Profile of ThoseDeafMutes

CoH2's future should be a few more balance patches, a couple of OKW/USF doctrines, some ToW missions, and then it needs to be taken out the back and shot so as to facilitate speedy transition to Company of Heroes 3.

CoH2 has a lot of problems that don't seem easy to fix. A lot of people want radical overhauls, but those are basically impossible without simply creating a whole new game. The game is still a technical mess, and runs awfully on low-end machines despite not being a real looker, graphically. The game was designed with an honestly pretty awful DLC policy in mind from the beginning, a microtransaction nightmare with for-sale commanders that frequently wreck the balance before being nerfed. It still doesn't have a damned in-game ladder. It took 18 months and a major DLC expansion to add custom servers.

The future of the CoH series in the form of CoH3 should be as follows:

General

• Totally overhauled game engine with a focus on optimization for less-powerful computers and actually looking great on high end computers.
  
• Mod-support out the gate
  
• server browsers, custom ladders and other features commonly available in the early 2000's as standard features
  

Monetization

• Full price retail game.
  
• Unit skins, faceplates or other prestige/customization stuff
  
• Theatre of War packs
  
• Extra campaigns, substantial gameplay content.
  

Factions/Timeline

• 1940-1941 Timeline
  
• Base game: France vs Germany, 1940
  
• Expansion factions: Commonwealth vs Italy, 1940-1941
  
• Preferrably no extra factions, but could potentially add USSR and some kind of German+Hungarian+Romanian etc faction with 1941 equipment as Barbarossa. REALLY DON'T WANT TWO GERMAN FACTIONS THOUGH.
  

Gameplay

• Abandoning the "commander" design in favor of fixed, but much more flexible doctrines ala CoH1.
  
• Since the designers always know which factions will have which doctrines available, it should be less challenging to balance them against each other (in principle).
  
• Timeframe allows for light tanks and vehicles to have a serious role in the game; no super-heavy tanks exist in this time-frame and should never be added.
  
• ALL factions designed with strong core army, not missing important units purely for the sake of differentiation. No faction forced to pick doctrines at the start to get important infantry they need to stay in the fight (e.g. soviet design in coh2).
  
• All factions designed to be equal at all stages of the game; no steamroller design where one faction becomes unstoppable later on, and is weak in the early game to compensate. Even if you get it right for some game modes, team games always operate differently and you're going to fuck the balance in some of them automatically because of it.
  
• No bulletins, they are superfluous and add little/nothing of note to the game.
  
• Forward retreat points stuff up map design and make balancing between modes really hard; don't include them. Field HQs to reinforce and heal in the field are ok, but retreating should always punish you by sending you back to your base.
  
• serious attention paid to balancing team games, up to the point where it doesn't interfere with 1v1 balance.
  

I might have forgotten some stuff, but that's the main ones.

T1 gets Raketenwerfer
T2 gets JPIV
T3 gets Puma
T4 gets Panther

The current meta has everyone beelining for Panther. If the Pzshreks weren't so powerful, and OKW had to choose between lots of shreks or lots of LMG34s, players are encouraged to diversify by going for some other vehicles to cover one of these two weaknesses - either dedicated anti-inf vehicles, or dedicated anti-vech vechiles. If they don't, they will be unusually vulnerable in the mid-game, particularly to medium tanks.

For AT they might choose the manpower-only Raketen (which needs a buff currently because it's a bit crappy, but not a MAJOR buff), but regardless of what they do we should be seeing more interesting builds. Currently, the Volks+Ober spam (not necessarily blobbing, but it certainly is conducive to blobbing) is extremely effective, and also extremely boring to see it happen in almost every game. Stalling for end-game super units is a shitty boring tactic and it would be nice to see it become more popular and viable to invest in multiple mid-game units rather than saving for Tigers / IS2s / Panthers / lol Americans.

To represent the small, manpower constrained nature of the 1944/45 German military, there should be an "existence penalty" of 33%. So when you pick OKW, there's a 1/3 chance you don't get to play the game and there's just nobody in that slot.

Did the B4 get stealth nerfed? It got gun-destroyed twice in a game just then with no stukka dive bombs. The light arty barrage from assgren doctrine got a couple of hits and destroyed it outright. Second one went down to 1 glancing blow from light arty barrage + 1 direct hit from a walking stukka.

I think I'm taking counterattack out of my rotation now.

A tank escaping with a crit instead of dying is more impactful on a heavier, more expensive tank than on a cheap, lighter one. Consider the case of a scout car escaping with a main gun crit, versus a tiger escaping with a main gun crit. The same applies to a less extreme comparison like a T34 vs Panther.

In vanilla CoH2 this was a more symmetrical matchup, but with USF and OKW additions it could be said to favour Axis more. Getting main gun destroyed on a KT and it getting away because of it is usually a game losing dice-roll, because you will likely have sacrificed multiple mediums to do that much damage in the first place.

That said, there are much, much bigger balance issues than this right now.

As for smoke, it definitely pisses me off. Axis already gets the most heavily armoured vehicles with the most HP in the game, do they also need defensive smoke to amplify their efficacy? And blitz on tigers and shit, just ludicrous lol.