Profile of Imagelessbean

if this is so why dont we increase the HE damage reduction of yellow cover?

Because it adds depth to gameplay. Not all cover is created equal and having a player understand when it is important to be in cover vs not is really important.

Keep in mind there are four cover types (red, grey, yellow, and green). Red is negative but offers speed bonuses to some units. Grey is not bonus, unit is stock, but is actually better against flames. Yellow offers light arms fire but tends to clump up squads, I think, flames also get a damage bonus here. Green cover offers small arms protection and indirect fire protection, but gives bonuses to flames hitting units in it. Green is also capable of stopping rounds from vehicles so if they flank you and fire into the back of green cover the can wipe the squad in short order. This complication makes the game more interesting by forcing players to make real decisions about whether or not to use cover, and where to seek it out.

If in doubt, always go green cover in early game. Avoid green cover when tanks are flanking, and avoid yellow cover in the late game when indirect fire is plentiful. Keep infantry out of red cover at all times. Use grey cover to cross from cover to cover.

Suggestion from Vipper is good.

Also if you are laying wire, and watching, try to leave a bit unfinished so that you can still cancel it before you leave if a unit cannot get out.

Unfortunately the AI is not smart enough to try to avoid building itself into a corner. RE's and wire actually are the ones I have the most trouble with as they love to trap themselves between traps.

No, you would find the damage in the cover table of the weapon file. Damage vs structures is dependent on certain AOE modifiers in the AOE section of said weapon.

On the actual note: the Katyusha has no penalties vs units in heavy cover.

Thanks for clarifying.

Because the DLC factions were designed later. Relic released CoH2 in a time when their previous publisher, THQ, went bankrupt. They had to push CoH2 out in a state that most certainly didn't match their intended conceptual design completely.

I think a lot of things/ideas were scrapped from the Vanilla factions to simply reach and/or realize the launch of CoH2. These ideas and utilities you now find in the DLC factions.

This.

The game was released in a hardly finished mode, large bugs remained that even made play hard in some cases. For instance, at release the Su85's out ranged pak guns and could snipe crews, got no debuffs for focus forward and even had infantry detection to help them do this, this kind of stuff does not make it through good play testing and balancing before launch. DLC came much later when new ideas could be built in.

How do you balance it now? Well you could make units that come from stock factions more powerful by a slight margin to help them, you could offer them more tools, etc. There are many ways to do so.

Somehow the sniper changes were successfully packaged as 'light vehicle' changes so I've been pretty leery as to how restrictive this 'Scope' really is.

Instead of insinuating that the balance team is cheating us and pushing their agenda, please go back and read about the scope of the patch. That was released in all of its gritty details a long while ago.