Profile of Fortune

These things are pretty amazing, with Scotts, Stuarts, strong infantry synergy and weapon upgrades, there is almost no need for a heavy or even medium tanks. Scotts force the opponent to commit to dealing with them since their range and ability to shoot over obstacles while having a decent wipe potential renders them annoying, to say the least.

The more I play USF, the more I find gimmicks like this, and the more I start really hating the faction.

The point is this:
USF infantry and light vehicles are so potent and with so varied applications that it leaves other factions looking dull or incomplete from a purely game design standpoint.

Stuart -
Can 1 shot squads if you can micro them to shoot properly
Fast speed and good acceleration
Vehicle Stun
Engine Damage ability
Has the Crew inside who can instantly repair crits for 10 munitions
Even the tiny MG does decent damage

Scott -
Fast
Good rate of fire
Fires over obstacles
1's cute, 2's a nightmare
2 Scotts for 150 fuel can make Panzer 4s blush.

These are both micro-intensive units mind you, and if you purely look at the stats you might be left wondering what the big deal is. These units are simply too good for what they do. Normally for any other faction if you have a unit that's really good at one thing, you get a counter to it and kill it. With the Stuarts and Scotts this is not so, since they are just so fast and can get away from trouble with ease.

/end

They seem pretty good, though then again USF itself is very strong.

Highlights:

2:28 Tommies in "Heavy Cover" losing to Sturmpioneers in "Negative Cover", this is actually misleading.
The Tommies are in Heavy Cover only insofar as it relates to units engaging from the other side of that cover, cover is generally directional. A unit with the green shield can still be in negative cover, since that road they're fighting on is basically a paintbrush of negative cover. The Sturmpioneers on the other hand are taking fire mostly on the one model who is in fact behind a rock wall.
Just because a unit has a certain color shield saying cover/nocover, doesn't mean anything. Cover is applied per-model, and directionally.

You do have to account for scatter as well, if there are infantry models behind a Heavy Cover model, those infantry models might be hit by stray shots. This happens a lot more than you might think.

Bear also in mind that where the shot "looks to be hitting" is completely irrelevant, the animations aren't necessarily tied to in-engine results. Sometimes a shot looks to be hitting an object and yet it does damage. There are exceptions to this however - AT Guns, Tanks and Projectile Weapons are the inverse to this rule. Snipers also have a few oddities to them:
Tell a Sniper to shoot at a building (which has a garrisoned unit inside, so you just right-click) and the Wehr/Soviet Snipers will do just that - shoot at the squad inside. Tell the Brittish sniper though to do the same thing, and he will literally shoot the building itself often ignoring the infantry models within.

4:48 Tommies blew up the Kübelwagen. For the prior 20 seconds the Kübel seemed to not take any damage. Remember above I said to "ignore the animations"? This is why: Just because a Vehicle "gets hit on the side / rear" doesn't mean this in fact happened.
Vehicles in CoH2 are not 3D, they're 2D. Instead of a Kübel imagine a flat line. 50% of the unit is Rear, 50% of the unit is Front.

Where the unit gets hit on is determined by a dice roll proportional to the angle presented, any increase of 90 degrees results in a 25% increase/decrease to front/rear hit chances respectively if you're rotating your rear away from the enemy, and this is inverse when you're rotating the front away from the enemy. If a shot "Hits the rear" of the vehicle it still counts as a "Frontal Hit" unless the game gives you that big red "REAR HIT!" event text. The Kübel's armor is such that trying to take it out from the front will take you a while, so what's relevant is where you're hitting it, not if you're "penning", since the penetration chance is that low from the front.

5:35 Sturmpioneers run over "Negative Cover" and engaged a Tommy squad in "Heavy Cover", here's a wonderful thing about cover that is often overlooked: Under 10 range, Cover no longer applies. Thus, the Sturms running over that small distance between the house and the wall did suffer damage, but they were also dealing lots of it while moving (sturms have a relatively high 50% accuracy while moving). The Tommies in "Heavy Cover" had no more protection than they would've in Light or No Cover.
Ironically had the Tommies not been "buffed" out of cover and had their in-cover bonuses lowered commensurately, they would've easily taken out the Sturms. But, it stands that Tommies' in-cover bonuses are negligible if within 10 Distance from target, since as pointed out above, <10 Distance Cover does not apply.

This game is roughly half the length of my usual posts, but I found it to be a fun match.

Great game.