While agreeing with you I also feel there is another problem with the way Relic designed COH2: they say "Every battle tells a story", and they explain you that they want players to talk about the games they play with their friends and even after days remember what happened.
I know people hate when someone brings COH1 again and again, but in this specific case it is important imo to mention that game because Relic started designing COH2 from the work done on their first game.
In COH1 not every battle told a story and a lot, truly a lot of games, were just huge stomps from player/team A to player/team B and vice versa. And it was totally fine because they were just showing that a better player was beating a worse player, or that between two equally skilled players one of them was taking advantage of the windows of opportunity provided by the game better than his opponent. Those games telling a story tho, the so called "epic games", were truly amazing and since they were more rare to happen they were also bringing a huge entertainment factor with them, that us casters/events organizers were using to bring people excitement about the game and that also defined players skill level (top players were capable of interpreting the game in a way normal players were not even remotely capable of doing).
I'll dig in a bit more into this and bring the example of "comebacks": doing a comeback in COH1 was something complex to achieve and a lot of times it relied on a real effort from one player to change the game situation, since the resource system (as Quinn says too) was more "punishing" and less flexible because of the fact big resource points were way more important than simple strategic points, that manpower income and popcap were linked to map control, that cutoffs had a huge importance, to the point a top player knew when capping the cutoff was more important that capping a resource point (while in COH2 it's economically better to hold as many territories as possible despite what territories they are since they all provide resources)
The approach Relic decided to take in order to follow that design principle is what I think is one of the hard-coded wrong aspects in the game that also has to do with RNG: with the idea that every battle had to tell a story, they introduced/magnified the impact of two main elements: Rubber band effects to avoid snowballing effects (making a general match of COH2 more boring to watch/play but reducing the "skill gap" between top players and good players in order to make the game easier to approach/learn for newer players) and RNG effects (in attempt to raise the entertainment factor of a general match of COH2 by introducing more elements in the game not in players control, like squad wipes and plane crashes).
- Rubber band effects to avoid "snowballing" effects. (for those who do not know, snowballing your opponent means taking advantage of a certain situation to create a snowball effect and potentially even win the game in a matter of minutes, like the M8 + 4 riflemen push with infantry off-map artillery against Wehrmacht in COH1)
There are a lot of rubber band effects in the game and the main ones are all related to the economy system: from the way popcap and manpower works to how resources are spread over the map (less importance of cutoffs and resource points, more importance of normal strategic points), the result is that it is harder to close games entirely compared to COH1 because even if you take full advantage of an opponent mistake or on the other side you maximize the effect of a good action you do, your opponent can still field a 100/100 infantry based army that will be able to fight till VPs reach 0.
On the other side, due to the way Relic approached the economy design, if a player gets somehow back in the game he would still need to cap the majority of the map in order to stop the opponent's income (since every point matters more now). I believe the overall result of all this is still a balanced situation: comebacks happen more because of an opponent's mistake to fight the attempts of the opponent to comeback by throwing his infantry based army at him for 10 minutes (till VPs are 0), and at the same time they can be stopped more frequently because it takes more time to actually stop the income of the player who had an advantage, since resources are more spread over the map.
Be careful tho to think that this "balanced" situation is the same for both COH1 and COH2: the biggest difference I see here is in the way these comebacks are executed and in the entertainment factor that comes from them. The "every battle tells a story - at all costs" design principle is the reason because there is a reduced entertainment factor and by consequence a reduced skill gap between the top players and the good players. I can't express it in better words but having casted and played myself both the games I can really feel what I just said and I could go back watching tons and tons of games of both COH1 and COH2 and notice the exactly same difference.
- Increased RNG effects. In my opinion Relic decided to increase RNG effects, mainly squad wipes but to a certain extent also plane crashes and AOE damage in attempt to compensate for the decreased average entertainment factor of the game and the fact that matches felt generally more boring. (before the weapon profile changes RNG, in the form of criticals, flamethrowers, mortars, had a dominant role into turning those fights of grens vs conscripts shooting each other behind green cover for 10 minutes into something more..entertaining and in fact cheese strats were dominant at least till the end of SNF5).
What RNG should have brought, an increased entertainment factor, in reality turned into more frustration for both the players, to the point where RNG in the form of plane crashes and squad wipes caused by AOE weapons may still have a decisive factor into deciding the outcame of a match.
The argument that the players that win tourneys are still the same is partially flawed by the surely huge amount of top players that either stopped playing the game entirely or stopped playing it competitively (you know, there is not really a reason to spam COH2 games right now since there are not many tourneys, the problems/bugs are still the same and/or there is no incentive to keep playing competitively since there is still no league system or a proper ingame built ladder with levels - both things we hope will come soon!)
With all the respect for our current top players, they still play far from perfect games and this is true because there is no incentive in improving and pushing forward the skill level because of how small the competitive scene around the game currently is. (besides the fact that the rubber band effects built in COH2 are a real limit on what you can do in the game and the results you can obtain when you outplay your opponent)
What Quinn said is not false if you think FOR WHO this game was built: COH2 was built attempting to please everyone, from the comp stomper who might enjoy RNG more because it brings more variety in the games he plays daily against the AI to the mass of new players scared by how hard playing and learning an RTS like this can be, who can find these rubber band effects good in order to have more time to learn and adapt in the game (especially because the lack of easy to understand datas to determinate how strong units are against each other have the result of making the "ingame experience" far more important than all the rest), up to the small competitive community on the game, who has still a nice game to play with that still rewards good players for playing better than others (sadly not enough as I would like to see)
Finding the right compromise attempting to please everyone is no easy task, that's sure. And I understand a lot of the decisions made to design COH2 (even if not all of them), even some I disagree with, being myself very close with the competitive community of the game.
But the RNG issue in particular is something I believe Relic went too far into: RNG is a core element in COH2, but too much RNG is just a direct cause of frustration and leads players to a negative attitute towards the game and developers that doesn't bring anything good to anyone.
Ultimately I have my own idea on how I would personally adjust COH2: I strongly believe that a succesfull game has to be first of all as fun as balanced and have as few frustration/out of players controls elements as possible, while also being designed to always challenge (an element that imo is totally lacking from the game) players to find new strategies and solutions to approach certain problems presented in the game (like adapting to certain units) by offering them a lot of strategic options and variety (Inverse knows well what I'm talking about).
I don't pretend COH2 to be built to be an eSport, I want it to be as good as possible so that the CORE people around the game, like events organizers, casters, key figures which have a lot of weight in the community can promote the game with the help of a strong advertising campaign from Relic/SEGA aimed at producing/organizing big events around the game.
Something in the mid betweehn what happened with Heartstone, League of Legends and many other famous eSports
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