Profile of Aftermath

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Thread: Soviet Faction Design1 May 2023, 12:09 PM I will lay my cards on the table here and say that returning to the Eastern front is what makes the most sense for further factions in the game. I wouldn’t mind seeing factions from Japan/Italy but overall I feel the Eastern front to be the most logical answer, from both a gameplay perspective, historical accuracy but also because players liked Soviets and Ostheer, so I imagine it would be a crowd pleaser. Therefore, here is what my design for Soviets would be. I don't think that Relic should release any new factions for at least a year, but I imagine that work will start on new ones soon. A few notes, I’m going to be sparse with the text as these faction posts become monotonous if they’re too long. The design itself tries to make best use of the new features (towing) as well as using units that were not in Coh2, to keep things interesting. This diagram mostly speaks for itself, however some notes: Gaz Truck is basically your tow and reinforcement vehicle for the faction, it has 2 upgrades which can be upgraded after either T1.5 or T2.5 has been unlocked. These include: - Quad Mount, 4 maxims, for surpressing infantry and performing AA roles. - Ambulance version. The BA-64 is basically on a similar power level to the 221 Scout car and arrives at a similar timing to reflect this. Could potentially have a PTRS upgrade making it a light vehicle counter. The 72-K is a 25mm AA gun, my assumption would be that this would have similar power levels to the Flak 30 AA but require towing to get around, so not unlike the Bofors in that respect. The T-60 has a 20mm gun as opposed to a 45mm one, so my assumption would be that this would be more similar to the Humber in lethality but closer to the 8 rad in survivability. The BT-7 would fulfill the same role as the Stuart and Chaffee of being primarily used against light vehicles. It could also have a 76mm howitzer upgrade replacing the main gun, making it effective against infantry with a slow moving projectile like the Stug D. Guards would be 6 man again but start with SVT rifles and can be upgraded with either DPs, PPSH SMGs or PTRS rifles, but in my opinion they shouldn’t have a mix of weapons again. The T-26 would be similar power level to the Crusader and fill that role of generalist light tank. The 52-K is an 85mm AA gun, which again would be towed and serve the same purpose as the Flak 88. The SU-122 would fill the same role as the Brumbar. And finally the M-30 would be the primary lategame indirect option. In keeping with my suggestions for a Substitutable units feature, I would recommend being able to do the following unit substitutions: OB-25 -> PM-41 M-42 -> Zis-2 BA-10 -> BT-7 KV-8 -> SU-122 DS-39 -> Maxim. In terms of teching design, the basic idea is a T1/T2 split, where either way you go, you will have access to basic AT and your primary concern is whether you want suppression or indirect. Another advantage of this split is that it compliments 2v2s, in that one player can go for each tier and have all the bases covered. Then having reached either tier, you have a plethora of options. Each tier has a .5 tier, which contains units of mid game power. The T60 and BT-7 are not unlike the Humber and Stuart combo and the BA-64 with 72-K combo is more akin to the offering of the Luftwaffe tier in Wehr. However, for a similar price, you could tech directly for T3 and get Elite infantry and the SU-76, which would be a lot more at home in Coh3 with the Marders than in Coh2. Going into the late game, players have the option of spamming T-26 tanks, which would not be far from Carro Armatos and Crusaders, with the back up of the 52-K, which is the Soviet Flak 88 in function. However, the real late game steam roller would be T4, with the main battle tank, heavy anti infantry tank, heavy tank destroyer and heavy indirect fire, its everything you could need. I’m still thinking of how I want to approach upgrades with this design, but I will come back to that! In: COH3 Central
Thread: DAK Redesign29 Apr 2023, 13:04 PM In keeping with my suggestion regarding global upgrades here: https://www.coh2.org/topic/111232/aftermath-s-feedback-wishlist/page/2 I would argue that DAK need to improve the UI of a bunch of their global upgrades. For AP Rounds, a box of shells on the back of the vehicles that benefit from them would do the trick. For the halftrack upgrade, some sandbags draped over the bonnet of the 250. For advanced repairs, having a Panzer Grenadier model with a backpack of tools would be nice. For the Smoke Dischargers and Vehicle Survivability, this is an interesting one. Currently there's no indication that these upgrades improve the health of the vehicles they upgrade, without looking at the portrait, so I would again make some visual change after these upgrades are done, like actually having the smoke dischargers modelled on the vehicle, a box of tools for or again using something obvious like sandbags draped over the vehicle. Moreover, I would actually argue that the health buffing component of these upgrades should be extracted in its own upgrade, as currently the health buff component inflates the cost of these upgrades out of proportion to what the upgrade is ostensibly about. If there was a third upgrade for the health buffs located on that final upgrades row (or in Tier 3 in my version), then the upgrades could be more finely priced and balanced. The visibility indicators could also be tailored to more accurately reflect the advantage they provide. Its a fine grain change at the end of the day. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Aftermath's Feedback/Wishlist29 Apr 2023, 12:42 PM Feature: Global Upgrades To Have Visual Indicators on Units If you look at other Strategy games, such as Kane's Wrath, the global upgrades in those games generally have some visual indicator on the units to show that they are in fact upgraded. However, with Coh3 this is quite hit and miss, some upgrades do have an indicator (such as Side Skirts) but others such as Smoke Dischargers and Emergency Survivability for DAK do not, the only way you can determine that they have the health buff is by clicking on the unit and looking at the hit points (which you need to have memorised). This is not only unintuitive, it raises the difficulty curve unnecessarily for new players but also doesn't lead to a great viewing experience when you watch casters fumbling around trying to determine if units are upgraded or not. I would argue therefore that all Global Upgrades should update the model of the unit they upgrade so both your opponent but also viewers can determine that the unit is upgraded, with the potential exception of grenades. Feature: Structures Should Have Visual Indicator for Side Tiers One of the nice features of Coh1 with say the Supply Yard, was that after you upgraded certain upgrades, it would visibly change the building. This was not only made the lives of casters easier but also made base scouting more rewarding as you could determine precisely what they had upgraded. Therefore it would be great if structures for Brits, Wehr and Dak had visible tells when they had gone down certain teching paths. US kinda already has this with their Support side tiers. It doesn't need to be much, a flag here, an engine on a bench there, and it would make a World of difference. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Wehr Design Proposals29 Apr 2023, 12:26 PM One other tweak I would make to Wehr would be this: Vehicles such as the P4, Stug, Panther, Brumbar etc, rather than getting Side Skirts as a Global upgrade, should have this as a squad upgrade for munitions. Then this Side Skirts upgrade should be mutually exclusive with the Pintle Mount MG. Currently, the only thing these upgrades achieve is helping these units scale better by improving their stats, there isn't much of a trade off because the only consideration required is whether or not the Fuel and Munitions can be spent on something else entirely. However, if these upgrades were at the unit level and mutually exclusive, this would be much more interesting, as you then have to decide whether or not your unit should be better at dealing with Infantry or more survivable. This is somewhat similar to the Tank Commander vs Pintle trade off in Coh2, which is genuinely a fun and interesting decision. The upgrades for these vehicles in Coh3 now are just 'default buys', there's almost no reason not to. Even better then would be adding a third upgrade for vehicles, something like 'Tuned Engines', which improves manoeuvrability and speed, or 'Enhanced Optics', which improves accuracy of the main gun. This third upgrade would again be mutually exclusive with the other two and provides an interesting upgrade choice when you're dealing with vehicles that don't have pintle MGs (Wirbelwind). If there is a genuine concern that the vehicles don't scale into the late game, requiring some Global upgrade to address that, then this could be achieved in a plethora of different ways. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Aftermath's Feedback/Wishlist27 Apr 2023, 21:14 PM Feature: Prioritise Vehicles on Units in Halftracks Units in open top vehicles such as Panzerjägers in 250 halftracks would be much more useful if you could apply prioritise vehicles to the unit within the halftrack. This way, when doing chase downs of opposing vehicles, the AT squad doesn't shoot at random infantry. Feature: Replay Tools to Show APM of Players In Starcraft II, you can see the APM of the different players in the reply tools. This would be neat information to see in Coh3. Feature: Replay Tools to Show ELO & Rank of Players It would be nice if the replay tools, once they are finally created, showed the ELO & Rank of the players at the time of the game, so you don't have to look this up afterwards. Feature: Replay Tools to Show Total Munitions, Total Fuel Accumulated & Total Reinforcement Expenditure Again, in Starcraft II you have total resources gathered stats. It would be great if you could see the complete munitions and fuel accumulated by each player through the match, for analysis purposes. Another interesting statistic would be total manpower spent on reinforcing. Feature: Postgame Stats/Replay Tools to Show Ratio of Time Spent in Tact Map to Normal View Another interesting statistic would be a breakdown of Clicks on the Standard Interface, Clicks on the Minimap, Clicks on the Tact Map. Feature: Postgame Stats to Display UI Element Click Frequency and Hotkey Usage Frequency A great statistic to have would be to see which UI Elements you clicked on the most so you can determine which hotkeys mapping are clearly too cumbersome or where you need to focus your own hotkey training. Another one would be seeing which hotkeys and actions you execute the most so you can consider remapping the actions you perform the most to more tactile hotkeys. It would also be great if when you're watching from the player's perspective you could not only see their cursor, but when they use a hotkey, this is highlighted to you in either the command panel or on a separate display. This makes it easier for a player to break down exactly how a player executed a manoeuvre. The cherry on the cake would be if the game recommended hotkeys that were underutilised in the game. Feature: Postgame Stats To Show Resource Usage Some great piecharts would be to see for munitions, what proportion was spent on mines, upgrades, unit abilities and battlegroup abilities, as general headings, and then more granular information on the exact abilities/upgrades where munitions were spent. For example. if I'm spending a majority of my munitions on Grenades and none on mines, that's useful information to reflect on. Then also being able to compare how effective these expenditures were for abilities, say a comparison of total damage possible of grenades thrown vs actual damage received, and also being able to compare that to damage dealt by squad upgrades (pintle MGs etc), would be magnificent. This has the benefit of allowing you as the player to determine if your mine/grenade placement is actually effective or not and whether you're getting more value from your abilities or upgrades etc. Then for fuel, same sort of idea. I'd want to see how much of my fuel is spent on teching, upgrades or units. Finally, same again for Manpower, which of my units did I reinforce the most, did my manpower got mostly into new units, upgrades, teching or reinforcement. The coup de grâce would be being able to compare this information with the other player in the game. Feature: Postgame Stats to Show APM Graph I'd want to be able to see at what points my APM spiked and where it was worse relative to my opponent. Feature: Merit Earn Rate Visible in Store It would be great if you could see what your average merit earn rate per hour of play is and then in the store, being able to see roughly how many hours of play would be required to unlock each item, would be great information to have when making decisions as to whether to buy War Bonds or not. For instance, if a Battlegroup is going to take 15 hours of play for me to unlock it, that would make me think twice as to whether they want to wait that long or not. In most situations I wouldn't care, but if I really wanted some content specifically, this information would be handy. Feature: Substitutable Vehicles This feature from Coh1 should just come back. From my perspective its a win-win for everyone for a number of reasons: For the game developer, it can be integrated directly into the Game store and Merit system, therefore providing a further means of revenue diversification. I'd imagine players would be a lot more motivated to grind in Coh3 if they knew they could get a whole new unit to play with. The upfront cost of new content with a feature like this is relatively cheap compared to say the cost of developing a whole new battlegroup, so new units could be added frequently (say 1 unit for each faction each quarter) and this would drive not only media opportunities (all that YouTube hype from the players) but also allow John to do a PR vid everytime. This would all contribute to players either returning to the game to play the new units or drawing new players in entirely. The other benefit for devs is that as a mechanism by which new content is added, this is relatively low risk, as the substitute units would basically perform the exact same function as existing units in the faction, albeit at different price points and power levels, so 'Pay to Win' should ideally be less of an issue relative to say battlegroup which have a grander impact on how a faction plays. Then for players, one of the obvious advantages is more units! This would further add to the diversity of build orders possible with a faction and presuming its not clear on the loading screen which units your opponent has in their loadout, it adds an element of unpredictability to the game (which is fun!). Again, as a means by which new content is added, this would be lower risk, meaning the balance & meta should not be affected as much whenever new content hits. If the new units have different abilities from the ones they replace, it could make entirely new strategies possible and would lead to the flavour of the faction being different. It adds a better reward for playing than just cosmetics and increases the longevity of the game (it stays fresh as you unlock new units after continuous play). Its yet another feature to play around with while waiting for games, as you mix and match between batllegroups, units and bulletins profiles in between matches. In terms of implementation, I think that merit should be refactored to be more similar to Coh2, its pretty lame that you don't get merit just for playing the game, the challenges should be an extra and not the primary way by which merit is earned. All substitute units should be purchasable with merit, I feel it should go without saying how much of a PR disaster it would be to put up a pay wall. Should. Then in terms of what units should be substituted, the World is your oyster. Here are some examples: US - M17 -> Greyhound - M22 Locust -> Greyhound/Chaffee - M10 -> Hellcat - .50 Cal ->.30 Cal - M2 Mortar for M1 Mortar (former having a shorter range but faster ROF). Brits - Daimler Armoured Car -> Stuart. - AEC -> Stuart. - Valentine -> Crusader. - Universal Carrier -> Dingo. - Cromwell -> M3 Grant. Wehr - Granatwerfer 42 -> Granatwerfer 34 (former having more damage, slower ROF). - 30 cm Nebelwerfer 42 -> 15cm Nebelwerfer 41 (former having more damage, longer recharge, shorter range perhaps). - Pakwagen -> Marder III (former being cheaper and weaker). - Stuh 42 - Brumbar (former having less frontal armour, cheaper). - Ostwind -> Wirbelwind. DAK - MG81 -> MG34 (former being more expensive, more cumbersome but with better suppression). - Pak36 -> Pak38 (former being more manoeuvrable and higher ROF, worse pen and damage). - Sd.Kfz. 7/2 (37mm Flak) -> Flakvierling HT (former being better against light vehicles, worse suppression). - Panzer II -> 8 Rad. - Panzer III N -> Stug III D (former having rotating turret, worse frontal armour, more expensive, fully rotating pintle MG) You get the idea. Feature: Custom Voice Lines Before, I wrote about the importance of being able to configure specific voice lines off and configuring when they are triggered. This request is more geared towards replacing the voice lines entirely. We're in the third instalment of the game now and several of the units in the game have been in the series from the start (Infantry sections, PGrens, Snipers, Shermans etc). What would be really cool would be if you could configure which voice lines from the alternative games you could use for each unit. For example, if you could use the voice lines for Coh1 for Riflemen, the Churchill voice lines from Coh2 and the Pak voice lines from Coh3, this would be just amazing. This gives the player total flexibility and more control over the experience. This could also be easily enough be integrated into the Store where specific voice lines require merit/war bonds (for example, all the Coh1 Gren voice lines being a package). This way we get a better experience and Relic get yet further revenue diversification. Feature: Custom Sound Effects Similar to the custom voice lines, it would be nice if could pick which sounds effects we preferred for different weapon types. For example, I know a lot of players prefer the MG42 from Coh1 and being able to configure this would make a lot of people happy. Again, can be hooked straight into the store. Disclaimer: I recommend features that involve micro transactions primarily because I see Relic's profit as equating to more resources spent on improving the game, resulting in more content, more balance improvements and more time spent on features that indirectly improve the game (like enhancements to control groups, hot keys, post game stats etc). In: COH3 Central
Thread: Wehr Design Proposals18 Apr 2023, 09:21 AM Jump back to quoted post17 Apr 2023, 11:11 AMAradan So non-doc T4 Pershing for USF? USF arguably have the same problem. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Wehr Design Proposals16 Apr 2023, 18:52 PM This is an excellent show case of why Wehr need some form of Heavy AT in the late game: https://youtu.be/TG9Mgs0RCQU?t=2301 Every other Axis faction from Coh1 until Coh3 has had the Panther as the lategame AT choice and Dak have Flak 36s and Tigers. If the player in the vid didn't have access to the Tiger, how would they actually deal with Heavy Tanks? Aside from making Pak40s on par with Coh2 standards... Either the Nashorn, like in my Mod, or the Pak 43 should be added to T4 because exactly these types of situations. In: COH3 Central
Thread: DAK Redesign11 Apr 2023, 20:48 PM This is another great example of how bust the DAK endgame design is: https://youtu.be/ggpfAuTH9rQ?t=2270. The passive repairs, free smoke etc make infantry completely pointless in DAK and vehicles capable of doing everything. I'm more convinced that ever that these not only should not be passive but also mutually exclusive at the squad level. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Aftermath's Feedback/Wishlist5 Apr 2023, 13:49 PM Feature: Ability to See Allies Queued Commands In Steel Division 2, you can click an ally's unit and when holding shift, see their queued commands. We should really have this in Coh3! In: COH3 Central
Thread: COH3: Milk Carton Units5 Apr 2023, 13:45 PM Jump back to quoted post5 Apr 2023, 13:05 PMYeltsinDeathBrigades About rapid advance: it just should not affect stug IIID, Carro M13/40, and Tiger, maybe also PIII. Anything else is annoying, but fine. I think the problem with most of these abilities is their passive nature. I think territory capping should be something you activate which disables the weapons, like for Soviets in Coh2. Self-repair should be a timed ability that costs munitions. I also wouldn't mind seeing these abilities being mutually exclusive at the unit level, so you have that trade off of which utility you want most and also reduces DAK lategame vehicle scaling, you basically don't need infantry right now. In: COH3 Central