Profile of Hannibal

Your ELO was higher than the enemy team's. The ELO estimate expected you to win, but you lost. Therefore, you get a "high" penalty and downranked.

Second game, your ELO and the enemy team's ELO are more closely matched. The game is closer to 50:50, therefore you don't get as much of a bonus if you win.

Basically, everything working as intended.

The same thing occurs if your ELO was always higher than the ELO of the enemy team (which, if I get you right, probably was not the case). Then you get penalized for losing, but don't gain much from winning since you were expected to win in the first place. Also here, everything working as intended.

What is rally? If your talking about the rally point that is only available in Airborne but not Terror Tactics. Airborne ACC vet is overall worse than the other Soviet elite units also but probably to late to address.

Good point. I somehow connect the airborne rally point with airborne Guards, probably because they have existed only in combination for a long time.
The accuracy veterancy bonus not especially bad. Guard Rifles get +30% as well. Almost every unit in the game either gets +30% or +40% in total. On a quick search, I can't find a real pattern, it is not depending on elite/non-elite nor the optimum range. However, that doesn't mean though that Airborne Guards couldn't use a +40% buff instead the +30%. Maybe that is what they are lacking.

While a delay would surely be beneficial, CoH3 will be way better in the long run.

That judgement is obviously pure gut feeling, but from what Relic showed so far, they at least seem to know and work on 90% of CoH2's shortcomings. I assume CoH3 comes out fairly buggy, with acceptable optimization and probably overall bad balance. The first >half year will probably be fixing glaring issues and balance, as well as implementing some more "basic" and QoL features.

But there's a lot of promising signs that Relic/CoH3 will fare better. As mentioned above, Relic at least acknowledges a lot of issues and declares they were working on them. If that's really true will be seen, but it's not that they'd completely neglect where designs in CoH2 failed and kept pushing for it. Engagement of the community is higher as well as their hiring of community members into staff might potentially give them a bit better look/understanding how the game looks outside of their testing, at least as long as they actually have to say something.
The current visual fixes regarding contrast and visual hierarchy gave me confidence, that at least that part of the company knows how they can fix stuff quickly if the community calls for it. It's probably blindness to your own work that makes it often hard to detect room for improvement. It could be a hint that Relic does not have sufficient reviewing procedures. It is overall shitty to outsource that part to the community, but overall it can still yield a good game.

Other smaller factors will likely also contribute in the long run to a better game. Just to mention one: While it initially doesn't sound special that there will be four instead of the usual two factions at launch besides having twice the amount of equipment to play with, it will surely make the introduction of new factions via DLC smoother. CoH2 suffered a lot downstream from the DLCs, because Wehrmacht and Soviets have been balanced so intricately to one another, that - in combination with Relic's shoddy design for the new factions - the introduction of the new factions not only lead to problems for the new ones, but heavy changes on the old ones as well. Having four factions at launch will at the very least mitigate that.
I haven't followed AoE4 an awful lot, but from what I get the factions there are also more asymmetric than in AoE2, and the faction balance has become alright. The game also seems to regain players at the moment, so Relic seems to be able now to weather some storm and improve the game they have.
And last but not least: CoH is Relic's core franchise. They have more interest in keeping CoH alive than AoE, so in the end they'll also invest more resources into CoH if need to be.


My best guess is that buying CoH3 6-12 months post launch is probably the best strategy if you like the franchise. At this point, the game should be decently fixed with the initial weaknesses being addressed to not distract from the actual improvements.



(edited typos)

The answer is: clearly not.

Why is this the answer? Because you (nor me nor anybody else) can define what these terms means for COH2 Balance:

• Consistent (across what and when and where?)
  
• Cost for benefit (decided by whom????).
  

That's a very loosely defined and weak argument according to which you basically never need to update any game.
There are clear objective parameters such as cost, performance etc available to sketch out a rough idea. The rest is up for testing. Cost and benefit of an ability can be determined the same way literally all units and abilities have been balanced. Just play test.

If no one could ever properly say that something is too cheap or expensive for what it does, we'd never have any balance update.

There's definitely means to make things more consistent in CoH2, the points you made in the post above have no real argument behind them.

As for Hannibals argument, while I agree with it, can cause a slippery slope. The best example would be "Mark Target" as it does the exact same thing. It doesn't provide much against smaller units such as LV upto all 4 shot MED tanks. However once you get to the Panther and heavier it creates a situation where it takes 1 less shot to kill(sometimes 2 depending on tank). With the prevalence of snares it can be quite disproportionate on the value of the ability. The much larger issue is that most doctrines with Mark Target also have Guards who have access to Button. So you get into a situation where abilities synergize a bit to well and we get to where we are now. (Guards doctrines are over picked)

Definitely there are some downsides to it.

There will be concessions to make as in the example of the button ability. However, the button ability is definitely not an analogous form of things like Panzer Tactitian or Vehicle Repairs. It only exists on one single unit and the ability is integral to the design of Guards. The cost of Guards can reflect how useful they should be against heavies. It doesn't cover all the bases, but you can tune a couple of knobs very specifically.

That's not the case for abilities that are handed out generally to a wide variety of different units.