Profile of ThoseDeafMutes

Ciez, I agree with a significant percentage of where you're coming from. I don't know if all your solutions are good fits for CoH2 as is. But I think we are learning a lot of valuable lessons for a future game in the series, if we ever get one. The most important ones IMO are related to the pitfalls of asymmetric faction design. Not that we should abolish it, just that we should think very carefully about which kinds of units to deprive some factions of, and which to muck about with in weird ways. My preference would be all factions having a standard respectable mortar, mg, at gun, and core infantry unit, no gimmick stuff like Kubels and Mortar Pits, no silliness like pack howis and isgs instead of mortars. You seem like you want to add flamers to that mix, I guess that's a fair call too.

I'd also contend that no factions should be designed around resource shortages, and no faction should be especially good or bad at fighting in urban vs open areas IF POSSIBLE. The alternative if that is too restrictive is to make sure that ALL automatch maps have roughly equal ratios of enclosed and open spaces, so that we can at least balance that kind of thing for tourneys. Idk.

The targeted airstrikes versus loiters is something I definitely agree with you on, I can't believe they ever decided to make all strikes loiters for the base game. One of my most hated changes actually. Replace predictable strikes (which you can use experience and skill to both target and dodge as appropriate) with random nonsense in huge areas of effect that are total dicerolls regarding effectiveness half the time, sometimes get shot down and sometimes don't. The plane crashes fucking players up were just a secondary cancer that grew out of this.

Its reusing old Coh1 assets, the flame hetzer too.

Dunno about hetzer but Pershing is a new model for CoH2, completely different than the CoH1 model (which was still in files). The new pershing first showed up alongside the British forces Alpha, people alpha testing discovered a NEW one. The old one had been there for aeons.

I get the constant freezes. I get the memory shooting up and filling my 12GB and then creating a pagefile. Every first time I open the tac map, it freezes for a few seconds.

To stream coh2 in obsmode, I have to do some ridiculous things:

1) remove all replays from my replay folder (if not I get frequent bugsplats)
2) try to alt-tab as infrequently as possible (this is impossible to avoid as I need to control many other programs whilst streaming)
3) spend the first few moments, after loading into the map, moving the camera around the map and opening and closing the tac map. The process of doing this gets some freezes out of the way while I am in another scene so the viewers don't have to see them.

It's kindof a nightmare.

The memory filling up and windows creating a massive pagefile (I should never need a pagefile, ever) is the biggest evidence that something is wrong with coh2.

Alt tab might be better in borderless windowed or similar modes, if you haven't already tried.

And it is also a myth, losing huge losses in men and equipment in the first months of the war, before the beginning of 1943, the Wehrmacht had a numerical advantage

On a tactical scale yes, the USSR did not have overwhelming numerical advantages (at least not any more than any other army does at the points they choose to attack, where everybody always tries to attack the weakest positions with the most number of men to maximize advantage), however the total number of Soviet soldiers participating in combat exceeded the number of Axis ones on that front over the first few years. The Axis invasion forces enjoyed an overall numerical advantage in '41, but not beyond it, when in Q1 1942 the total manpower intake for the USSR was something close to double the Wehrmacht. Had the Soviets not lost so many formations early on in the war, their total manpower strength would have far outstripped the Axis from much earlier on than it did historically.

Trying to theme them around what are essentially stereotypes was always inadvisable, imo. The desperate, struggling Soviets zerg rushing the Germans to make up for their deficiencies are an early-war phenomenon. But that's what many people in the west think of when they think Red Army, so that's what Relic wanted to make it feel like. The late war Soviets were a well equipped, comparable fighting force to the Germans, roughly as good man-for-man and tank-for-tank, but with many more men and tanks overall. Things like conscripts with improvised molotovs in a mid-late war context is silly. Calling their core infantry conscripts feels odd because every army in the war used mass conscription, most fighting men in the US were conscripts, most fighting men in the German Army were conscripts, most fighting men in the British army were conscripts, and so on. Every country had lots of volunteers but was predominantly composed of conscripted soldiers.

In that sense, I'm glad that the stereotype has largely not held up in respect to their faction design (the campaign on the other hand...). The T34s suck and stuff, and they don't need to massively overwhelm the Germans with crappy stuff, instead relying on reasonably comparable armour. Their infantry is a bit mediocre but I can deal with that based on just faction diversity arguments, their weapon teams are often good and their specialists are ok. CoH is never going to be properly balanced if one faction needs significantly more units to take on the other, because of heavy micro burden associated. The USA wasn't designed to have twice as many units as the Germans in CoH1, even though in reality the US frequently outnumbered the Germans, just as the Russians did. It was not uncommon to have the forces be equal in size for a given battle, even though the Russians had two or three times more troops overall - tactical engagements could be of any size, and the Germans would also outnubmer Russians or Americans when they attacked in strength (even if, when you zoomed out 600km, you could count more Russians/Americans than Germans overall).

The real thematic failure, IMO, is OKW. Specifically the whole idea of 5 levels of vet is nonsensical. The Germans were NOT supermen in the Ardennes, no better than the Americans they faced down. Even if they were, wouldn't that theme mean that the Germans started stronger, as they were very expreienced, but had less room to grow from experience as a result? Shouldn't the Americans have more room to vet up? Shouldn't Soviet raw conscripts have the most ground to cover in terms of experience gain, thus being weakest but becoming much stronger?

Obers and other "elite" squads should have started at Vet 3, IMO, but having no room to get stronger because they're already elite. Then, the core OKW army should have been those raw recruits that were fairly weak, to support these elite call-ins / late game units. That would kind of fit the late war Germans in the west better, imo.

I also hate the gimmicky way they design additional factions. They always lack important core units that make balance a nightmare. I understand the want for diversity, but the CORE trio of AT/MG/Mortar should be roughly in tact for all factions, IMO. None of this Kubel instead of MG, Mortar Pit instead of Mortar garbage. Then the OKW fuel/resource situation... it just makes people who can't do math confused when having balance discussions, all the while GUARANTEEING team-game imbalance when the faction who is designed to be resource constrained scales up to larger modes.