Profile of VindicareX

I've been playing CoH2 for awhile now and I can say that the game has made significant progress in balance. In fact, except for a few things which I will get in to shortly, the game is well balanced. I find most mid to late game engagements reward the player who has the superior strategy unit composition, executes effective flanks, and can react quickly to battlefield conditions (and, of course, a bit of luck on your side): Company of Heroes is meant to play like that.

Now, what makes this game brutally imbalanced (at least for 1v1) are a few early game units and abilities that the soviets happen to have.

First off, Soviet mines. These things are far too cost effective at killing infantry. Often times they 1 shot the entire squad (which in the first 5 minutes of the game is devastating). If I even have 1 grenadier remaining after they hit a mine I count my lucky stars the squad wasn't wiped. For 30 (35?) munitions, these mines provide far too much cost efficiency and even leads to the Germans being pinned in their base lest they dare to move out and get killed by mines. Waiting for minesweepers isn't as easy as it sounds.
- The mines must be fixed. Make it like vCoH miens where they only kill 1-2 members and pinn the squad for a time. Anything but wiping entire squads at full hp. Soviets don't need free squad kills to crush their opponents further.

Now for the real problem: The M3A1 Scout Car. What's suppose to be a light recon unit means to scout and harass enemies turned into a murderous deathmachine on wheels. These units are so powerful that players like Cpt. Molo can play soviets exclusively and face off against top tier players with pure scout car spam and still perform well. Here's how they make Soviets win:

- Priced at 190 MP, 5 fuel, the M3A1 is dirt cheap. And for all that it provides, it's simply an investment you can't ignore.

- The M3 is very fast, able to outrun retreating infantry. This allows for easy squad wipes for any German infantry that dares to venture alone. The M3's formidably machine guns combined with combat engineer flamer or even guard DP LMG makes short work of retreating infantry.

- The M3's gun is surprisingly strong at long range. If you manage to face an opponent who has some understanding on how to handle these cars, you will face grenadiers in cover, which the M3 can efficiently handle outside panzerfaust range. The grenadiers, even in heavy cover, will inevitably lose when the soviet army comes for them. Even if the Grenadiers manage to heavly damage the car, it can easily back up and be repaired quickly for 0 Manpower bleed.
- If anyone played Dawn of War 2, they are basically IG Sentinels that made the IG race strong.

- The car faces no serious counters until German Tier 2 comes out, where upgun 222's or pak guns can effectively handle them, allowing Soviets to basically run wild with 1-3 M3s for several minutes and take the map.

Now knowing that you can't send units alone since they will almost always die to a flame car, you try to keep your army together and play very defensively (you basically sacrifice at least 60% of the map doing this). This strategy is almost always what you see top players do in response to scout cars. Even playing this way, your lines still might be broken, which will end the game for you as you already ceded most the map.

What's wrong with playing defensively? Nothing, CoH is a long game and holding at least part of the map can keep you in the game for a long time to make a break out.

The problem is this 190 MP 5 fuel car can so effectively shut German troops at almost no cost to the Soviets. It's extremely lethal to units and scores easy squad wipes and can deal good damage outside Panzerfaust range (maybe if Grenadiers had a built in sprint ability like conscripts it would be different...). They simply dominate the field, allowing the Soviet player to dictate the flow of battle and gain a significant resource lead that will eventually culminate into a dominate army.

Between mines and scout cars, playing as Germans is like storming into no man's land (it's very hard). Just look at the success of OMGPOP - sure he's a great player, but by simply building scout car he just dominates everything in sight with little effort. He thrashed both me and VonIvan with simple spam into guard squads in short order.



Fix mines to stop 1 shotting squads.
Nerf scout cars - it baffles me why they got buffed so hard last patch (HP increase from 180 to 200 and increased armor penetration). My suggestions:
- Remove the machine gun and decrease cost to 120/5, making it a pure recon unit and mobility tool to protect infantry that hop in to give it some firepower.
- Increase the cost to at least 222 levels (230/15), if not more.
- reduce speed (odd for a scout unit, but it's too damn good at killing retreating infantry).
- Severely reduce HP, making it far more risky to run the car into enemy territory to chase retreating squads. A single panzerfaust deals only about 30% of its HP whereas conscript at 'nade is far more damaging to a 222 (and easier to pull off with sprint).

In my opinion, nerfing both soviet mines and M3 will go a long way in making this game balanced. There are several other things that I would like to change, but none as glaring as these.

P.S. Nerf ISU-152 1-shotting infantry (reduce accuracy vs infantry?).

I tend to agree. M3's are too powerful for the early stage they come out in.

They cost 190/10.... needs a price increase to at least german scout car levels.

I appreciate your a pretty good, top 10 player Vindicare so if you could please expand upon this that would be great . I believe sniper play in VCoh took a while to develop, so i'm open to other opinions.

The Ostheer sniper already has quite a few defensive traits. Most obviously his cloak and his recloak time (after shooting) which is superior to that of the soviet sniper. I've had quite a few games where I simply cloak my sniper and jump from cover to cover to avoid getting killed where a retreat may get him killed.

Both snipers send their targets to ground for a couple of seconds, allowing you to control advancing squads and put some distance between the sniper and the enemy.

The Ostheer sniper also has a stun shot which is quite handy for using on charging squads to help him retreat (since it resets rifle cooldown between shots).

I believe making the sniper even better at defense (be it through HP and/or armor buffs) would basically make him nigh unstoppable except from a counter sniper (which was already mentioned). The sniper is an expensive supplementary unit that slowly whittles down the soviet army. If the enemy somehow manages to get an infantry squad right on top of him, or a scout car for that matter, he should be rewarded with a high probability of killing that elusive sniper. He's already very easy to keep alive at long distances and I haven't lost a sniper to "bad" RNG(first mortar fire, 1-shot crit on retreat, etc.) in ages; this is mostly because these occurrences are exceedingly rare and very easy to avoid with proper care.

In short - I can be aggressive with the sniper and keep him on the front-lines, but that puts him in the way fire and greatly increases his chances of dying. As such, I prefer to keep him back more and give him heavy screening/protection with grens and MGs. This sacrifices some map control, but is great for a defensive war of manpower attrition.

Funny, whenever I face sniper scout cars (or any scout car strategy), I just build 1-2 222s (with at least 1 upgun). If he invests so heavily into snipers as well, it usually becomes an easy win. Sure they are rather fragile, but with proper micro they stand up well enough to hold the map.

GL HF