All over, removing auto-fire is easiest way to fix them, I think. (same for leIG18) Maybe Relic can be convinced, because why not? Balancing became community-work.
Anyone who wants to remove autofire does not know how to play.
I dont know man, but if skilled people like Terror, Olvadi, CN, and even Seeking (he said it in a streaming) and a lot of people who would post it anyways after me right now, say Valentine its too good, maybe.... they're right you know?
Another thing is, while Ostwind became murdermachine to the point where it had to had put a limit on affected entities, Centaur was getting nerf after nerf, falling to the level of performance in AI comparable to Cromwell at times and its low speed isn't helping the unit either, its higher armor over ostwind, ironically, helps exclusively against med generalist tanks.
Centaur is basically paying for its past sins of being absolutely broken.
I'm not sure how to buff it. I'd personally just buff its vet gain. It's extremely potent at vet 3 from my experience.
I disagree that the Centaur is a bad unit or that it's in a bad spot or that it needs to come earlier. Well I generally disagree with this stupid trend in balancing discussions that everything needs to arrive earlier and every faction needs everything to be accessible, which has led to dumb buffs like Pgrens in T0.
Anyway, the Centaur imo is a victim of the current 1v1 meta, which is to just spam generalist mediums and support them with AT guns.
Changing a unit's role or place within the roster (timing etc.) and adjusting the cost and the performance accordingly is a perfectly good way to make units or abilities more distinct or useful, rather than just outright buffing or nerfing them. It has been done quite a bit in the past with units like Assault Engineers or Panzerfusiliers. And for example in hindsight I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to "nerf" the Ostwind into a cheaper intermediate anti-light vehicle that might've really helped Ostheer against LVs, rather than buffing its performance into a 100 fuel AI vehicle.
Not that I really agree that the Centaur needs this. I think it's fine currently and that it's actually the Cromwell that could probably use a 10 fuel increase with its new AI performance to help make the Centaur stand out a bit more. Definitely not a priority.
That is some solid logic regarding infantry and support weapons. On the other hand, making a centaur arrive literally 20 seconds earlier and be weaker is a nerf, there is no way around it whatsoever.