Incredibly stupid bug that I noticed but when you use the handbrake on the M5 it also causes the top gunner to hold fire.
Someone has to hold the Handbreak. |
Mortars aren't for entrenched positions, and that's the fundamental flaw in their game design. Mortars are for breaking up concentrated attacks in open terrain where the shrapnel can fly everywhere. The chances of landing a mortar shell in a trench is quite difficult, and will at best only affect a few soldiers since trenches are built with curves etc. The only time you would expect mortars to affect an entrenched enemy is if you've got an unlimited number of shells, and all the time in the world.
What the mortar should be is a blob punisher, as it is in real life. It was cannons and mortars that killed mass formation warfare after all.
If the game wants mortars to have a serious role in the game the following needs to happen:
Drastically reduce damage on mortar shells. No more than 10-20 HP per model.
Drastically increase the AOE radius.
Increase the projectile speed.
Increase the range.
If possible add a special 'adjustment shell' to the barrage that's fired first, and lands almost instantly. Ought to do low damage, but will suppress if it hits at least two squads, and possibly pin if it hits 3 or some other number. It shouldn't be enough to suppress a single squad.
The end idea would be that mortars are no more than a nuisance to a single squad; however, the auto-attack would be cause serious damage to a blob, and the barrage would be a near force retreat.
Well, no, I'd argue it was the Machine-gun that truly killed Mass Formation warfare, not cannon or mortar. Formation fighting coexisted with both for hundreds of years.
It died due to developments in Machine-gun technology, and to a similar extent advancement in the accuracy of infantry small arms. |
I hope stuff like this is given a little more weight if there's a coh3. I know coh isn't meant to be a perfect stimulation, but I wouldn't mind if they leaned just slightly more towards realism
It's different reasoning but a friend of mine won't play much because of how friendly fire is handled in this game. He thinks hmgs should do friendly fire suppression, mortars should have full friendly fire damage etc.
Idk if I agree with him that it would make coh better but it would certainly be interesting. Friendly fire suppression i think makes some sense at least
Edit: i should clarify he means for your own units. Obviously teammate friendly fire could get cancerous
It all doesn't bother me so much, I can accept that it's a game, and a lot of these abstractions are for the good of balance. I'd rather have a playable and fun/balanced game than one that tries too hard to be realistic at the expense of playability.
I have just found that friends of mine can't quite think in the same way, and keep trying to 1v1 Panthers with Churchills with no support.
EDIT: Really its consistency within the game itself that I'm more concerned with. AT guns inexplicably not being as effective against certain targets they "should be" effective against, for example. |
This is pretty much the case currently with Penals being glass cannons and Conscipts having sandbags and 7th man upgrade. The patch tweaks Penals to make them less glass-y in the late game but I haven't tested them enough to comment on how they feel late game. I don't know if PTRS can really be classified as either offensive or defensive but balance wise I think it's better to put it on the more expensive squad to limit blob-ability and be a conscious choice. I'd also like to see something like Button replace satchel though I'd like more variety of abilities and let Guards keep their uniqueness.
To some degree, but Penals being behind an extra building, and costing quite so much more than Conscripts, (And not scaling quite so well, particularly in terms of utility) causes them to be rather less viable as a "Mainline alternative", and more as a strange "shock unit" that they truly exist as now, which has limited them/their usage.
The concept I had in mind would be to have them both be tier 0, both be approximately the same price, and both be similarly equipped weapons-wise, but diverge when it came to abilities and potential upgrades. I really would prefer they lost the PTRS upgrade, or Cons got it instead though, particularly if they did become the "Offensive" variation of mainline infantry. (But I still think tier 1 guards is the better solution). Both should have merge, incidentally. |
That's also something to account for. Even if a change is OBJECTIVELY better, human psychology weights more the lost rather than the gain of something.
And then you thread a thin line between what its right or not. Why AT infantry or a flame grenades destroy faster than an AT gun for example.
Exactly. There's a lot to be said for making things "make sense" for players.
Honestly this same issue arises in a few friends of mine who i've tried to play CoH with, who can't even get over the fact that many units in CoH do not act in the way they "should" when compared to their IRL counterparts. One friend being very unhappy when he built a Firefly, and finding that it did not act as a medium tank, for example. This is rather a more extreme example than AT guns, but I thought it was an interesting anecdotal addition. |
Double Bren (stronger) could work if it was mutually exclusive with 5 man (as 5 man taking up a weapon slot) so you would had to opt between double 4 man Bren squad or 5 man with single Bren.
You could also gate a weapon slot behind Hammer/Anvil, meaning that early on you could only have a Bren (more simil to LMG42) or just the 5 man upgrade.
Even further now that medics are cheap and heal on AoE, you could make the 5th man linked towards either of the upgrades (pyro/medic), giving visual representation to that upgrade by giving them a weapon which occupies that slot. In this alternative version, you could get 5 man IS with 2x Bren but without medics nor pyro attached to them.
Talking about the medic upgrade specifically: I think that one should simply be done away with entirely. It's deprecated since the addition of nondoctrinal Medics (And that UKF get medics on their FA) On top of these two other options, the Medic upgrade is really far too powerful. Free, on-the-move AOE healing, with the only downside being that you can't also upgrade to a Pyro section.
Other than that I agree with your post. Bolster could, instead of being a faction-upgrade, be a unit upgrade in the same way as Pyro (Or, as another example, the Conscript's 7man upgrade) The current design space is really not conducive to proper balancing. |
While possible, i don't think Relic nor the mod team likes to add target tables unless it's really needed at all.
Even if you were to cut down the damage from an AT gun to 50%, it would still be a better choice against emplacements due to reliability and RoF. On top of having a hard AT been a necessity as opposed to having a mortar.
Unless your faction is OKW and you went mechanized (with new patch ISG been more accessible), you don't build an AT gun to counter those things. You build an AT gun because you need to counter vehicles and while there's nothing else to do, you use it to assault enemy emplacements.
If recent tournaments have been anything to go by, what you actually buy an AT gun for is to kill enemy Sandbags. :^)
I agree that target tables are a poor idea, though, they make things far less readable. There's no logic behind your AT gun being inexplicably worse against certain targets, and it doesn't "feel" right to people. |
When a buff to the StugG?
This unit is not being used anymore since the ROF nerf a few patches ago.
The TWP buff from this patch is not a buff... its a reverted nerf from some patches ago.
It isnt? I admittedly haven't played much in a while, but I never found the STUG to be bad. Even with the nerf it still does very nice DPS vs enemy mediums, particularly for it's low price. (Plus it gets an MG, which is not hugely significant, but a nice bonus if you can afford it).
The buff to HEAT is also welcome.
It's certainly not competitive with allied TDs vs heavier armour, and assuming they can leverage their range they squash it flat in direct fights, but that's ostensibly what OST have the panther for. |
That doesn't work due to how the popcap system works.
Popcap for infantry is squad pop value + 1 per model. Regardless of cost of the upgrade, it will always be more efficient to get 4 squads of IS with Bolster than 5 squads of IS without it.
And this doesn't even account for RE.
If we account for either pyro/medic (now even the raid upgrade) on top of the weapon system things gets even uglier.
The problem has always been 5 man IS with either squad upgrade, grenade unlocked and double weapons been over the top. But to achieve that, you need to spend an unholy amount of resources and you will only see it when at really late stage of the games or as a consequence of a snowball effect.
In regards to the weapon system, i think the issue is that the Bren was nerfed in the wrong direction. A single Bren doesn't cut it and if we account for the penalties out of cover affecting way more the performance of LMGs than their base rifle, you would rather have an extra model of IS rather than a 4man squad with a single Bren.
Finally, vet. It was the initial general design that UKF would get worst vet bonuses on their infantry, so their scaling is more tied to those upgrades. If you check, you would see that the bonuses are inferior to all other factions main line bonuses. Reminder that they had their scoped lee enfields at vet 3 removed, cause the execution of it was extremely poor (they increased the likehood of dropping weapons and, at first, they even reduced the DPS of the unit compared to vanilla rifles). Even after it was fixed it was barely an improvement.
TL;DR: Bolster is problematic because it's the more visible and worst component of a whole system which is flawed.
If you asked me what makes IS hard to balance it is in order:
Bolster >> Weapon upgrade >>>> Squad Upgrade >> Sandbag > Vet > Trench > Grenade >>> Millbomb
I wish lelic would just allow the Balance team to do away with Bolster as it currently exists. It causes SO many problems and really doesn't add anything interesting to the faction other than "haha my squads all have an extra guy now  ".
Brens should be balanced more around single-upgrade performance, and prevent a second being purchased, squad upgrades need a MAJOR look at (I still think reworking the "Assault" officer as the vehicle for UKF infantry gimmicks would be an elegant choice, and would make it more usable in cases when you don't need an SMG squad. Make him the starter unit, with Enfields, and give HIM the ability to have powerful abilities. There are fewer concerns to be had when you can't spam him), and if Bolster could be done away with, Tommies could be given a more "normal" veterancy, to provide their scaling instead.
Regarding Sandbags, Trenches, and the Mills Bomb/Grenade tech, I agree they cause issues, but I don't have specific suggestions to change them. |
How is Penals' "design" being an alternative mainline infantry to supplement Cons any different? It's not like people don't go straight Fusies and No Volks like people go straight Penal builds. They also have two clear paths: either keep them vanilla AI or go PTRS route. There is also nothing stopping players from using them like P-Grens either and building several Conscripts/Engineers before building a Penal with similar timing to P Grens. Your concerns about the fact that they come in with Full AI power unlike Fusies doesn't have real balance concerns right now because 1) Penals are hardly being used right now so their early game AI power obviously isn't a balance issue right now 2) Nothing in the balance patch changes that right now aside from a slight T1 build time decrease
Just come to terms with the fact that the "design" of the Penal is basically a hybrid Fusie/PG that has it's own drawbacks different from them. IF they are used more it'll likely only be because their PTRS route is actually viable to use now and facilitates different strategies, which is a good thing. I'm open to nerfing them if the PTRS package is too potent (I'm leaning towards removing AT satchels or locking them to T4). But you really can't seriously argue that Soviets shouldn't have a stock infantry AT upgrade when every other faction has that option...
I mean I guess you could mold Penals into Fusies and have them start cheaper/weaker with a SVT upgrade package but I think that's a terrible way to go because it adds additional balancing problems and once again Penals early game power isn't an issue
"Alternative mainlines" really need not directly follow the PF model of "Starts worse, becomes better late". There's room for two mainlines to provide "Different" strengths to an army, rather than one simply being "better" than the other. I could well see Penals being made to be a more "Aggressive" Mainline, and Conscripts being tweaked to be more "Defensive", for example. The specifics involved in this are debatable, but I really don't think there's cause to dismiss the concept out of hand.
Given that PF are doctrinal, and Penals are stock, it's understandable that PF can appear to be more enticing than Volks, incidentally. I should like to see both Volks and PF changed a little, but that's outside the scope of the "Soviet" thread.
EDIT: I also still think Penals as the "AT" unit in T1 should be replaced with a Guards unit of some variety. Guard's utility abilities (Button, for example) help make up for PTRS' somewhat lacklustre performance in AT terms far more elegantly than the AT satchel does. |
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