they notice that a small percentage of the Luftwaffe in a small percentage of the time was accounting for a huge percentage of British shipping losses.

This is a surprise to me; I've hear of no such thing. The effectiveness of aircraft against naval targets was only really recognised after the Battle of Taranto, which was after the BoB was decided. Moreover, aircraft are in general vastly inferior to submarines for interdiction purposes; submarines can hunt undetected for months, far from any identifiable base.

Just for comparison, the US submarine force, comprising only 2% of US navy personnel, accounted for over 60% of Japanese sunk tonnage. There is no way aircraft could have remotely approached this.

Then there's the matter of where British shipping comes from. Hitler fatally started ignoring Britain once he felt they were beaten. If he takes them seriously and approves Operation Felix (seizing Gibraltar with or without Franco's help), the war in north Africa and the usefulness of the Italians drastically changes.

Well, I guess that's true, but I think only getting full Spanish entry into the war would have helped. The British demonstrably carried out several landings against fortified points in Europe and the Med; there is every reason to believe that the importance of Gibraltar would have forced them to do it there.

Even as late as 1942, if he'd sent Rommel a couple more divisions he likely takes the Suez and beyond.

Which was a course of action Rommel himself had advised against, until and unless Malta could be taken. Which it was not.

And if Japan is further "encouraged" to go after British holdings rather than American ones, you've essentially cut off British shipping at its sources rather than at its destination.

This would have been directly contrary to the Japanese war plan, which knew full well that their only hope was to smash the Americans so badly and so quickly that they could force a settlement; detaching forces to pick fights that did not contribute to this goal would never have been considered.

A lot of what iffing, but each one was a plausible event on its own.

Opinions clearly differ.