Profile of Imagelessbean

General overview:
You are doing an absolutely great job of spreading out and denying him fuel. Your micro of units however is not up to par with your capping ability and you bleed out MP like crazy after the 6 minute mark. You also continue to opt for grens when you see a blob of 5-6 units. You could easily afford to build as many MG42's and let them suppress the blob. You purchase both stormtroopers and PG's which makes little sense, if you go elite get Stormtroopers and rely on the pak with gren support until a tank can arrive. You spend your munitions on intelligent upgrades, in general, but you fail to put down s-mines on flanks, which would immediately threaten the blob. If you can bring your micro up considerably you will be beating these rifle blobs in short order.

From the replay places to improve:
You build an MG early and send it forward to take a building without scouting first. You are not punished for this but you are lucky.

Your MG sits in the building for more than 5 minutes without doing anything.

You fail to faust a greyhound when it makes a push at his cutoff, this alone could have won you the game early.

You do a fairly good job of retreating as the game starts, but then fail to retreat an MG when you had loads of time to do so and give the American a real gift.

You place two squads in a building with 3 windows, and then have them both wiped when a single nade brings the building down.

You are too aggressive with your pak gun, although you do get lucky. It should have a gren within faust range of it at all times.

By the mid game you are losing lots of units to wipes which is costing you a fortune.

Your first P4 does great work, but you have it at half health and proceed to dive behind his lines. At this point you are just asking for a rifle nade, in short order it dies.

Second P4 is moved into position to attack and sits statically firing at the blob until it dies. This unit should have been allowed to fire at the blob and then backed up at half health for repairs.

Pak guns should always hold fire and prioritize vehicles, at all times (almost). Yours fires at infantry for the majority of the game.

Your third P4 is ok, and does well in mid vs. the blob, but you do not move it between engagements so he knows exactly where it is when he comes back. The same can be said of your MGs. They need to move after you force him to retreat. Same area, new wall.

You opt for an Ostwind late, when he has 3 shermans and you know of two and dive it into an AT gun for little gain. You should have gotten 2 stugs and given up the Pak 40 you also purchased. These would have made short work of the Shermans and opened up your P4 to deal with infantry.

You do a good job of spreading grens out to take MGs, but those are YOUR MGs! He should never get his hands on them.

When he has roving tanks you send a number of high vet units behind the lines and he simply fines them and then wipes them.

Suggestion:
Try playing a game without having a single lost squad. See if you can manage to keep every squad you start with alive until the late game. If you can do this you will notice a significant improvement in your game. Do not wait as long to retreat, you want the squad back at base.

I would be willing to see changes made to goliath, if it loses self spotting and has 0 sight range.
It already gets to be built without an engineer present and can be moved anywhere on the map.

It is unfortunate to see the community so divided on this that we are willing to tear into each other.

I understand the risk v. reward in COH1 aspect of building design, and I really, really liked it in that game. However, COH2 has significant differences in level design, faction design, and diversity which this change will not take into account.

Had this been built into the game in 2013 or early in the game's life I would have been 100% for it. Since the design of the game widely departed from COH1 after this point I don't think it appropriate to try to bring back this mechanic.

The rally point system, while certainly imperfect adds a seriously important element in team games where teams can work together or split up as soon as the game starts, providing interesting strategy options. This will be completely removed by forcing spawns in buildings. To add to the benefit in 1v1 is small, since 2 factions gain literally 0 choice about base layout. If the problem is inconsistency in delay, simply move the starting off map point to the edge of the map so that units appear and near instantly enter the field.

Again, I understand the draw for both sides, but I am afraid at this stage in the COH2 life cycle this change does more harm than good. I am willing to test it, but my general feeling is to wait until COH3 to return this feature (as well as commander tech tree choices).

Edit: Another option, would be to make the build order part of the walk-in time. As the unit approaches completion it begins entering the map, if canceled it spins around and walks back, but if completed it arrives at exactly the same moment as the announcement of its production. This would, I assume, solve the issue of arrival outside of control time. Another simpler option is to leave the units symbol greyed out until the unit is on the field to give the player a very obvious tool to know when the squad can be ordered to begin a task.

I don't agree. The threats faced by OKW and Soviets are worlds apart. What early vehicles will Soviets face that can actually threaten their infantry? 222, flamer halftracks, AA halftracks, Panzer 2, 250 halftracks (rare). All of these are countered by the T70, and the T70 is also extremely lethal against infantry and is part of the natural tech progression for Soviets.

OKW don't have a T70 equivalent. All they have to counter light vehicles is the Puma, which is too specialized in AT and does not contribute to your early game army even if you manage to take out the enemies first vehicle. It also leads to an awkward tech path where you can either get your next armor in a reasonable timeframe but you don't get medics, or you get medics and greatly delay your armor.

OKW is going to get pretty unplayable in the balance mod. You can compare the preview patch OKW to the Brits. With Brits, it's AEC or bust. With OKW, it's going to be Puma or bust. But at least going for AEC will make your field presence stronger since it also kills infantry pretty well, going Puma does not, since it has only poor anti-infantry.

I think both of your arguments have merit. Forcing OKW to get Puma's will get old quickly, but I agree with Katitof that currently Shreks provide a crutch to allow OKW to do anything it wants instead of relying on the player to make intelligent strategy decisions. So while we do need to come up with some way to get OKW through the mid game by giving it some reliable AT, I think the loss of shreks is probably the best place to start since if places more onus on the OKW player.

Let's assume shreks get removed and come up with a better way to balance the faction. Do we need to improve the Flak HT to provide the OKW a light AT option in Med and a heavy AT option in the Puma in mech?

The tears on this forum...

Do you not remember literally less than 1 year ago when OKW received so many buffs that it had to be multiple hot fixed just to let other factions even have a chance to make it to the 15 minute mark?

Relax and leave constructive criticism so we can decide about the mod. COH2 is not ending, we are just in the midst of a major balance change.