Profile of Hannibal

When 5 entities fire on 4 entities it is certain that at least 2 entities will be firing on a single entity.

I did not object to that.
What I said was that, in a real game, you'll most likely get a 2/3 split of Riflemen firing on Grens and 2/2 split of Grens firing on Rifles in an open field battle. On top of that, cover will split the damage more equally, which will more often benefit defensive factions than offensive factions.

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I don't think balance team had much of a choice. From even some smaller things that they publicly said that Relic would not allow them to do, I doubt that Relic would have allowed them to fully rebalance USF tech structure.

Anyway, back to the point:
USF is short on MP in the beginning. In any normal build (3 Rifles into officer, but I think it is the same for 2 Rifles into officer), you will hit the 35 fuel for tech up way before you'd tech up anyway. The only way to make the teching up faster would be to reduce MP cost, but this would also mean that USF had a very cheap backup officer squad for the late game.

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While probably not broken, what would you replace the two commander slots with?

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I absolutely oppose giving more LVs a recon mode. The game has already made factions more "samey" across the board, they don't need to make the units feel the same, too.
It is fully fine if some factions shift more of the cost to combat, while you pay for utility in others for the "same unit type".
The huge sight range KT is obviously stupid, as are highly mobile TDs that spot for themselves.
Volks also only get 42 vision when in cover and at vet4, which takes a while to kick in. That vet is good for defense, but useless on the offense. No core combat unit should be able to basically self spot and dodge MGs (in cover and in the late game, you might be able to pull your squad out before it gets suppressed. And even if not, the MG will be almost useless since you can easily crawl out of range). We can see this problem with Pfusiliere already, where you just get artied all the time.


What I would have liked to see on USF is to make the officers into actual support units. The Lieutenant is almost a copy of a Riflemen squad, while the Captain has some quite limited utility. The major is good, especially after the sight buff, but with 3 models he can be easily forced to retreat. But the first two need something different. They could even get a single M1919 upgrade in my opinion to add more long range firepower for USF.

I think that with my idea, this could be implemented in the current engine.
(I know you said this is a hypothetical but if Vipper is correct about both being built on the same system then we'd have to do a little thinking about how it could be achieved in CoH2 anyways)

Realistically, the player won't be able to tell the difference between whether a bullet missed their soldier entirely or just failed to penetrate, so I think just modifying the RA of certain cover types based on the weapon would work just as well, and it still holds to the spirit of your "armor" idea.

What do you think?

The real question is: Would you think it to be beneficial for both game play and making CoH authentic?

Anyway, I just checked: There is already a solution fully implemented in the attribute editor. Relic has probably already thought about something similar. You can manipulate a weapons penetration value depending on the cover the same way you can modify accuracy and damage. That's the same thing as increasing the targets armor, just coming from the other end.
An accuracy modifier depending on the penetration could work, however this would technically not account for penetration changing based on distance. I assume no one would notice, but it is not quite correct as well.

And what I am trying to pointed out is that the current system applies to weapon not squad themselves and that is why direction cover and point mechanism works.

By giving an armor bonus to squad itself instead of the weapon one has to add a new calculation done by the squad to see if the weapon firing on the squad should get cover penalty or not. (not even sure if that is possible)

If one want to the effect you describe all one has to do is to adjust the cover tables of "high penetration small arm" so that they have lower accuracy/damage penalties so the DPS equals that of armor.

I've mentioned multiple times now that this is a design discussion that is untied from engine restraints. I've mentioned how the current system of RA and damage reduction is not authentic and what issues it creates, to then further introduce how my suggestion could at least partially solve even those. From the beginning I clearly stated my suggestion is not supposed to be introduced into CoH2 and that there would be issues in doing so.

Please stop with assuming to apply all changes to the CoH2 system. We don't exactly know how CoH3 functions, I assume similarly, but nevertheless we get a "fresh" start with people working on the game and being able to make larger changes even after release, as seen with CoH2. But even assuming all that, this discussion can be completely untied from both CoH2 and CoH3.


EDIT: In the end, even in CoH2 and since infantry armor is standardized, you could just apply a penetration debuff on the weapon if it shoots at squads in cover. Not sure if the Relic devs allow for that in the mod tools, but that would technically be a very easy thing to implement using even the old CoH2 system.

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My point was that the RNG of 1) and 2) is the same. There is no way to distinguish between a shot that missed and a shot that hit but bounced. The player only sees two outcomes, regardless if there are two layers or only one layer at work behind the scenes. And the chance for success in any matchup of two squads will be stable. For two squads, you can fully transfer the penetration chance to accuracy and the other way around, as long as there is no deflection damage. The main difference between options 1) and 2) is that the behaviour of 1) is more intuitive if you look at multiple different squads.
If we assume 3 squads, one having low armor and pen, the second medium armor and pen, and the third one high armor and pen, this becomes very clear: The low squad loses the medium one. The medium in turn is weaker than the high one. Everyone will assume that the last squad is just the strongest of them all and should absolutely wreck the low one. But nope. The low and medium squad die at the same rate, because the high squad will 100% pen both of them at all times, so armor does not matter. That is the problem with armor on infantry. Top it off with the fact that all of these people are made from meat and bones, there is no reason for them to have any "armor" beside gameplay reasons.

From my experience when I tested small arms fights, the main component for RNG was not accuracy, but if the squad focuses down one model or if they target different ones. If they target at least two models, early drops rarely happen, because too many shots have to be made before the first model is killed, meaning that you will be close to what you expect from the fight. Only the old vCoH system can actually lower the effect of early model snipes, but not cancel it out.

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I doubt your system will really solve the issue you are describing, but in the end also create other problems. From what I get, you want to remove e.g. model snipes and similar high impact RNG based stuff from small arms.
But as long as there is a decent chance to penetrate and deal full damage, model snipes will always happen at a regular rate. One option is to increase the range of armor values, so that your chance to penetrate is actually fairly low. Model snipes would then be a really rare occurrence. However, this leads to the problem I described above with the "low/medium/high" squads: If armor of infantry is not standardized, there will always be very odd and unexpected behaviour of different squad match ups. There are too many options to discuss them all, but at the moment I don't see how to really avoid that. Keep in mind that the average player only plays a couple of matches per week or month. He does not have the time to find out how a unit fares against the tons of different enemies.

My main guideline is that the mechanics must be intuitive and as authentic as possible. Yes, you can find some explanations for basically everything in the game. You could even find very odd explanations for the old vCoH system. But the more explanations you have to strap on the less it will be authentic.
Assuming your explanation of

More experienced soldier maybe moving differently, exposing less of his vital parts

is true. Why then does this soldier know how to hide from a pistol shot (low pen), but not so much from a rifle and even less from an MG bullet? This does not make an awful lot of sense. Why does it depend on the calibre of the weapon? Behaviour in the game will therefore be unexpected again.

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Most of this I have covered with the above points I guess.

I'll leave it at some last comments/repetitions:
I am fully in favor of keeping infantry armor standardized. This is what I would expect from the game. Experienced soldiers being harder to hit can be believably described by RA.
Fiddling around with standard armor levels will almost guaranteed lead to weird behaviour in some or most matchups that is not intuitive.

And finally, I'd like to come back more to the actual point of the thread, because I initially did not aim for discussing infantry armor in general:
Cover should change armor. This makes sense intuitively and logically. All the penetration and accuracy values would affect the fight in an expected way. High penetration weapons ignore more of the cover because they can just shoot through it.