In general you always want to merge when in combat. In base merge only if the unit you merge into is significanlty more expensive and has no armour (for example guards). Don't merge into support weapons with stock crews unless you need to keep them alive in battle. MGs get worse RA after merge, other support weapons also cost less to reinforce than conscripts. Do merge into captured support weapons, they are either conscripts, so you lose nothing, or more expensive models that don't really need their RA that much in this role.
Iirc pathfinders crit at 40% health or something like that meaning the opportunity to sniper models is less and USF is a faction that any problems you have arw better solved by throwing another rifle squad on the blob over diversifying your units. Why add a unit that can model snipe and little else when you can have a squad you can attack move with the rest and snare and throw grenades and and and and.... You will find any unit that uses a different tactic than brute force will fall by the way side for usf.
Yeah, that is exactly what I said. These units didn't work out, because there is nothing in them that is better than another infantry squad. Now if you had a real sniper doctrinally, you would definitely want it in the mix.
Doctrinal/nondocrinal. You will always see units that players have natural access to mire than those that require a dedication
I don't think this argument is valid in this case. Think of pathfinders. The airborne commander has been in meta multiple times thanks to its ability to supplement usf tech tree. Yet, pathfinders seem to be used only in troll strategies.
I would say we've got about 0.5 factions left designed around combined arms. Even Ostheer has been increasingly punished for team weapon play; they already are pushed into spamming infantry or mgs/mortars. And against the arsenal of the three allied factions, the ostheer sniper is really only useful against one.
Which means we should focus on returning these factions to their initial, superior design, instead of thinking about removing snipers all together...
Also, even if you are going to focus on sniper against usf, mgs against soviets and mortars against ukf, it is still much better strategic diversity than going infantry spam every game.
From the standpoint of strategic diversity the best situation is when agains each faction you can go with more than one strategy without crippling yourself (of course depending on what your opponent is doing) and when you can't do the same against all factions. This situation at least assures the second point.
Not that the idea doesn't have merit, but it is something more towards a future CoH3. Which in that case, i'll rather they move towards a model on which snipers works with a %HP crit threshold so they must work in tandem with another units rather than been stand alone man power attrition armies.
This idea has already been tested in WFA and people seem to use these sniper units rarely. In theory they have crit chance, more sniper rifles and lower chance of getting wiped. In practice, their performance if very RNG dependent and they don't let you win your engagement any better than another supporting infantry squad would. This is because they can't decrease enemy dps in whole engagement by sniping one model when it begins like EFA snipers were designed to.
There is much easier way to remove the "one man army" snipers from the game while keeping their support role. All one needs to do is making them slightly slower than other infantry, so they can't soft retreat when unsupported.
You obviously put a lot of thought into this and I would be happy to discuss it with you.
However, the question no one can answer, should be asked here:
Do we need snipers in coh?
We have two original factions that are designed around combined arms, which means they need to support their weaker infantry with support units. Mind that out of 3 main support units: mgs, snipers and mortars, its the sniper that is most fun to play. I'm pretty sure everybody can agree that game was in a pretty bad state when mg spam was in the meta. Mortars are brainless and thus they don't really fit top tier gameplay. Removing snipers would mean these two factions are either left with going back to mgs and mortars or spamming infantry. Is that the direction we want to go?
While I agree that Cohs charm is the atmosphere, voice lines etc. a large part of the atmosphere was lost when they enabled Amis/ Brits to team up with Soviets. #stillsalty
They did that because game without usf didn't sell in 'murica. And they totally screw their chances on russian market with campaign, that was considered there as defaming. For the same reason they added pershing later even though usf was designed to be medium oriented.
You wanna know why grenadiers have higher dps then their con brethern?
4 for 6 man
2 more rifle's AND 2 more bodies to drop. Math behind it translates into roughly 2.5 more dps required to be Equal.
As for dps on long range, it's a joke since grens are moving, mostly at 3 men or less and firing vs a cloaking target.
The only way to kill a sniper is with another sniper, and the 1 man change will not change that.
And if you want to go back to sov sniper utterly destroying ostheer, please make it fire as fast as ost sniper.
Sorry, but this is complete bullshit. For multiple reasons:
1. LVs are getting buffed against snipers
2. Snipers get their RA nerfed.
3. Even this patch, most snipers die to flanks, especially soviet ones. Many die to indirect fire as well.
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