Profile of Hannibal

The question is: What to do with USF once it gets hit by the just nerfhammer?

Left in the dust.


Judging by Sanders comments over the last time, I assume that the balance team wanted USF to have a late game arty option like the calliope but Relic vetoed that. I think balance team also took the wrong turn when they changed the Scott into a barrage unit instead of auto fire. USF lacks late game wipe options in team games, so they have to opt for higher damage over time.

On the other hand, I am not quite sure to which extend this problem really exists. I somehow have the feeling this mostly is a top100 or maybe top200 issue, but please correct me if I am wrong.
For arranged teams, I think USF will still be viable. The Soviet player or a UKF arty regiment player can make up for a lack of indirect. Or more likely: USF will go back to Calliope doctrines only. The recent patch has not really changed this strategy all that much, I am actually wondering what happened to the Calliope meta.

Imo it has everything to do with COH2.

HMG (Mortars) can be extremely effective and counter multiple mainline infatry but have less pop than mainline infatry because of their role as support Weapons.

TD are in the a similar manner "support weapons" (atg role) to counter main battle tanks.

Generally speaking TDs will not win the game main battle tank will, main battle tanks serve more roles.

And if 15 POP of TD counter 20+ POP of MBTs, I'd call that a worthwhile investment.
Overall, your logic only works in few cases. It does not explain ANY elite infantry. It does not even explain any vehicles that have decent AI or maybe even AI only. All these would not be worthwhile, they do cost more in both POP and resources than even the most expensive infantry squad there is. Still, people build tanks. Why? According to you, that should be a waste of population.

Elefant hardly see any action in 1vs1 for a reason.

Yes, but obviously not for the one we're discussing here.

In sort, role comes first and power level comes in comparison to units with the same role.

This is a mere statement without much backup. You even made the point yourself, quoting Sander, that cost is related to unit performance. Obviously, not the role itself.

But I'll leave at that. I think we've had this discussion in some form already and we both made our POVs clear. OP wanted to discuss the relation between resource cost and population with the specific example of the Firefly and Jackson, which has barely been done so far. SO I'd rather come back to that.

To the topic:
I've always considered population to reflect the unit value at later stages of the game, while resources rather take the role of reflecting the value of the unit right out of the gate. Obviously it's not as black and white as that, but the general idea works well.

POP always defined for me how much combat power you could squeeze into your army. Units that scale very well via upgrades and veterancy should therefore be more expensive in population. Buying a unit or upgrade is an upfront investment, for which you usually need quicker return. Goes more towards the "shock value" of the unit.
I agree with Sanders that these values are balanced within their faction, although I'd say "mostly" instead of "only". We've regularly had standardization of units or abilities across factions, and this makes sense to some extend.
Regarding your example: I think in the end probably no one would really notice the difference between a 16 POP or 15 POP Firefly or Jackson. The Jackson should not be overly expensive since it's your only AT unit to really scale into the late game as USF, unless you want to spend all your munis on those special AT rounds of the 57mm ATG. I think this is why it did not get a price increase: To not risk gating USF out of AT options more than necessary. On the other hand it performs so well that Jacksons need to be population intensive. I assume this is why they cost both less resources and more POP than the Firefly.

We didn't forget anything, Rangers were purposefully left at 10 pop because of how effective tripple elite Bazooka Rangers are and we didn't want to encourage spamming them. Thompson Rangers being affected by this was a sacrifice that was made deliberately. If it wasn't for the zooks they could've been 9 pop like other elite infantry.

Quick question:
Was it considered to give Thompsons a tiny buff then to make them on par in value with triple zook Rangers? If so, what was the reason against it?

Hi guys

New update on the player cards. Now it shows also AI games and custom games.
The right top info "card" has also changed - previously it was calculated from all the games. Now it's calculated only from ranked games.



Isildur example:


Or here is player with lot of AI games https://coh2stats.com/players/76561198132689304

Cheers
pagep

Very neat addition!

Out of interest, could you look up how the number of games or the total play time of AI games, custom games and ranked games compare? It would give a good indication how much of the community is actually participating in ranked matches.
Is this doable somehow, at least with some random selection of players to estimate? I know that you don't have complete data on every game that is being played, but might there be a way to do it?

Think he is referring to the tournament where the majority of games where Ostruppen vs Mechanized.

Wasn't this AE's Chaos Krieg tournament with 250 VPs? In this case it's not very surprising that players go for strong early game strategies.
Although Osttruppen have dominated at least one other, "normal" tournament iirc.