Profile of Vermillion_Hawk

The UKF was my most anticipated faction in this game but I think we can all agree that their launch design was far from ideal. While some considerable work has gone into fixing these errors, one glaring flaw still stands out to me as being the cause of a lot of balance issues with the faction. This is, of course, Bolster. It's an upgrade both unprecedented and unwarranted that causes numerous balancing and teching headaches.

The UKF starts with by far the most inconsistent infantry. 4-man Sections are highly situationally effective, and you can kiss an engagement goodbye if ever they are caught out of cover. Bolster, however, provides a highly effective boost, giving more health and effective damage on a unit which already has one of the best base rifles in the game. Without Commandos or other supporting infantry, Bolster is an essential upgrade to maintain field control as the Brits. This makes it problematic, especially given its place in the tech tree.

My suggestion is this - replace the current T1 tech choice between the AEC or the Bofors with one something along the lines of Hammer or Anvil. In this case, "Hammer" would keep your infantry at 4 men but give them additional combat bonuses (ideally removing out-of-cover penalties and increasing on-the-move accuracy), while "Anvil" would give you the current Bolster upgrade but make Sections more dependent on cover to be effective in combat.

I realize this might not be a realistic suggestion given the intricacies of coding with Relic's groundwork and the limited resources available, but this, I feel, would be very beneficial. The rolling Bren blob is boring both to play and to play against, and the current Bolster only draws players into that strategy. This would give the UKF an actual meaningful tech choice at T1 instead of the no-brainer AEC pick, and would diversify infantry play.

Thoughts?

I don't care whether or not they have "access", I do care about spurious arguments based on no experience whatsoever being advanced to nerf, of all things, probably one of the least-used abilities in the game.

Vipper I have no idea why you're so on the case of the Heavy Gammon Bomb. Did it murder your family or something? I'll reiterate what I've said earlier - I don'y think you've ever used one, and the only scenario I can think of where you got such a hard on about it is that you forgot about a tank in a 4v4 and had it erased by a ridiculous blob of Sections blowing hundreds of munitions. Because that is literally THE ONLY scenario where it could have any sort of serious effect.

I'd say it's almost exactly the opposite. Perfect mirror matches are almost always bad game design, unless it's driven by player choice (intentional mirror matches). I can't think of a single recent competitive game that isn't inherently designed around asymmetry.

There's asymmetry and then there's asymmetry. While certainly not as poorly-designed as the first game in this respect, CoH2 is still quite bad in that factions are balanced or even inherently designed for counterplay with specific other factions (see Western Front release state for example).

The ideal state would be like Dawn of War, where all factions are balanced for play against one another, including themselves. In this instance Starcraft is hardly the model to emulate.

the combination of heavy gamon bomb and AT barrage is simply broken.

Okay, seriously, what crack are you smoking when you say that the Heavy Gammon Bomb as it currently stands is even contributing to a unit being broken? Have you ever even tried using one?