Profile of MarcoRossolini

Long time salty CoH & CoH2 vet here. Bought back in after some cautious positivity on a podcast and... yeah.

CoH3 is interesting and no mistake.

About me: strictly casual teamgame player. Just want to play for a few hours and have some interesting games with randoms on big maps with lots of variety where I don't have to stress. I've tried to play all factions equally, leant heavily on Wehr recently because I couldn't get them to work with non-meta builds. After not being able to get them to work (grens are god awful) I refuse to play them from now on.

Firstly, the good.

1. I think all factions have the capacity to be well and interestingly balanced. CoH2's factions had some fundamental design problems that CoH3's seem to lack. They have their own styles and some cool units.

2. Doctrines are much more interesting - even if the interface is god awful.

3. I actually like the shorter games. CoH2's games always ended with heavy tank thunderdome which was repetitive and played into the strengths of only one side. Tanks arriving on the field now feels more special.

4. Artillery being rarer makes for more interesting games. 3/5 sides having non-doctrinal rocket artillery in CoH2 just wasn't very fun. Indeed, I think things like the nebelwerfer need a small improvement so they can be something more than a mild inconvenience.

5. Tanks do damage to infantry. They have weight. They mean a lot. The days of watching tanks plink away forever are gone, thank god. Tank gameplay in general I'm pretty happy with. Pathfinding isn't ideal, but both sides have access to strong armour and have interesting foibles. M3 Lees v Pz3Ls has made for some exciting fights. Panzer IVs and Shermans being the super tanks of the game is a pleasant change.

6. I've heard lots of complaints about the sound. I find it pretty good. The vehicle sounds in particular are excellent.

That brings me to the bad however...

1. The blobs. Dear lord the blobs. Worse than anything in any other title. I can see where Wagner at Bakhmut have been getting their tactics from. 3 games in and still no attempt to penalise blobbing. You'd think increasing suppression and received damage the more units are near one another would be a thought, but no. Why even call it a tactical RTS?

2. The balance. Some favourites:
- British AT rifle sections. They can take on most mainline infantry and hit vehicles that are meant to counter infantry very hard. Wehr suffers particularly from this as their automatic weapons do very little damage. I don't want a return to the days of the PTRS being completely pointless, but AT rifle sections need to be hard countered by infantry so they can't be effectively blobbed.

- Free flares. I like that we have more of them, but coupled with how blobbing recon infantry is meta and there's just no hiding.

- Wehrmacht balance generally. The base lineup (excluding doctrinal luftwaffe which seems to work fine) just isn't any good. The absence of early armed vehicles to chase down snipers until after the enemy has AT infantry I think is a critical weakness. A lot of its weaknesses though also tie into the above. At least AK can use aggressive vehicle plays to get the sniper if the US player messes up.

- AA, in particular the British polsten, is 100% worthless.

- US blob removal options are critically poor. MGs across the board lack the ability to manage them and the US faction lacks things that can make a big explosion or lots of fire to deal with them. If you picked the wrong doctrine or the axis player isn't stupid then you're screwed. The amount of AT infantry around means that their light vehicles are more or less nullified.

3. The meta. I despise it. I'm quitting the game until it gets a patch because of it. Each faction has about one way to play. If you play outside of it, you're screwed. Only Afrika Korps seems to bring interesting choices to the game. About the only counter to the US sniper + pathfinder meta is to quit and get on with your life. As above - this is apparently a tactical RTS game. Following a build order isn't that.

4. Half the issue with CoH2's balance were that the maps were often very poorly designed with there usually being only one or two ways to approach a position that could be easily locked down and favoured one side. Whilst those issues have been pretty much fixed in 3, there's a near total absence of cutoff points in the maps we have. The game suffers a lot for it.

But, frankly, there's some ugliness here as well:

1. Can't repair bases. Base buildings have extremely low HP. I like that they can be destroyed in a reasonable time, but I just lost a game in the first 10 minutes because an AK player destroyed my base and then I couldn't repair anything. We were losing anyway, because blobbing, but what seemed like 5-6 mortar bombs from their halftracks removed everything I'd built.

2. Half the icons are from CoH2. Sloppy. Very sloppy. Can I get 30% off because I own CoH2 if we're going this way Relic?

3. Buildings are odd. Entering and exiting them is very janky. I swear I've lost squads because they just stand at the door for 1-2 seconds getting shot despite me ordering a retreat. As others have said. I swear you take more damage inside them than in green cover.

4. Blobs again. Because they suck and are boring to play against.

5. The interface needs... something. I've found it way too easy when a game is tight to queue the wrong units as Wehr because their buildings look the same and have very similar units. (T2 & 3 have 1 infantry and 3 vehicles in both their panels and doing the wrong one is way too easy). Readability at a glance needs to be worked on.

6. The balance. CoH2's balance could be rage-inducing at times, but the worst of the pre-release beta in 2014 were mortars being massively OP, magic reversing SU-85s and scout car snipers (oh, and the armour gameplay, but that never got fixed). I cannot recall there being only one way to play the two factions back then.
Frankly, something is rotten in the way balancing is handled in these games. Whether it's the way it's playtested, or the way feedback is actioned, or the kind of people giving feedback, or the fundamentals of what balance is meant to look like, something is wrong. In 2015 when I was in the open balance test we were deluged with a bunch of doctrines that never saw the light of day and we never knew what was next to be released, so that utterly unbalanced things were pushed out (i.e. the Tiger Ace doctrine - what a joke that was). I'm late to the party here. The game's been played by lots of people for a while now - and still it sucks?

So, yeah. These are the thoughts of a guy who plays casually and props up player numbers. Except that I'm out until the next patch.

The game in it's current state was fun initially, but I've had about enough of playing exactly the same pathfinders, fallschirmpioneers and AT rifle section meta every game. See you after the next patch.

Sorry, can't have allies using clown cars effectively. Have a good day.

(And don't say anything about 250, this crap gets built once in a blue moon)

Nonsense.

I see 250s regularly and they are effective - especially when it can be dug in as well for the suppression.

Vipper's hard on for anything the allies have which is vaguely effective makes it impossible to take his suggestions seriously.

Next.

Maybe it's just that I'm a meh tier player but I really the SU-76 for teamgames, more survivable and better utility than the T-70 with teamgames being more compressed and with more AT. Indispensible on the thin maps where one MG can lock down an entire side.

I'll admit I was quite salty at the time of making the OP, since I lost a game that had me just being run over by a guy who used them well and mined well.
I get having to flip the range, but as Esxile notes, that's not always possible with HMGs in the mix, especially on fuel points etc which the axis players tend to just drop an MG on pretty early on.

I'm more curious as to why this is such a common strat at the low levels where I'm at. It's constant. Let's say out of 10 games I've played recently vs OH as US, every single one has had assgren spam. As I said, it gets old, especially when they get run over by an early vehicle.

I'm also curious as to why UKF is better than OH - every time I bring them out I get run over (usually by the same assgren spam).

So what RTS's do you play where spam doesn't work?

Wargame.

Spam a blob of something in that and it'll get smacked by arty and bombed to nothing.