Profile of Mr.Smith

What prevented these ideas from getting in the patch?

Scope™

We are given very limited options about which units we are allowed to touch, and which we aren't. That's probably to prevent too many changes done at once from alienating the entire player-base. Smaller changes means that players will have an easier time adapting, which will make future balance concerns more visible, earlier.

Welcome back

We wanted to normalize repair speeds across faction by nerfing it down to EFA levels. We tried really hard to do this, as this would help act as a safeguard vs UKF and, in particular, OKW super-OP late-game. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to include a fix to this disparity for GCS.

Repair speeds for EFA factions work like this:
- 1.6 at Vet0 (per entity)
- 2.6 at Vet2 (per entity)

Sturmpioneers, which only cost 50% more MP to field than Pioneers repair as follows:
- 3 at Vet0 (4, with minesweeper)
- 4 at Vet2 (5, with minesweeper)

Thus, by only paying 50% more than other faction engineers you get:
- 150% faster repair rates at Vet0 (minesweeper package & Vet0 repairs)
- You don't have to worry about maintaining your veterancy to keep adequate repair speed
- You have a capable combat squad on top of that

(OKW also has MechHQ which repairs at a rate of 3, but has 3 entities, however. Given how OP Sturmpioneer repair is, MechHQ repairs are redundant).

USF Vehicle crews are OK, and they follow that curve. With WBP they have been toned down as they can't get to Vet2 that easily anymore.

Rear Echelons and Sappers, however, repair as follows:
- 2 at Vet0
- 3 at Vet2
Sappers get an extra of +2 repair speed (additive) with the Heavy Sapper upgrade (Anvil)

If repair speeds would get normalized, we would change things as follows:

Sturmpioneer repair speed:
- 2.4 at Vet0
- 3.9 at Vet2
- Minesweeper upgrade no longer affects repair speeds

Rear Echelons/Sappers:
- 1.6 at vet0
- 2.6 at Vet2
- (5-man squads should come as 4-man squads on the field so that you don't get sapper models for free)
- Heavy Sapper upgrade bonus reduced from 2 to 1.3

(OKW can keep their MechHQ as is, to allow for non-popcap heavy repairs for players that gave up healing to get MechHQ)

For handheld AT, the real damage is a bit off from what is listed in stat.coh2.hu. This is because of the workaround we deployed to prevent AT infantry from vetting too fast.

In fact the real damage of handheld AT is about 3 times higher than the one listed in stat.coh2.hu (e.g., Panzerschrecks deal 120 damage as opposed to the 40 damage that's listed), etc.

To make things more complicated, we also had to modify PTRS damage vs infantry; they now deal 20 damage, as opposed to 14 damage.

The workaround makes gamefiles difficult to parse. The benefits of the workaround far displaced the complexity that it brought.

I guess Soviets are less bad than some people were worried about?

Due to how matchups in the first round of GCS are determined this dataset can, at best, tell you what factions the best players prefer to play as.

e.g., if DevM's favourite faction was not USF, the winrate for USF would go down, etc.

You can expect to see more-balanced matchups starting from the 2nd round and above.

Tobis vs Andres and Theodosios vs Refero seem to have been more evenly matched than the other matches on that round. (I've only watched Tobis' matches though).

I don't know how to do this. However I am aware of the following graphical glitch you could -maybe- use to lead you to a solution.

Put an infantry unit in a bren carrier and leave it in friendly territory. Then, activate UKF Commandos Smoke raid ability and order the unit to dismount the bren carrier.

The unit will be functionally invisible to the enemy. However, the model animators will not be transclucent.

Try to see if you can make it work in a similar way; modify smoke raid to also work on vehicles, and try garrisoning your Panther in a universal carrier and pop the ability. Then, ungarrison the Panther from the carrier and see what it looks like.