Profile of Bob Pontes

The situation is bad as the SUs are clearly OP. The best solution for me is to play ultra-aggressively and try to crush your enemy early. Make good use of grens on the early game, as they are good against a bunch of things. Then rush to either a P4 or any T4 tank (Panther or Brummbar) and try to finish the game. If your enemy is good enough and makes good use of snipers early game, this tactic might fail though.

Then you will have to face the inevitable SUs. It's very, very tricky. For starters, you will need lot of AT power. I don't think that holding on fuel until an Elephant comes out is a viable strategy - at least not on a game you haven't already won. You need to diversify: Paks, PGrens and Panthers. If it's a team game, try to complement your mate(s) armies. Do not just build a blob of PGrens - they might be the best counter to the SU but this will leave you very easy to counter. Then it all depends on what will your enemy will use to kill your infantry. If he goes Shock Troopers, maintain one or more AI tanks (Ostwind, P4 or Brummbar). If he goes KV-8, you *need* to have a Panther. If he goes snipers, a mortar can help blinding then while you attack.

Hold his advances until you see an opening to attack. From the moment you have a solid AT lineup, either accumulate fuel for an Elephant or spam Panthers and try to overwhelm him.

Notice that all these strategies are quite micro intensive: managing a diverse army while blobs of high-damage units are pounding you is tricky. So in any case you will have to outplay your opponent by a fair margin.

The problem on team games is not only it's range.
It has range + armor + damage + speed
When the Russian side lines up 2-3 of these, the German side is completely denied on tanks.
SUs still reverse at the same speed a (considerably more expensive) Panther advances.
If you happen to flank it, it still endures a *lot* of shots before being killed, and as it reverses really fast, it will often escape danger safely. Combine this with the fact that it's relatively cheap, and you have an unstoppable spam of these things on team games. Elephants are doctrinal, much, much more expensive and come at the very late game.

The only real counter to SUs is a blob of PGrens w/ Panzerschreks. But if you do this, you basically make the life of the soviet player simple, as all he needs to counter now is a single type of unit - solved with 2 snipers or 1 KV-8.

@Nullist: you might be right, I actually overlooked this fix from the patch notes. I will test some more in-game. If this is fixed, then the Pak might become a viable SU counter, which helps a lot - but I still think that it denying every German tank on the field is wrong.

any idea to what to do with soviet now after the patch?

Survive until you can bring the still broken SU-85?
And yes, I do play as Russians as well.

On team games, I'm starting with 1-2 conscripts, 0-1 M3 (depends on how many grens they have), and 2 snipers. Germans have a lot of problems with snipers until they can field scout cars. And the fact that you will force him to make a scout car kinda slows him down a bit.
My team mate goes T2 with ATs and mortars for harassment.

Mid-game is variable, but trying not to spend much fuel. Guards or T2+AT to keep scout cars in check. Survive the German T3 if he goes for it and get a SU-85 as fast as you can.
If you get to a point where you have 2 SU-85s, 2 snipers and 1-2 other inf squads... it's pretty much GG.

EDIT: And yeah, I haven't yet started using the T34, as I think the SU-85 is still ridiculous OP and I find it hard not to rush for it. But I guess that on team games you can have each player building a type of tank (one goes for fast T34 and the other aims for the SU-85).

I agree with a few points but I *strongly* disagree that the German MG is OP and/or has no counters.

M3s w/ flamers, snipers and mortars are all hard counters against the MG. And notice that these counters are spread between Russian T1 and T2 - so there's always a viable option.

In fact, as someone who played vCoH extensively I think that the MG42 is much less viable in CoH2, exactly due to the number of hard counters for it. In vCoH the US faction had no counter for the MG on T1, other than flank it. In CoH2 the German player pretty much has to build at least one Grenadier, otherwise gets owned by a single M3.

Thing is, focus sight increases its sight range, not its actual range. Thus if it reverses without focus sight it will still have the same range, just not its own spotter. But take into consideration that it will be reversing into friendly territory, thus it will 9/10 times still have vision of the attacking tank provided by either friendly infantry, or control points. I really dont know how big the effect will be, but I think the lol-reversing is still gonna be a problem.

My only hope is that the time it takes to de-activate the focus sight will give enough time for the flanking tank to get behind it.

Another good point brought up by nullist is that kv-8's are now gonna be almost un-faustable(like they were even faustable to begin with).

Good point, I hadn't thought of the friendly units still providing LOS. They will still have to deactivate it though, which at least puts more of a micro burden on it. But totally agreed that it will need to be further nerfed in the future.

As for the KV-8, not being able to faust it does not concern me, as that was almost always a suicide tactic anyways. My main concern with the KV-8 is that more often than not it completely kills a PGren squad with a single FT burst, even if the squad retreats immediately. Not being able to retreat upon meeting a hard counter is a serious problem that kinda breaks CoH's original concepts.