Profile of Blovski

id be surprised if the m3 gets any armor buffs. currently, all the 222 gets for costing 25% more fuel is 2.6 more front armor and 1.3 more rear armor. the damage on their guns is very similar, except the m3 has 2 guns and also garrisons units.

heres the chance for small arms to pen the cars:

m3
front 11.9% rear 5.95%

222
front 9.09% rear 4.55%

the difference is already very small. rng will pretty much decide if either car can survive small arms after it gets fausted or naded.

m5 definitely doesnt need a buff. it has nearly three times the front armor and almost four times the rear armor of the 251, yet theyre the same price. it also has a much better mg than the 251 and lets garrisoned units shoot out of it. the only redeeming factor for both german light vehicles is their weapon upgrades, but theyre expensive.

The numbers really don't sound right Woof. Rear penetration lower than frontal? I think you've halved rather than doubled for the rear armour but your frontal stats are right.

I think German vehicle veterancy is way more powerful on light vehicles than Soviet vehicle veterancy (because they radically increase the munitions cost and coordination required to kill one). That might change so I don't want to put too much stress on it. (edit: you've addressed this after I saw your post, my bad).

There's also the fact that the M3 means you don't have any AT guns and the fuel for your first vehicle is delayed, which makes it much more high pressure as a strategy (i.e. a fast Ostwind can do you in if your fuel control doesn't make up for the 20 fuel spent). By contrast the Ostheer SC comes with 2 decent answers (shreks, pak) to a quick tank in the same building and when upgunned and vetted actually does pretty well itself against light vehicles.

Certainly, the German scout car is way more popular right now, and I think that's a good example of the meta reflecting that stats aren't as important as being able to fill a role in COH 2. But it could just be the vet making it a bit OP - we'll see.

Very well written post, great analysis and quite objective. There will be a few changes in the future which should give the M3 more flexibility.

Thank you kindly and good to know things are lurking in the pipeline.

Thanks for the responses everyone

@Kafrion - my experience is that the flamer normally does enough damage to force off a lone gren squad before the car dies.

@NWF - I completely agree there (I think the 221 vet 2 is just too good right now and it might be a little too cheap but other than that it's a really fun unit).

@Tristan - My view is kind of that the real asymmetry in the two comes from the difference between the upgun and the stored squad in terms of giving them ways to improve their damage output/versatility. I'm kind of waiting on the veterancy changes before I have an opinion on what the exact balance between the two vanilla units should be - right now I think the 221 veterancy makes a much bigger difference.

@1234 - I'm not really sure the M5 has been tried enough in the meta right now, to be honest. In my experience, adding forward reinforcement to the Soviets (especially Tier 2) makes them surprisingly resilient and the meatchopper is very decent against infantry. I think Helping Hans is probably the only top player I see using them as a matter of course with his T3, and he seems to get reasonable use out of them. Not disagreeing with you - I just don't think I've seen it and tried enough to say whether it works well. In theory there's a lot of really powerful things you could do with the units shooting from it.

I've been trying to do a strategy working the M3A1 into a Soviet build for the last two patches and more or less what I've concluded is that the armour isn't heavy enough for it to perform well enough against the units it theoretically counters, while the counters to it have been substantially improved. If the armour were increased to roughly the level of the Ost scout car for instance, I think that'd make it a much more potentially useful unit without buffing it against the things that are designed as counters to it or really damaging the asymmetry of the way the two scout cars work.

Naturally I'm keen to hear from anyone who's been trying to make the M3A1 work themselves and their experiences and anyone who's been seeing a lot of M3A1s or having trouble against them.

--

A brief history of the M3 in the meta:

Back in the open beta the M3 ruled the Russian meta. If you watch any of the TFN tournament casts, you can see an M3 squad kill in almost every game, and Sepha playing a 5 M3 start against a flabbergasted Aimstrong.

Then there was an eminently reasonable nerf on the M3 (specifically, the crew was now at a reasonable chance of dying when the vehicle got killed). Following this, a number of reasonable changes and bugfixes resulted in de facto reductions in the M3's usefulness:

Riflenade refunds were fixed, meaning Germans probably have a bit more in the way of munis now
The 221 armoured car topgun was fixed, meaning that an upgraded 221 is no longer useless and incapable of gaining vet until Soviet Tier 3 or 4 arrives, and that it's a much more appealing counter to Soviet Tier 1.
Panzerfaust damage was increased to 100 (from 80), meaning a scout car requires less small arms fire to kill it after a faust.

(and Ostruppen were introduced, which have twice as many fausts available as a gren build, and fast T2 is a little more viable with them)

The net impact of these very reasonable changes has been to make M3s a much more challenging unit to use nowadays and not very popular in 1v1. They still have a lot of functionality if managed properly and if you can kill the 222 sent to counter them by decent play, they remain a fun interesting unit.

My issue with the unit has surprisingly not really been all of these counters being improved (though they do make it noticeably more a matter of good management on your side) but actually the speed with which small arms fire damages the vehicle. Using a flamer M3 responsibly against pure p-grens or assault grens can often result in the vehicle and squad getting focused down by small arms fire if you're anywhere near the range you have to be to use the flamer, and similarly a vet 0 MG-42 can often do a surprising amount of damage to an M3 trying to clear it from a building. Sometimes even the good old M3-flamer faust-chomping tactic can get messed up by a couple of LMG bursts finishing off the M3.

Anyway, right now the M3 has an armour of 8.4 (front) and 4.2 (rear). I think if it were buffed a bit, that'd make the M3's performance against such things as aren't meant to counter it a bit better, while on account of it being eminently counterable and requiring skill and attention to manage, not overpowering it.

So, question, LMGs got a small nerf, right.

Is anyone really feeling it?

People seem to be complaining just the same.

i think a panzerwerfer is a light vehicle. it should be ok for it to die. it was just bad luck like a bunch of stuff in this game.

Even then, the 1 hit kill when I'd targeted nowhere near it seems a bit extreme (so, there was no opportunity to move it at all for my opponent). To be honest, with its level of anti-infantry power I don't think it needs to chew out light vehicles *that* quickly.

With the strafes in general, I find the undodgeability and very big target area doesn't really make for decent gameplay, and if an anti-infantry strafe is killing a rocket truck in one shot, that's kind of silly imo. Wouldn't mind if the strafe could 2-hit it or something so you give the Ostheer player time to react with light vehicles even if the smoke is sneakily placed out of LOS.