Profile of Protos Angelus

How not to play a 3 man premade OST team. They have 30 wins and 12 loses. Generally all good ranks across the modes but you can really see the difference between individual skill and a premade-team skill. Somehow premades rely mostly on teamwork and communication and lack general awareness. I did get lucky a couple of times but still this game is a good display of how premade teams can skewer the matchmaking on both sides of the board.

Looking at the winrates:

https://coh2stats.com/players/76561198021122402
https://coh2stats.com/players/76561198057893544
https://coh2stats.com/players/76561198041218221

You'd think that it's gg for allies, given that they are premade and all, but don't give up. Statistic paints only half a picture. So the next time you see a premade team with great winrates, who knows, try and win.

I present to you abandon vehicle mechanics

I don't get it. Vehicle abandonment is a good mechanic in COH2. What's wrong with it. Definitely adds another layer, especially to 1v1s

I really don't understand why they're sticking with Call-ins as a mechanic. Especially with a new game releasing, I don't see any reason they can't change the system to have all "call-in" units be buildable from appropriate structures.

Even paratroops can be done this way, by merely having them be built at base, and subsequently deployed from the air.

Keep your streamlining to yourself. If you want to design a game that is pure starcraft e-sport title, then learn C++/unity or unreal and make it, otherwise stop with the cookie-cutting BS. Paratroopers deployed from the base. I have a feeling like you want to be a professional COH player but the only thing keeping you from becoming is COH itself.

While I don't agree with a lot of changes the balance team has made, and there have been much better solutions presented on this forum than the ones they implemented (eg. lastest E8 change), they have made the game much better and generally greatly improved it. They did help out with the USF lategame and toned down some axis lategame. Also ISU152 HE was fixed. They retained the usefulness of the HE round by lowering the range to 60, which "nerfed" it in a sense that you won't be able to cheese snipe infantry across the map.
Sure the axis is generally stronger and more complete in teamgames, not to mention easier to play, but overall there is nothing big that the balance team screwed up. Sure, some things still remain unbalanced and funny, but nothing major. 1v1 is balanced well and 2v2s, to a great extent. USF is a bit of a meme faction come lategame in teamgames but in 1v1s it's probably the strongest faction given it's versatility and lack of 5 panthers rushing you.

Also there is the fact they made some great QoL improvements. The manual reload for one. As a USF player myself, AAHT is a mixed bag. One one hand it's great in firepower, on the other, it's buggy and extremely hard to use. You can't just "attack" units with it because it will get into a rotate loop, you can ground target only if you press "stop" after using ground target. AA part of the unit is buggy with infinite tracking, which they fixed by adding the 360 AA mode.
But the biggest is: Reload on the main gun takes 9 seconds. Puma, Luchs, 222... are all LVs that can kill the AAHT if it's not on a full clip. If any of those LVs catch the AAHT with a few shots left on the main gun, the AAHT is destroyed. Lo and behold, the manual reload fixes that.

Again, I wish they didn't make some of the changes they made:
E8 with of 800hp/235 armour + MG buff + fuel nerf instead of the gunnery ability
Scott/pak howi overlap in role
Calliope retains 3 shot kill but it's mobility is severely weakened, either after using barrage or generally. (achpawel made a good suggestion on one thread)
Giving rangers some abilities or reducing cost because right now they are not a justified 350 MP/10 pop cap unit (unless you spam zook rangers in 4v4 and your teammate plugs the holes).

Sure they could have made a better job, but the fact that did not get payed a dime coupled with the fact that the game is vastly improved compared to a few years ago, I'd say job well done.

I also didn't say you did, but I think you are slightly underestimating what theoretical calcs can do if read properly. But to be honest, I think we pretty much agree, there is no real point in arguing in the first place.


Just to drive this point home for everyone:
Assume you try to deduce how good a Sherman penetrates frontally at medium range vs an Ostheer P4. You have 20 players discussing over their experience with the Sherman. We don't know what they understand by "mid range", and even if everyone understands roughly 20 meters, there will be variations from probably at least 15-25 meters being classified at mid range, variations because of players driving their tanks, factoring in missed shots, reduced accuracy due to moving, increased penetration due to engaging at an angle and getting a rear armor hit.

Let's put this into a test setup: 20 meters distance (120 penetration vs 180 armor), flat terrain, only frontal shots possible, only actual hits counting. We count 50 hits, assuming that the players in the discussion above would have their last roughly 50 shots in mind when thinking about the engagements. We do 20 tests to form each player's experience.
Basic statistics tells us that the real penetration chance is 66.7%, meaning 50*(120/180) = 33.33 shots should penetrate with a standard deviation of 3.33 shots (10% of the mean in our case). This means that almost one third of the players discussing will have had the Sherman penetrate less than 30 times or more than ~37 times. One player will have had the experience of the Sherman hitting less than 27 times or more than 40 times and probably be screeching about the trash Sherman or saying it were OP.
Even if all discussion was fully rational (good luck with that), players will regularly report a penetration chance anywhere between less than 60-75%.

Funny side note: The skill level doesn't matter. This one player could be Luvnest or VonIvan, not just your level 2000 rando. Those 50 shots probably represent the last 5 games, which represents 3 hours of games or 1-2 evenings of playing CoH2 with this faction and this unit. This in turn means that it might all the experience you get for 1-2 weeks playing CoH2 if you also play all other factions equally. This one player, high skill or not, will say that the Sherman were OP or trash. And if they are known as a good player, their opinion will have a larger impact although it actually should not. And we can prove that with numbers.

Back to topic: On top of that, all this assumes that this sample of players actually gets a "representative set of RNG". If I just hit refresh on the numbers, I regularly see that even all their "experience data" pooled together will both misjudge the real penetration value by a couple of %, as well as the standard deviation varying decently (often 7-13%, meaning players will either be more in agreement if it gets smaller or disagreement if it is larger). Is this huge? Not huge, but we've seen penetration and armor values being decreased by 10-20 regularly, which depending on shooter and target often lead to only a couple of percent penetration chance. So yes, we're still in the range of actual balance discussions being influenced by RNG.

If you want a really reliable discussion where the values only vary by a one or two percent, you'd need 100 players. That would be 5 pages on this forum if everyone just states their experience, no discussion involved yet. And don't forget: Everyone just tested the test setup, there still is no variation due to a real game.

True. At the end of the day, this game is a numbers and chance game. While pure numbers can't stand on their own due to the different scenarios in the game (eg. put a jagdtiger on a small, tight 1v1 map and all of it's "greatness" disappears), they can still paint a nice picture. And in the end, numbers don't lie. Heck, I could have said that the raketen was severely UP 3 or 4 games ago because it missed on my AAHT 4 times in a row, and last game it hit and penetrated each and every shot on a Pershing and AAHT and allied Comet, therefore OP. Don't know why people try to counter statistics and numbers with personal feelings. Sure you can put some context around it, like game mode and map, but concerning something as basic as penetration there really isn't a lot to discuss.