Profile of Hawk

It's 2v2, every decent soviet team will have all tiers and both shocks and guards.

One going conscripts+shocks into t2 and the other guards+sniper clown cars and there's not much you can do since both guards and shocks will be out before you get t2 up.

All I can suggest is to play definsively, make good use of cover until you can get some t3 vehicles out. Sniper would be the must go bu they are buggy and need a ton of micro to avoid m3s, mortars and countersnipe.

Yeah, that's pretty much what we've been seeing. We've tried to play defensively and hold on, but our defense is essentially a house of cards. Once they break any part of it, the rest comes tumbling down. The shocks roll through the gap and just eat up anything in their path. Then we're giving up map control and the rest of the game is spent trying to fight back to even. The 120m mortar really makes you pay for being defensive as well. MG42's and Paks are just free XP for that beast. Now I know why it was my favorite unit when we were playing Soviets.

I do have good luck with snipers but the True Sight mechanic is a nightmare with them. So often you think they have a clear LOS on an engagement and they just sit there doing nothing. As soon as you order them to engage they run out of cover and out of max range and then it's constant babysitting. Still, I do think they're worth it.

Thanks for the input. We'll keep trying to adapt and figure something out. If I get a good replay where I feel we made minimal mistakes and still got trounced I'll upload to get some advice.

It's not just the grenade mechanics that people are complaining about, it's how the cover system and increased resources encourage and enable over use of clickable abilities.

Someone else mentioned it but in CoH if you had a unit in heavy cover and someone tried to rush that unit through red cover, the rushing unit would normally take heavy damage before it had a chance to throw the grenade, making it a risky proposition at best and possibly a complete waste of resources. In CoH2 assaults like this are common and usually end up favoring the rushing unit. That ends up meaning that positioning your unit in heavy cover was less important than babysitting it and making sure you dodge the incoming grenade so you don't completely lose an engagement you should have had the upper hand in to begin with.

Also the fact that standard strat points provide munitions and fuel means that there are more munitions available in general which makes using an ability less of a strategic decision as you're more than likely still going to have munitions available later for key upgrades. Obviously this won't be true if you're losing complete map control or spamming the ability in every engagement but it's still more common than in CoH where a decision to throw a grenade had better pay off as you were possibly delaying crucial upgrades later in the game.

It's also insanely frustrating when your own squad moves to squat in the molotov you just threw, or you dodge the molotov and then watch your grens move on their own back into the flames.

Wait a minute?! If this gets implemented then my 120mm mortar might stop having as many friendly kills as enemy kills! That's just not right...

So how about that? Try and figure a build with your partner that exploits the fuck out of the narrow t2-3 window BEFORE they can start gradually accumalating their Panther horde of doom. Mix a little AT into the mix though, because even though younmay jot be able to destroy each Panther as they come out, even if they are overextended, the repair time and especially engine dmg makes them unable to coordinate with the Panther horde as a cohesive whole. So keep each individual one as dmged as you can, in turn.

This is actually the approach my 2v2 partner and I have adopted and it's risky but it can work. We actually do it with me leaning heavily on T2/T3 and he going T1/T4. The key is if they do start to get panthers/tigers out you need to have several T34's and be willing to use ram to disable them and have the SU-85's finish them off. You have to make sure you use the ram in a situation where you're almost certain to kill the panther otherwise it'll be a net loss. There is also luck involved since you're not guaranteed to damage the engine.

Sadly if you can't pull this off it's pretty much GG against a smart team. Once they hit critical mass with the panthers you won't be able to stop them even if you have an equal or even greater amount of SU-85's. They'll blitz right past your SU-85/ZiS defense and once you get those units turning it's over. Guards won't be able to stop them long enough, and late game mines are harder to keep up with arty blanketing much of the field.

Even worse on many of the maps is the Elephant. On the maps with lanes/choke points these things can deny a huge portion of the map to any Soviet armor which makes them next to impossible to kill if they're supported well. You pretty much have to get lucky with an arty/bombing strike since you'll never get armor anywhere near them and you have no AT infantry capable of doing significant damage to it.

Good idea. Or simply something in the cone display of MGs and AT that show what parts are in and out of LOS/true sight.

That would be an improvement, but the units I'm most concerned with are ones like the sniper or SU-85. If you think your sniper has a clear shot and you tell it to force fire on a high priority target in the middle of a large battle, it sometimes decides to run up in the face of the target and usually ends up dead. Same with the SU-85 which depends on its range and doesn't have the best mobility. It can turn the tide of a battle when one of these units wigs out unexpectedly because a pixel gets in the way of their sight!