Profile of sherlock

I lost a gren squad on the move to a random 82mm mortar round.
My teammate lost one full-health PG with schreck to a TM-35 mine, and later 2 PGs with schrecks to a KV-8 despite instant retreat. Free schrecks for the shock troops!
Later I lost 3 gren squads with LMG42 and vet2/3 to one IL-2 strafing run despite instant retreat. That was all my infantry.

All this in one game.
We still won though, they couldn't counter Elefant with Ostwind/P4 backup. But the only infantry we had left was pioneers.

That's the point I made in my first post in this thread. The point of the Soviets is to cause significant enough mp losses to delay or try to prevent a strong German late game. In your game they, despite all these things happening, were not able to prevent or delay it enough to win them the game.

I also would like to remind people of the attribution bias. I'm sure the Soviet team lost a lot of squads too but in these instances we attribute that to our skill, not that we got lucky, but if we lose a squad, the others were just lucky and we got unlucky (it's psychology and it's normal but one must be aware that we're not being objective, especially right after a game (CoH is one of the few games that can really annoy or cause joy unlike many other games )).

While it is true that the soviets seem to have more possibilities for potential squad wipes, many here seem to forget that the German units on average do more damage than their Soviet counterparts. This in conjunction with the fact that the non doctrinal infantry of the Soviets is rather vulnerable has the effect that killing off squads with "conventional" methods works much better for the German faction.

One such example are PGs. I regularly kill conscripts squads with 2 of them before the soviet player even can react and if he manages to hit the retreat button you can still follow them and finish them off in many cases.

Mines are rather unreliable for squad wipes and it's been a while since I last managed to lose any squad or be able to kill one for that matter. Many lose their squads because they walk through choke points with low health squads expecting to get away with disabling mines with grens .

Shock grenades, listed in the introduction, are the worst grenade in the game in my opinion. Bundled and Guard grenades (and much less likely rifle grenades) are far more efficient.

I also don't see the problem with precision strike, at least not the one on the 82mm. The 120mm precision strike might be worth looking into. However, many here also forget the higher firing rate of the German mortar and that it is also capable of squad wipes, although it's not as likely as with a precision strike. That being said, a precision strike is only as lethal as the German player let's it be.

Last but not least one must not forget how the game is designed. Both factions are designed to be asymmetrical. The Soviet faction is as a whole (or should be) rather good at fighting infantry to delay or try to prevent a strong German late game, while the Germans have the best at capabilities with some ai on top of it.

That's how the game is intended to work and how it should work. If we were to remove the chance of one hit squad wipes for the Soviet faction (which are not as often as people make them: attribution bias), we have to maintain the mechanic that is governing the two factions. This might mean making certain units stronger vs infantry to compensate and maintain the ability of the Soviets to drain the Germans mp to delay the late game. Whether or not this is better is debatable, since the one hit squad wipe chance can be mitigated by clever play (using mine sweepers, not leaving an mg in the exact same spot, dodging nades (problematic due to unit delays and input lag, which Relic should resolve)).

To dismiss railway and sector arty as late game partially invalidates your own list, listing the is2 and isu (I've recently had a 2v2 against it and it managed to miss more than in hit, flanked it with a p4 and it was gone ). I personally like to use the light artillery barrage and stuka bomber (both not mentioned) and had several squad wipes with them (the light artillery in most cases doesn't kill squads with one shell but it often gets the rest with another). The fragment bomb also wipes squads.

Still waiting to be allowed into the beta branch. I'll eventually meet you there Stephen. Good luck, we need more players like you.

I think the movement penalty is a GREAT change. If it means t70's, t34's, ostwinds, 222's can no longer wipe squads on retreat then this is truely a needed change.

@sherlock - the scatter won't effect the t34 against tanks from what i understand. It will however help the pak from being flanked by t34's which normally die to 3-4 shots from a t34.

This will reduce the lethality of all vehicles that move and shoot, with a major impact on vehicles vs. infantry and a minor impact on vehicles vs. vehicles.

You're partially right: http://www.twitch.tv/pqumsieh/c/2662960

Scatter max distance doesn't affect the probability to hit a tank, however if scatter max angle is increased it will have a negative effect on tank battles. Furthermore the accuracy itself is decreased (0.5 accuracy penalty) this makes hitting a tank with a moving tank harder. This will mainly negatively affect units that are intended or designed around the concept of flanking, like the t34.

Due to the fact that they write scatter in general, I assume that it will affect scatter max distance and scatter max angle.

You can do a lot as Germans but the 500 mp at start is still an odd decision. I advised against it since it doesn't encourage anything but spam (first for the Germans, for the lack of alternatives, then for the Soviets as a reaction to heavy gren strats). The effect they're trying to get with it (easier tier1) isn't achieved with it, since every Soviet player will resort to spamming cons when he realises that building tier 1 and some penals loses him the map control and furthermore they're more expensive then 2 grens (including tier 1 building) and will lose the engagement.

In fact most on the forum where this changes was communicated were against it and still...

It's an interesting idea but so far my experience matches my prediction. This would have been perfect to be tested in the beta branch. Why it was rushed into the normal game escapes me.