Profile of Hannibal

It's both a LOS blocker and a Shot blocker.
It not the lack of sight that prevent unit from firing.

Unit will not fire on units in smoke even if they can see the enemy unit. Even removing FOR of war via cheat mode will not allow unit to fire.

I don't know that much of the technicalities, how Relic programmed it exactly and how cheat mode interacts with the game. I guess Relic wanted to hide or double ensure the wanted behaviour of smoke.
When I am talking about a shot blocker I mean that the projectile will be deleted or explode when colliding with the shot blocker. This is not the case for smoke. For small arms it does not really matter, since they don't have ground attack and can only shot at what they see.

(decided to put this into a spoiler since the main topic is still about how smoke could/should function).

Show Spoiler

I do accept your opinion but I can't really agree with the reasoning behind it.

COH2 started with some level of consistency that made the game more "readable" (can't agree about intuitive), for instance Ostheer vet bonuses where the same across vehicles and "Blitzkrieg Tactics" provided the same bonuses to all vehicles.

That created balance issues since certain bonus where to high for certain vehicles (like the FT) and was less "intuitive" since a Tiger gained the same bonuses as an ostwind.

Over the years Relic realized (that as I had suggested) bonus and abilities should be customized to fit specific units. That makes balancing easier.

Consistency is a good thing but that does not mean that things should be identical, all what needs is categories of abilities/bonus with similar usage.

Yes I agree to this. Your comparisons however are not equivalent. The Blitzkrieg does "the same thing" on all units. You'll still get maneuverability and target size buffs. The extend is tailored for balancing, but you'll press the button for the same reason on all units, and it will basically do the same thing for all units. Both variants of this ability do what the player expects and wants them to do, even if they are not aware of the minor differences.

Here, we can also see that minor alterations in abilities don't really confer well to communication: OKW's combat Blitz is pretty different ability. Still, many players don't know that this ability is much more offensive than the one of OST (as seen by e.g. Tightrope's explanation videos), despite having a (slightly) different name and icon. Because visually, they do the same thing: The tank goes faster. Minor differences like acceleration boosts are not recognized by players that easily, and no one will ever be able to tell if that shot that connected/missed was now due to the ability buff or pure luck.

Changing the icon is a good start, but if the names are similar enough and they visually do basically the same thing on the battlefield, there will be confusion. The clearer the differences are, the better and more readable the game will be.

Which directly ties into this point:

As for "readability" it is not hard to achieve by using specific names for categories, icon and in game descriptions.

For instance:

a good example is the commando grenade, has a different icon with a shield on it, a different name and a description of the effects. In addition the ability is designed around the unit.

an inferior example is USF smoke grenade that has little indication on the icon, effect is explained on description but the effect seem arbitrary (at least to me).

I obviously disagree to that.
We have a similar situation as to above: There's minor alterations to the icon and ability name, but visually they do pretty much the same thing. This is exacerbated by the fact that even the normal smoke grenades have different names and icons, making it even harder to spot differences. I agree that the USF smoke effect is very arbitrary, actually both of these abilities are designed very badly. And this is exactly why I disagree with how I understand your main proposal. We have other examples of that where names are shared orsimilar, icons are shared or similar etc. Some are Hull down (KV1 and OST), Target weak point (OKW Command P5 and SOV), camouflaged AT guns, multiple OST units had a "heat shell" ability before it got partially renamed, different types of automated vehicle repairs that actually have completely different icons and names, yet people complained on this forum multiple times that they are so much different and how one is stronger than the other. On all these and other examples, even if players understand that there is a difference, it is not really obvious what the difference is. Point is: Icons, names, descriptions are not enough. If two abilities are too similar, players will assume that they behave similarly. This might be the fault of the players themselves, but it is still bad game design to not account for that. The most obvious solution is to clearly differentiate them on a visual basis on the battelfield.

Obvious and intuitive differences are fine. 152mm shells producing more smoke than a Nebelgranate is pretty intuitive. 152mm shells doing some minor damage would also be intuitive.
Smoke grenades like the Nebelgranate producing light cover, while 152mm block vision might also be intuitive, although I would guess that Nebelgranate also has a completely obscured area, especially if you overlap multiple of them. Anyway, that would be suspension of disbelief for me, those details would be hard to communicate to the player and the simple solution is fine.
But I don't see a benefit in specialized smoke like e.g. the Churchill's smoke giving additional buffs to infantry in it (although it would make sense gameplay wise as an infantry tank), then the smoke of an Scott giving different buffs, mortars again having different buffs etc. Even if there are reasons - different payload size, different chemicals etc - the game would not be readable or intuitive.
The overall idea begs the question where you set the cut offs. Even handheld grenades had different sizes. Then there is the 75mm Scott, 81mm mortars, 105mm howitzers, 120mm mortars, 152mm howitzers all using different shells, payloads etc etc. How many classes are necessary, where are the cutoffs?

Keep the system simple and understandable:
E.g. All smoke blocking sight OR giving the same set of bonuses would be okay, just the size of the cloud is different. That's an easy system. The best one for deep gameplay? Probably not, but understandable and -for the most part - intuitive. At least as intuitive as almost any other system that you want to represent in an arcade game.


(edited for clarity and added points)

I am pretty sure that in real life a smoke screen from ML-20 is match more effective in concealing movement from smoke screen from a hand held grenade...

Which is solvable by increasing the smoke radius per shell and scatter, which is totally fine and not against anything I said. My point is that the game should be intuitive to the players. It is intuitive that a 152mm shell can create more smoke than a handheld grenade. It is not intuitive that (random example) the smoke of a 152mm shell creates some bonus for the soldier/vehicle within it, while the same soldier being concealed by the smoke of a handheld grenade does not/gets a different bonus.

Different types of smoke already exist in game like the commando grenade smoke and the USF grenade smoke, so the current system is already complicated. The suggestion would rather simplify the system and make it more complicated.

Exactly, and no one uses USF smoke to make an Axis vehicle go slower or the commando smoke to get light cover (for the latter I am not even sure if it works that well since models in smoke cannot be fired at, the only solution is some kind of radius around the smoke that applies, even if the model is not in the smoke anymore. Which does not make sense). Most people probably don't really know about it in the first place. They use these smokes when they want - well - smoke to cover an advance. It could be a normal smoke grenade as well.
Your suggestion would use what is currently rather an oddity of very few units into a more fleshed out concept. But as I said, this will still create confusion for the players since there is no inherent logic reason for smoke to behave differently.

Main point here is that current implementation in COH2 make smoke a mechanism that a big impact and little counter play. That result in overuse in game.

What do you base it on what is "big impact" and "little counter play"?
Smoke works as expected, and fairly close to reality considering what an arcade RTS is able to portray.

Call-ins system is competently fine. Its just need adjustments.

Delay upon unlock. In other words, say you stale your CP for quite some time, allowing you to instantly pick call-in unlock. This is where the problem comes from, such approach allow you to pretty much have a "panic button" considering you have enough resources.

What should be done - make cool down upon call-in unlock. It shouldn't necessary be equal to re-charge timer, but say at least half of it.
CoH2 did it right with 0CP call-ins like paths\ass.engis and so on, basically it they had "production" timer, but it worked only after the game start.

Imo this production timer should always be applied after you unlocked call-in, to mitigate instant panic usage.

Or something else could be done. Maybe call-in units should arrive after a delay which will represent their production time? Or just commander buttons should act like a simple unit order from building?

Definitely there needs to be some kind of delay.
One major problem with call in units in CoH2 was that they allowed tech skipping. If you didn't use call ins back then, you were always one tank behind. This made the meta and gameplay very boring, especially in smaller modes where power spikes matter more.
They somehow need to be bound to tech, but at this point it does not really matter if they are build in a building or called in from off map, beside the building delay.

What I personally dont want to see, is, CoH2 style, unit inclusion in tech buildings, like P4J for wehr.

Why is that?



What call ins could do though is to shift economy needs. That's apparently already Relic's design, since the call-in tanks in VulcanHD's video did cost manpower, but not fuel.
You could then build e.g. more LVs early on instead of infantry, generate less bleed and re-invest the saved MP into the vehicle call-in. Or, conversely, play more infantry heavy if infantry call-ins cost less MP and more mun or fuel.
It could also still work in the late game, when you realize you're out of one resource and can shift costs that way.