Mmm, I do feel at odds with some of this discussion.
I do think that USF Air Support Center got overbuffed. It was pretty damn useful after the air support ability re-work. Adding buffs after that to each ability and reducing their cost was... too extreme. ASC had very little counter play for any team weapon. At the same time the AA power of core anti-air vehicles was halved (a good thing). If you can't shoot it down... then you have to be able to dodge it. It was possible (if tough) to dodge with infantry squads but impossible to dodge with any AT gun or weapon team. Given the cost and cooldown you can just cheaply remove models and pin an MG every engagement or deny/kill anl AT gun - which given the state of riflemen and light vehicles for USF (very powerful) - it's pretty oppressive.
Rolling back the changes of the most recent patch is justified, I think. I have not played much since they added the delay to the ASC in the most recent hotfix but it should still very effective against team weapons - which are core to Wehrmacht play.
I have been enjoying the new British changes. I do think you can make an argument that the British are mostly less well off than the US... USF has a lot of strengths going for it now. Incredible stock riflemen, motor pool has gone from useless to indispensable, and late game shermans/easy eight are still quite potent.
The British strengths are farther and fewer between but they are there. Infantry sections are still very strong. I think Stewarts and Bishops are really solid particularly if you can use tech skipping using Royal Engineers Battlegroup to avoid going into the final tier and leaning on a Churchill or Crusader for armored support.
The training center not being a blight on your build order is great. My three-Vickers HMG build, which was sort of a joke experiment, has felt fun. Not optimal, but viable again. I feel like there are more options and builds possible now. I have been more excited playing as British than USF lately. I've been experimenting with using the Humbar to cover the weakness of pumping out some cheap 150 manpower secured points using Air and Sea Battlegroup. That cheap economic advantage seems pretty good. Sometimes I build two Humbars, which can do quite well for their price!
As for balance... Relic games have always suffered in this way with initial balance. I do think that... comparing the balance of a 20 year old game and a less than 1 year old game is a bit crazy. That's a lot of time for refinement and understanding how your game plays/could be played. For instance, I think CoH2 has reached a really nice level of balance where the many commanders and units have a lot of viability. That took like 10 years of iteration while releasing constant DLC content- plenty turbulence during that time. The last few patches, co-developed by the community certainly helped CoH2 a lot.
I can't really speak to War3 balance. I was more of a SC2 player than anything else. Blizzard has been better than Relic about this in the past... understanding that much of balance comes down to community perception. Though given their general community's grip on reality... maybe the well's a bit poisoned. I think that every patch has been in the right direction for CoH3 so far though.
Going to have to disagree on every patch being an improvement. The April patch nuked the brits and with it a huge chunk of the allied playerbase. That it took 3-4 months to address - and even then possibly not - is a monumental cock up that the game will take a long time to recover from. Can only speak for myself but I simply stopped playing entirely, and I'm on the verge of just leaving again.
In general terms, I simply don't see any real strengths in the british arsenal. There's nothing the axis really have to fear outside of maybe the black prince. Everything else is mostly an inconvenience until they roll out a counter (of which they have many). On the flip side, there's plenty of axis units that can instantly swing or outright win a game no matter what position the Axis are in.
I maintain that the training centre is a monument to the lack of thought given to the british. The buffs are vague and uninteresting, with the end result being that your units will simply suck without them. Making it free is Relic waving a white flag and admitting that it was a bad idea and poorly thought out. They simply have no idea what to do with it since it was a bad idea in the first place, so may as well make it free. After three months of the faction being rock bottom surely they could have thought of something better? Then again, given how little regard they had for the effect of a blanket stat nerf to the entire faction when it was already underperforming (outside of boys) I shouldn't have expected anything different.
For games themselves, I've only been able to win when the axis have been pretty obviously incompetent. I don't expect it to change.
Edit: Apologies if this comes off a bit strong, I'm simply very frustrated with how I see the game playing out. Relic just seem that much more responsive to axis players and seem happy to leave the game heavily slanted in their favour.
I feel like the exodus of players was natural with the slow rate of updates, state of the launch in terms of bugs and the pitiful map pool/variety and less to do with the balance. There wasn't enough to keep it fresh for me, so I fell off myself for a while.
I think the old training center needing to be built was a pointless tax. Afrika Korps didn't need to build their upgrade building, nor Wehrmacht. When I compare British and Wehrmacht I don't see a big difference in upgrade options that means that the faction "lacks thought" though.
Wehrmacht upgrade a building so the units it produces get one free level of veterancy plus 25% bonus veterancy experience from fighting.
British upgrade a building so that a type of units gets 800 veterancy experience (about a level for most infantry and light vehicles), increased experience gain, and 10% better at "fighting" (fire rate, accuracy, dodge chance...?)
It's pretty much the same, only that the British upgrade gives actual combat buffs while sometimes giving less veterancy experience. To me it just seems like these two are the simpler factions that are easier to approach for their sides. You can invest in a type of style (heavy infantry, etc.) which offers some expression. In some ways there are units you cannot upgrade for the Wehrmacht (Battlegroup units that don't come from buildings such as the Rad8, StuG G or Wespe) that makes it seem sloppier over there. But getting into "grass is greener" is a bit pointless.
British strengths, huh... I feel like we're on completely different pages. I hate the Black Prince. I had a terrible game when I tried to use it where I ended up powerless against some AK cheese build. It was too slow to use at all and got picked off by two Marders which had easily enough penetration to slam it for huge damage at max range... shockingly pointless armor for a tank that is so slow. Why does it only have 40 range when it is slower than the Tiger which gets 45 range?
Seriously... just make the Black Prince actually good. It's only 10 manpower cheaper... if there's any cowardice, it's there. The normal Churchill is cheaper, faster and gets the job done in 90% of circumstances better. I get that factions should have identities - British armor maybe not being their strength. But the battlegroups should be allowed to break through some of those barriers.
You're fine though. I think we just disagree some. I used clown around on Axis factions with silly builds and still win, but after the patches I've been losing pretty badly when doing such things. A lot of that is just people getting sharp about USF strengths and using them well, ASC included. But it is also Axis units getting nerfed. I didn't understand that the Rad8 scatter nerfs would do anything... but its anti-infantry got a lot weaker and natural predators like the Chaffee and Stewart have gotten better and popular.
I get that the MG42 being best in class is a "faction identity" thing too but I wish they would do something...
i think that on release britain was pretty solid but it was built around two things... the training center vet bug and boys being good. both are deleted now.
i have played a lot of ukf... i don't really accept that sections are good in their current state, particularly not for 1v1 meta
you have to upgrade them to make them hold a candle to grens which is very harsh on muni. their other early game units are mediocre at best. engis also take muni. the vickers is alright. the mortar has been documented as being the worst in the game. the dingo is aight but a no-capture light vehicle only gets you so far
my 1v1 experience has been while im dumping muni into my army to make my units function, axis is mining everything
the middle of ukf's tech tree is dire. you don't become The Real UFK until tier 3 stuart upgrade. but with UFK's early game gutted its a hard life making it that far
gurkas have been buffed (and are great) and commandos are also hugely buffed but they take CP to get going and if a faction can only survive on a battlegroup unit that feels like a bad place to be
i dont think the game should be balanced around 1v1 and i do think that UFK is much more functional in teams so that it can be carried into Tier 4 God Mode, but golly, I did play 1v1 on release and it feels way way way worse now
*edit* to be clear, my general thesis is that axis has an absolutely beast mode tier 2/3 situation. UKF is strong in tier 4, but Axis is also pretty good and UFK currently has no way to survive to that power spike. On release it was balanced because UFK partied hard in T0/1, built up a lead, then held on for dear life.
i dont think this game has a balance team or even a balance person. feels like theres maybe one balance guy who is responsible for both this game and aoe4 at the same time
i had a longer rant prepared but I think that the above is really just what it comes down to. this doesn't feel like a serious RTS. I've been a warcraft 3 fan for many years and blizzard is pretty notorious for how badly they've treated that game, but for all its ills, that game is hella balanced, and even in the current Blizzard regime when they do their patches they are detailed, thoughtful, and mostly bug free
Relic has a vast balance team of thousands, all dedicated to their task. Meticulously tweaking every possible factor in order to achieve perfect harmony.
It's just that there's one guy who, right before every patch launch, goes: "Screw that. Space Marines/Germans are awesome!"
On the training centre, I agree it was a pointless tax and I'm glad they've finally got rid of that cost. The wehrmacht equivalent also isn't that interesting, but it synergises directly with their much more interesting tech system since it boosts the units from the building where it's researched. The UKF version on the other hand is just a stat boost to a vague class of unit. The first example of Relic not really thinking it through at all was how all classes had the same cost to upgrade at launch, despite infantry and tanks clearly being better. The launch version was also horribly buggy and convoluted. Bonuses were allied with each vet level (which may or may not have been intended), didn't apply retrospectively and didn't apply to units above vet 2. This led to wildly different experiences with units. Again, that they didn't really check that it worked properly leans into my feeling of 'not much thought given', but to be fair it was hardly the only thing broken at launch - it's just the axis broken stuff tended to be along the lines of "infinitely recrewable unkillable emplacements".
Generally, I just dislike blanket stat buff upgrades, especially when there isn't any real world basis to it. The training centre just stands out in particular because there's so little to it. There's also the question if the upgrade is actually a bonus or just bringing your units up to their "normal" performance, in which case it isn't really an upgrade but a concealed nerf. The section in-cover from CoH2 was very much the latter. If they'd wanted to do something interesting with veterancy they could have tried something like unlocking vet 4/5 as an upgrade with a boost to experience. Granted extra vet levels had issues in CoH2, but it was at least visible to everyone.
With the Black Prince, I'd picked it basically as a Tiger analogy - a unit that has stats high enough to at least pay attention to it. I don't actually use it at all really since it comes way too late. The point I was trying to make was that I feel like I'm always having to prepare for the next axis thing before it arrives otherwise all momentum is lost. There are very few british units that can really seize initiative in my experience. The Centaur AA would probably have been a better example as the timing on that can make an impact - but I struggle to think of much else.
I did have one fun game this evening though, even if the enemy were entirely predictable. 3v3, L'Aquila, top spawn, I get the 'urban' side of the map. I absolutely hate this side and struggled even before the MG42 was made oppressive. So I basically gave up on fighting for it from the start, just capped the 'natural' resource points and went elsewhere. Enemy build was as predictable as you can imagine - bike, MG42, mp40 grens to attack move/grenade any weapons teams, med halftrack, AT gun, stug. Indeed the only surprises were only 1 MG42 and no mortars, so maybe I had more options than I thought. Did try double mortar for a bit (because I thought there'd be more MG42s) but figured I'd lost the top and wasn't going get it back. So, what did I do instead? I built two 5.5 inch howitzers in base and reduced any spot they even thought about stopping to rubble. Cheesy? Probably, but given how strong the MG42 is they deserved it anyway. Ended the game with two vet 3 howitzers with about 80 kills between them. I built one tank (a Matilda, died to a Tiger) in the entire game. It also helped that I liberated somebody else's MG42 early on and used it to halt his MP40 grens most of the game.
Still trying but without much success. If an axis player knows what they're doing there's next to no point.
I have found infantry sections to just be bad though. Good enough to beat grenadiers and a few pioneer units (who all have more utility) early on, but not able to match any of the infantry the axis will actually use - and that's with the training centre upgrade. In the end I find that they're really only good for bodies and a few flares. On the other hand, sappers aren't exactly great in terms of stats, but I've found them to have more effect early on. At the very least they can force an MG to run where sections can't really.
There's also times when I wonder what the fuck Relic was even thinking in the first place - like fallschimpioneer grenade launchers. Counters garrisons, cover, weapons teams, infantry standing still for more than half a second, light vehicles and just generally a one stop solution for everything up to actual tanks. It's ridiculous and has been abovious from day 1.
Edit: For all my complaints, I am finding some of the british stuff to be good. Guards and Gurkhas are top notch, and while the 5.5 inch howitzer may not be the most reliable for clearing areas, it will win an artillery duel quite handily.
I play Brits exclusively, almost always 2v2 and have some observations.
-Engineers are excellent early on because they'll bully a most units off a point and if you can get in close, should win or almost win against early Axis line troops and will slaughter their engineers very easily. If they get vet, the early frag can also turn around a fight. Fallschirmpioneer have typically been the bane of my existence tho but that's because they're just a stupid unit. Sometimes I can stick the engineer under their drop fleers and slaughter them tho.
-Are you upgrading Sections with scoped rifles? They're cheap and frankly better than Brens imo but most important are their flares and the arty strike. I can usually force an MG42 to move with that combination because even if the unit gets pinned, I can typically drop it right on the edge and most people freak out when they see the flares. I also go for early rifle grenades and have managed to catch an MG as it's setting up at its new location.
-Dingo's gun is still bugged to always penetrate and does good against 250s, but I still don't use it enough so I can't speak from that much experience. Their artillery strikes are still useful to get MGs to leave as well, much like the recon upgrade
-Vickers is kind of crap (well, compared to MG42 of course) but its vet ability can be useful for outdueling other MGs if you can get the vision
-Med trucks are paramount to the way I play, getting the early one with the Arty battlegroup is good for me
-Commandos' buff to their first strike when coming out of stealth has made a lot of difference, and they're just generally excellent ambush units, though they can be underwhelming if they're not in position as well. They're not really great shock troops. Ghurkas are tho, from what I understand they might be the best infantry in the game? No AV of course.
-Upgunned Crusaders are still real good and usually come out earlier than other tanks. Pointless with out the upgrade though, so you're really paying a munitions tax. And of course they kind of fall off later but I've had some good micro opportunities with them, especially now that casemates actually turn slowly again
-I've been trying to make Matildas work to *some* success. Mostly against DAK, what with P3s being a lackluster medium tank, and their health pool letting them bear some amount of Marder fire
-An early Crusader AA really can turn things around if your enemy has insufficient AT. Meanwhile I always wish I'd just built a normal tank if I try the same thing with Air & Sea's Centaur
-Grants are fun in concept but I really only build them if I'm already winning. They're good against Infantry I guess, but that's not usually the problem I have playing UKF
-Having their only real heavy AV being a towed weapon is definitely a problem when team games go long, especially given Werhm's obscene artillery. They already have the Archer modeled and integrated in the campaign, why not use that instead!
Sections I've tried both recon and bren upgrades and still don't find them particularly useful as a fighting unit. The grenade package is something I'm uncertain on. I just never seem to find a good time to slot it in. Early in the game it's competing with training centre upgrades and getting light vehicles out soon enough for them to have any effect. Later in the game there are other solutions available. There's also the competition for munitions from mines, flamers and section upgrades. On top of all that, the MG42's supression means that straying into its arc at all means you're suppressed and the rifle grenade now has half range. Likewise, the axis tend to prefer close range troops which pretty much hard counter sections and rifle nades.
The Centaur CS is pretty much always a disappointment. It's just too unreliable and can't really give chase. The vet 1 also sucks - one smoke shell with a 180s cooldown is pretty bad. The Centaur AA can just do everything better. The truck based AA on the other hand is completely useless. I experimented with upgrading the truck that comes with the mortar to AA once, but it does so little damage that it's simply not a threat to anything. Grenadiers seemed entirely unphased by it and it barely scratched the paint of a halftrack. Astoundingly pointless unit.
On the Archer, the easy and cynical answer is that it's there for some future battlegroup. It could also be a relic of whatever the original plan for the british was.
Generally though, the way they've chosen units for the british is historically a bit weird and something of a pet peeve of mine, especially when compared to their direct peers. Since they've decided to cover the desert war, the british get stuff from the desert campaign - although I'd note at this point that the british are the main faction for the Italian singleplayer campaign. Begs the question if the brits were originally meant to be set in the Italian theatre but moved to accomodate USF/DAK in the game? Would explain weird units like the Archer and Black Prince a bit better at least. At any rate, they've decided to focus on tanks used by the british in the desert - except this tends to skew to very early in the desert war. The tanks themselves were pretty decent for that phase of the war, but the bulk of the opposition were Pz1, Pz2, Pz3 with the 37mm, short barrel Pz4s and Italian armour. By contrast, the stock tanks for DAK are the Pz3 L, long barrel Pz4 and the Tiger. What bothers me about it is that the british tanks are all skewed towards their weakness, while the DAK tanks are all skewed towards their strength (which in turn negates the strengths of the british vehicles). There's a whole host of other issues when throwing them into the Italian theatre vs wehrmacht when the british had long since withdrawn them as obsolete by that point. There was an opportunity to go to an early part of the war, before all the 'german engineering' nonsense came into play and to really do something different - but in the end they skewed back towards the late war stuff anyway (and all the myths/propaganda that comes with it).
One upside to the british design I've found is that they can work relatively well with low fuel income. The elite infantry (Guards in particular) can carry a lot of weight in the late game and the 17pdr can deal with any armour for a modest fuel cost (when it isn't being nebelwerfer'ed at least). The extra range has helped quite a bit with making it viable. Granted that's from 3v3 though, where mobility isn't needed as much on most of the maps.
Edit: Also wanted to add that Churchills are also pretty worthless. Barely competitive with a Pz4 because they've been given stupidly low penetration. The game will glitch and treat frontal shots as side hits often rendering the armour useless. It isn't even that good against infantry.
Yeah almost every time I go for Churchills I end up wishing I;d saved my points for the BP instead, which can be a real terror so long as there aren't a bunch of Panthers around. It's got the same gun as the upgraded Crusader but can't chase down its quarry and is usally too slow to retreat well. Since it's an infantry tank it should buff infantry like it did in COH2. I do agree with you that the UK feel unfinished in some regards, especially when it comes to vet abilities. Something like three of their tanks just have smoke and at least one of their units, the airdropped howitzer (which I do find very useful against Nazi entrenchments, however) doesn't have one at all.
Still decidedly cold on the balance side of things, but had some observations at least:
- Section Brens don't work most of the time. If you really go all in on it then sure, their damage is respectable enough (but can't be used on the move, unlike the LMG42....). Chances are you'll have better options though and the recon section utility/sniping is hard to pass up.
- Commandos can be fun but really hard to use and survive with
- LMG commandos are actually really good if you can use their range but a tough pick vs the pack howitzer
- The 17pdr vet 1 HE shells are secretly insane. Absolutely devastates infantry blobs and most of them have no idea what's happening. They just see an AT gun that couldn't possibly be a threat to infantry... Downside is that it will do no damage to tanks while HE shells are active, but again nobody knows that and they're not willing to risk it.
- There are too many damned planes. Every other fight in the mid-late game involves a luftwaffe strafe to instantly pin all your infantry and decide the fight if you haven't perfectly dodged it. Then there's the loiters, which also instantly pin infantry and can straight up delete tanks with undogable cannons (for the DAK one at least)
Funniest strategy I've encountered was the british player who built a few vickers and sappers to cover his "natural" points, then nothing but self repair Stuarts. He built 16 in total. By the end of the game he had a swarm of 9-10 of them that demolished everything them came across, including Tigers.
As is tradition, axis get significant buffs to compensate a few nerfs, allies get heavy nerfs to compensate a few (largely irrelevant) buffs. Why should I expect anything else at this point?
British got their mortar upgraded to merely "below average" as it now matches the number of shells everyone else gets in a barrage (but slower). The AA truck gets upgraded from "literally pointless" to "mostly pointless". The Stuart got its penetration crippled and is no longer guaranteed to pen the rear armour of a StuG. The Bishop now fires at a much lower angle so it's more likely to be blocked on any map with buildings. Strafes got plane health nerfed so that 88's can one shot them again. Huge benefit to the axis side, does not improve the situation at all on the allied side. Oh and the Flak 36 got extra health for good measure.
I was watching a little overview of the most recent tuning patch and at the end the guy, Tightrope, showed off that the developer of CoH3 stats released win-rate analysis page, this link being for the 4v4. I always find the data interesting.
The overall win-rates are pretty even. I've felt Allies have been doing very well since 1.2 and its reflected there... but I didn't actually expect them to be greater than 50%. Though it's somewhat marginal. I was surprised to see British generally doing better than USF, but I have been playing a lot of British lately partially because they feel like they have some options these days with the buffs.
I think this little tuning patch is mostly good though. I think the Stuart is changes are... somewhat justified as spamming like 5 Stuarts happened a few times and is actually pretty hard to deal with. I would have preferred perhaps for them to tackle the root causes - British tech skipping using armored battlegroup being so strong - but that general tech flexibility doesn't seem to be considered an issue right now.
The stats are interesting but gloss over a lot of nuance. I can only speculate, but I imagine the reason british do better (than USF at least) in large team games is simply because they have artillery and the US don't. I've seen plenty of lower skilled axis players expend all of their resources entrenching onto one or two VPs and not pushing their advantage at all. Their encampment then gets destroyed by continual artillery fire or they manage to cling to one VP only. I've done it a few times and every time the axis would have won if they'd pushed.
With Stuart spamming, I'm leaning towards calling it overpowered but I also only see it when it's successful so there's a bit of a selection bias. It's a tricky one to deal with though. I don't think it has anything to do with tech skipping, since it is the entire endgame. Centaur AA and Churchills simply don't feature (and also isn't a strategy I've had any luck with, they often come too late). The Stuart itself isn't that impressive. A single Stuart isn't good against infantry, can deter but not really kill light vehicles and is a bit of supplemental damage against tanks if you manage to flank them. With the associated tech cost I'd go as far as sying a single Stuart is just plain bad in most circumstances. Two of them working as a pair starts to perform better, but also costs more than a Crusader. It's when they hit a critical mass of 5 or so that they really become devastating. If the stats are lowered further it becomes even more useless outside of spam strategies. A sensible nerf would be to tone down the self repair rate (currently faster than an engineer I believe) which would keep them out of play for longer - but I don't expect Relic to be sensible, so here's to the next round of swingeing british nerfs to deal with one outlying strategy.
One thing it may highlight is that the side armour implementation might not be that good? As far as I know it's just "hit on the side = side armour hit", and doesn't account for angle of impact. This would tend to favour wider, shorter vehicles over narrower, longer ones and also make it relatively easy to get a side flank.
I haven't played for a while, but another major update out today. As ever, it's hilariously one sided. Universally buffed axis. They even outright say "we know Wehrmacht are pretty good, but have a load of buffs anyway". Meanwhile on the allied side it's universal nerfs, largely along the lines of "this strat was effective so we've nerfed it and everything about it". They're really quite obvious about their preferences on the factions.
ive been ranting about the awkwardness of AA units pretty much since day 1 so i am happy that they finally took the time to make the AA/offmap stuff finally at least attempt to make some kind of sense
the minutia of who has what air power now and for what cost and in what durability category has leaked out of my mind so i have no idea how this shakes out
on that basis i cant say for sure whether this totals out to fair or unfair
but to me it doesn't matter anymore. i think the community is distrusting of the game's prospects long term and thats really bad for RTSes... they'll have to do something al a COH2 where they just give it away and try to make the cash shop work to bring blood into the matchmaker
i follow the reddit and every other day you see screenshots of people with 700 rating getting matched with 1100+ after 10 minute queues. thats a rough place to be
The reddit also has a nazi posting SS pictures every other day to the point where it became a meme. I have a pretty low opinion of the CoH community. The problem is that there's a constant campaign from a certain section of it to get every single allied strength nerfed into the ground. And Relic listens to them. You can already see the campaigns going to get Gurkhas nerfed.
From my point of view, I was primarily a british player and they've seen unrelenting nerfs from back in April or thereabouts - the patch when they nerfed the boys AT onwards. I'm seeing a repeat of CoH2 play out - a faction that isn't stong but is carried by one or two cheesy strategies (boys AT spam, Stuart spam) to distort the picture. Relic systematically nerf them, remove any designed strengths, nuke the cheese strategies and when left with a middling core of below average units and the lowest unit count/variety in the game they inevitibly suck. Balance the faction around the crutches, then remove the crutches. At that point Relic just shrug their shoulders, say "it's a mystery" and abandon them.
I'd hoped that the patch would give me some reason to come back and try it out again, but instead all I'm faced with is another round of nerfs. Why would I come back if it's just going to be worse? The game has struggled with maintaining an allied playerbase for a long time and it isn't hard to see why - axis are just easier to play. I'd expected the DAK buffs, but adding a whole round of Wehrmact buffs was just baffling and added insult to injury. Some of them weren't even bad units to start with! It gives an already strong faction even more options to work with. If we take their excuse of buffing 'underperforming' units at face value - where's the work to improve underperforming allied units? Off hand I can point to the Centaur CS, regular Churchills, british armour generally but especially the Grant? None of these were underprforming but somehow the Panther and Nebelwerfer were? That's before looking at design failures like the entire right half or the british armoured battlegroup (or arguably the battlegroup as a whole).
Part of the reason I stopped was just that the british strategies were very stale and they've given me absolutely no reason to come back.
Two battlegroups for multiplayer - one for the US, one for Wehrmacht. The US battlegroup includes rangers and some much needed artillery, while the wehr one contains even more fortifications and some italian flavour (including a howitzer). Both of them will be available for 10,000 merit. I have no idea how much effort that would or wouldn't take. Also includes a campaign company for the italian map and some "premium cosmetics". Unfortunately Relic are commited to the mist disjointed and haphazard cosmetics scheme imaginable, so the "10 premium cosmetics" they list are 10 individual units - four for DAK, two each for everyone else. It will not cover the entire army.
Honestly, it feels like a haphazardly thrown together pack of things they feel they can charge for. With the battlegroups being obtainable with merit the price seems a bit steep. If I do end up buying it, it will be a "don't let the game die" gesture more than anything else. I'm still astrounded by how Relic broke the cosmetics up into individual units rather than just selling "whole army" packs. For a paid expansion I'd expect complete army schemes rather than, for example, just the CWT truck and Dingo.
On the up side, the December update will finally bring replays to the game.
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-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
How has all this rebalancing affected the campaign?
I occasionally want to jump back and finish it but when RTS's go this hard on rebalancing, the campaign can end up in really bad shape since the encounters are based on unit balance from launch.
idk if coh has the ability to do this or not but some RTSes have totally separate balance engines for multi and single..... i would think that coh3 might have that since the coh3 campaign has a lot of stuff that simply doesn't exist in multiplayer, but who knows
im curious about their revamp of the campaign because I thought it was cool just a little monotonous and grindy
its like okay, i dont mind massing this zillion manpower army to do this meme mission... once... maybe twice... but 12 times a day... nah man im good
The big issue is the price, 17 bucks for 2 battle groups.
AoE4, also relic, just had a dlc with 2 brand new civs and 4 "civ variants" (basically the same civ but with changes that make them play differently), plus a new campaign for 2 bucks cheaper at 15 dollars.
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-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Guessing the difference there is the publisher.
MS is probably putting more money into AoE4 than Sega is into CoH3.
Every unit has separate stat tables for singleplayer and multiplayer so balance changes shouldn't affect the campaign. That ought to have been the case with CoH2 as well, but I don't think it was as strictly separated there. The problems tend to come when core mechanics like pathing or targetting rules change, the kind of thing that's core to the engine rather than stats tables. These can often break AI scripts that hadn't accounted for them. Ardennes Assault ended up a mess because they 'reworked' the core US faction mechanics and hadn't separated the SP faction and the MP faction, leading to bugs like not being able to deploy pathfinders when the campaign expected them to be available etc. There also wasn't enough separation of SP and MP units which further messed things up, particularly around abilities.
CoH3 doesn't have any of these problems that I know of, but I also haven't touched the SP at all yet.
As before, I was primarily a UKF player and there's nothing here to draw me back. What I'm seeing is targetted nerfs (the Matilda? seriously?) and a few buffs that come from systematic changes rather than any desire to make the UKF better. Of the faction specific buffs, I doubt the grant penetration change will make it worthwile and the commando healing is arguably something they should have had already (germans already had it on similar units). Just adds to the feeling that UKF is a faction they don't want, and probably only exists so they could put the Afrika Korps in.
I haven't played in quite a while now, and with the initial read on the patch notes I'll just wait and see how it plays out instead.
its not all bad, but my overall concern is that they're really seeming to want axis to be able to just dig in and allies counter that with indirect fire and maneuvers.... which is fine, thats very WW2
but the issue is that the axis *also gets all the same indirect fire stuff if not more*, and you've got stuff like the sherman dozer and the centaur which is great on paper but they're buffing the marder to be able to counter them even harder...
its like they dream up all this gameplay and then they go through a flowchart of every way that the allies could possibly subvert the axis gameplan, then give axis a way to directly counter it... but it never feels like that runs in reverse
the allies gameplan seems to be "play significantly better than your opponent"
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ButtersA glass of some milksRegistered Userregular
So some folks on reddit were saying the graphics were improved? Is that accurate?
i jumped in a skirmish just to see... i can't say I noticed anything in terms of graphics that jumped out at me... maybe some shadows
the coh community is really big on the little model animations and stuff which most people never notice at match speed... so maybe that's what they're buzzing about, I couldn't tell you after 50 hours if anything is better or worse
whatever they've done graphically is subtle
what I will say is they apparently redid the entire user interface and its way better now and it sounds like they did some appreciable changes to the audio which i immediately noticed
cant tell you how many times ive lost units because i just couldn't hear shit...
honestly, i think they are batshit on unit balance but they've put may more work into this patch than I thought the game would ever receive. may get the expansion just to support them
i jumped in a skirmish just to see... i can't say I noticed anything in terms of graphics that jumped out at me... maybe some shadows
the coh community is really big on the little model animations and stuff which most people never notice at match speed... so maybe that's what they're buzzing about, I couldn't tell you after 50 hours if anything is better or worse
whatever they've done graphically is subtle
what I will say is they apparently redid the entire user interface and its way better now and it sounds like they did some appreciable changes to the audio which i immediately noticed
cant tell you how many times ive lost units because i just couldn't hear shit...
honestly, i think they are batshit on unit balance but they've put may more work into this patch than I thought the game would ever receive. may get the expansion just to support them
can it turn? I haven't seen it yet. the british one has insane range but you have to build it pointed in a fixed direction
ive gotten a few skirmish games in and the game feels pretty good right now... the battlegroup changes to britain are solid. i feel like i have options where I really didn't before and that was my main complaint
a couple of big things i noticed... normalized mortars... very nice. early mortar feels good.
tank movement apparently changed and I thought overall quite good... big thing I noticed is that tanks ability to polish off models is.... impressive... there was a lot of times where I just gave up on a kill and managed to get them well into the fog of war with my last shot. not sure whats at play here but its welcome i often felt that infantry was so good because it could yolo into armor and have a fair chance of retreating
and hey, the post-match stat screen finally works... after nearly 10 months! incredible!
ive been playing this game a lot this week and I still think it feels pretty good. the battlegroup adjustments they made in the "expansion" I think helped everyone a lot.... the game is definitely the most balanced its been since release
i think they have sort of a wheel going where britain obliterates dak, dak obliterates usa, usa..... etc, etc, etc
mortar/bunker/mg spam is pretty insane right now but im feeling my way through it... i just had two back to back 3v3 games where I faced intense turtling and managed to overcome it as both britain and dak
i spent a lot of time trying to make wher work but I just can't get it going, among the many things that annoy me about that faction, 3 model engis is brutal
I'm still waiting for a balance update before trying again. From following winrates and general discourse, the brits are still in a pretty awful state (worst pickrate and winrate across all modes) while DAK are comfortably better than everyone else. As usual, the axis pull further ahead as the size of the game increases. Mid February before we'll hear any more about development apparently. Hopefully they'll have something to make the brits more interesting (although honestly I just expect more nerfs).
Granted, I don't have any direct experience with this patch but nor do I have any motivation to try either.
They've finally released a balance patch - aka the "I hope the brits don't suck anymore" patch. There are some good changes but I worry they don't go far enough. It seems to be mostly making Dingos, Humbers, Grants and Bren sections hopefully not suck. There's nothing really in the way of structural changes for the brits. British battlegroups remain untouched outside of a slight shuffle on the armoured side. They've also left some problematic axis units (e.g. Nebelwerfers) practically unchanged. Maybe the cumulative effects will shift the balance needle a bit. I'll probably give this patch a try at least, but after a year solid of nerfs to the brits I'm a bit wary.
ive been playing as much as i can, which isnt much, but still, been doing online as often as my bad internet allows and enjoying it
i dont think britain was bad but they were limited, the patch notes even say it, i think the dingo in particular is big, and the engi buff along with that will be a very firm point on british 1v1 openers...
double engi -> dingos -> ??? will feel similar to the now deleted US jeep opener and give brits an option other than section spam
im thinking you may be able to hold serve in the opener with engis/dingos and possibly skip sections entirely or at the very least not invest huge resources into sections... possibly get through to gurkas or commandos.. against Wehr especially, where section openers are already really good against Dak
Humber was kinda dogwater and i dont think its buffed enough but we'll see
there are larger issues in the game that go unaddressed, I think the overall meta of rushing to LVs and fast tanks and smothering your opponent before T4 can happen is a problem, i get a chuckle over them doing anything to the Grant because its like... the issue isnt that the Grant wasn't good.. its that hardly any games run long enough for you to even build a grant if you wanted one lol
they've nerfed some of the better LVs but I dont think its enough.. when I 2v2/3v3 with friends I am always in awe of how utterly ineffective AT is versus things like Stuarts.. they can just dive your line with impunity... i guess/hope that maybe the vehicle accel nerf will hamper this more than I imagine
ive been really REALLY loving Dak and even though I dont play the meta (i hate L6 spam and refuse to participate), i just.. i love the faction. i cant explain it. strong infantry + support vehicles is my jam
The patch seems pretty solid. Improving underperforming units is always a solid choice. I felt more effective with British recently than Americans, but part of that is trying to use the Ranger doctrine which does not seem to be that good compared to the original three. It is hard to make it work.
Whereas if I was playing brits I would just play three sections and have a good time. I actually quite liked the Grant before (though challenging to reach) so it will probably be incredible now.
The new weapon team training changes, vickers veterancy buffs and other changes make me wonder if I can make my old meme build that was triple vickers work again. I think with the 250 getting an armor nerf, the Dingo getting a buff it could work again. Particularly if the Humbar ends up actually being able to hold its own in the mid-game. Probably not... 5 armor will not protect it too much from predators like the Rad8. Still might be fun to try.
I also love DAK or any mechanized combat style. The interplay of vehicles, infantry and speed is great. They were a bit OP last patch, hopefully things get rounded out a bit. I wish they had hit the Flakvierling halftrack a bit harder than 10% speed nerf, but I'll take anything.
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I do think that USF Air Support Center got overbuffed. It was pretty damn useful after the air support ability re-work. Adding buffs after that to each ability and reducing their cost was... too extreme. ASC had very little counter play for any team weapon. At the same time the AA power of core anti-air vehicles was halved (a good thing). If you can't shoot it down... then you have to be able to dodge it. It was possible (if tough) to dodge with infantry squads but impossible to dodge with any AT gun or weapon team. Given the cost and cooldown you can just cheaply remove models and pin an MG every engagement or deny/kill anl AT gun - which given the state of riflemen and light vehicles for USF (very powerful) - it's pretty oppressive.
Rolling back the changes of the most recent patch is justified, I think. I have not played much since they added the delay to the ASC in the most recent hotfix but it should still very effective against team weapons - which are core to Wehrmacht play.
I have been enjoying the new British changes. I do think you can make an argument that the British are mostly less well off than the US... USF has a lot of strengths going for it now. Incredible stock riflemen, motor pool has gone from useless to indispensable, and late game shermans/easy eight are still quite potent.
The British strengths are farther and fewer between but they are there. Infantry sections are still very strong. I think Stewarts and Bishops are really solid particularly if you can use tech skipping using Royal Engineers Battlegroup to avoid going into the final tier and leaning on a Churchill or Crusader for armored support.
The training center not being a blight on your build order is great. My three-Vickers HMG build, which was sort of a joke experiment, has felt fun. Not optimal, but viable again. I feel like there are more options and builds possible now. I have been more excited playing as British than USF lately. I've been experimenting with using the Humbar to cover the weakness of pumping out some cheap 150 manpower secured points using Air and Sea Battlegroup. That cheap economic advantage seems pretty good. Sometimes I build two Humbars, which can do quite well for their price!
As for balance... Relic games have always suffered in this way with initial balance. I do think that... comparing the balance of a 20 year old game and a less than 1 year old game is a bit crazy. That's a lot of time for refinement and understanding how your game plays/could be played. For instance, I think CoH2 has reached a really nice level of balance where the many commanders and units have a lot of viability. That took like 10 years of iteration while releasing constant DLC content- plenty turbulence during that time. The last few patches, co-developed by the community certainly helped CoH2 a lot.
I can't really speak to War3 balance. I was more of a SC2 player than anything else. Blizzard has been better than Relic about this in the past... understanding that much of balance comes down to community perception. Though given their general community's grip on reality... maybe the well's a bit poisoned. I think that every patch has been in the right direction for CoH3 so far though.
In general terms, I simply don't see any real strengths in the british arsenal. There's nothing the axis really have to fear outside of maybe the black prince. Everything else is mostly an inconvenience until they roll out a counter (of which they have many). On the flip side, there's plenty of axis units that can instantly swing or outright win a game no matter what position the Axis are in.
I maintain that the training centre is a monument to the lack of thought given to the british. The buffs are vague and uninteresting, with the end result being that your units will simply suck without them. Making it free is Relic waving a white flag and admitting that it was a bad idea and poorly thought out. They simply have no idea what to do with it since it was a bad idea in the first place, so may as well make it free. After three months of the faction being rock bottom surely they could have thought of something better? Then again, given how little regard they had for the effect of a blanket stat nerf to the entire faction when it was already underperforming (outside of boys) I shouldn't have expected anything different.
For games themselves, I've only been able to win when the axis have been pretty obviously incompetent. I don't expect it to change.
Edit: Apologies if this comes off a bit strong, I'm simply very frustrated with how I see the game playing out. Relic just seem that much more responsive to axis players and seem happy to leave the game heavily slanted in their favour.
I think the old training center needing to be built was a pointless tax. Afrika Korps didn't need to build their upgrade building, nor Wehrmacht. When I compare British and Wehrmacht I don't see a big difference in upgrade options that means that the faction "lacks thought" though.
It's pretty much the same, only that the British upgrade gives actual combat buffs while sometimes giving less veterancy experience. To me it just seems like these two are the simpler factions that are easier to approach for their sides. You can invest in a type of style (heavy infantry, etc.) which offers some expression. In some ways there are units you cannot upgrade for the Wehrmacht (Battlegroup units that don't come from buildings such as the Rad8, StuG G or Wespe) that makes it seem sloppier over there. But getting into "grass is greener" is a bit pointless.
British strengths, huh... I feel like we're on completely different pages. I hate the Black Prince. I had a terrible game when I tried to use it where I ended up powerless against some AK cheese build. It was too slow to use at all and got picked off by two Marders which had easily enough penetration to slam it for huge damage at max range... shockingly pointless armor for a tank that is so slow. Why does it only have 40 range when it is slower than the Tiger which gets 45 range?
Seriously... just make the Black Prince actually good. It's only 10 manpower cheaper... if there's any cowardice, it's there. The normal Churchill is cheaper, faster and gets the job done in 90% of circumstances better. I get that factions should have identities - British armor maybe not being their strength. But the battlegroups should be allowed to break through some of those barriers.
You're fine though. I think we just disagree some. I used clown around on Axis factions with silly builds and still win, but after the patches I've been losing pretty badly when doing such things. A lot of that is just people getting sharp about USF strengths and using them well, ASC included. But it is also Axis units getting nerfed. I didn't understand that the Rad8 scatter nerfs would do anything... but its anti-infantry got a lot weaker and natural predators like the Chaffee and Stewart have gotten better and popular.
I get that the MG42 being best in class is a "faction identity" thing too but I wish they would do something...
i have played a lot of ukf... i don't really accept that sections are good in their current state, particularly not for 1v1 meta
you have to upgrade them to make them hold a candle to grens which is very harsh on muni. their other early game units are mediocre at best. engis also take muni. the vickers is alright. the mortar has been documented as being the worst in the game. the dingo is aight but a no-capture light vehicle only gets you so far
my 1v1 experience has been while im dumping muni into my army to make my units function, axis is mining everything
the middle of ukf's tech tree is dire. you don't become The Real UFK until tier 3 stuart upgrade. but with UFK's early game gutted its a hard life making it that far
gurkas have been buffed (and are great) and commandos are also hugely buffed but they take CP to get going and if a faction can only survive on a battlegroup unit that feels like a bad place to be
i dont think the game should be balanced around 1v1 and i do think that UFK is much more functional in teams so that it can be carried into Tier 4 God Mode, but golly, I did play 1v1 on release and it feels way way way worse now
*edit* to be clear, my general thesis is that axis has an absolutely beast mode tier 2/3 situation. UKF is strong in tier 4, but Axis is also pretty good and UFK currently has no way to survive to that power spike. On release it was balanced because UFK partied hard in T0/1, built up a lead, then held on for dear life.
Relic has a vast balance team of thousands, all dedicated to their task. Meticulously tweaking every possible factor in order to achieve perfect harmony.
It's just that there's one guy who, right before every patch launch, goes: "Screw that. Space Marines/Germans are awesome!"
Generally, I just dislike blanket stat buff upgrades, especially when there isn't any real world basis to it. The training centre just stands out in particular because there's so little to it. There's also the question if the upgrade is actually a bonus or just bringing your units up to their "normal" performance, in which case it isn't really an upgrade but a concealed nerf. The section in-cover from CoH2 was very much the latter. If they'd wanted to do something interesting with veterancy they could have tried something like unlocking vet 4/5 as an upgrade with a boost to experience. Granted extra vet levels had issues in CoH2, but it was at least visible to everyone.
With the Black Prince, I'd picked it basically as a Tiger analogy - a unit that has stats high enough to at least pay attention to it. I don't actually use it at all really since it comes way too late. The point I was trying to make was that I feel like I'm always having to prepare for the next axis thing before it arrives otherwise all momentum is lost. There are very few british units that can really seize initiative in my experience. The Centaur AA would probably have been a better example as the timing on that can make an impact - but I struggle to think of much else.
I did have one fun game this evening though, even if the enemy were entirely predictable. 3v3, L'Aquila, top spawn, I get the 'urban' side of the map. I absolutely hate this side and struggled even before the MG42 was made oppressive. So I basically gave up on fighting for it from the start, just capped the 'natural' resource points and went elsewhere. Enemy build was as predictable as you can imagine - bike, MG42, mp40 grens to attack move/grenade any weapons teams, med halftrack, AT gun, stug. Indeed the only surprises were only 1 MG42 and no mortars, so maybe I had more options than I thought. Did try double mortar for a bit (because I thought there'd be more MG42s) but figured I'd lost the top and wasn't going get it back. So, what did I do instead? I built two 5.5 inch howitzers in base and reduced any spot they even thought about stopping to rubble. Cheesy? Probably, but given how strong the MG42 is they deserved it anyway. Ended the game with two vet 3 howitzers with about 80 kills between them. I built one tank (a Matilda, died to a Tiger) in the entire game. It also helped that I liberated somebody else's MG42 early on and used it to halt his MP40 grens most of the game.
I have found infantry sections to just be bad though. Good enough to beat grenadiers and a few pioneer units (who all have more utility) early on, but not able to match any of the infantry the axis will actually use - and that's with the training centre upgrade. In the end I find that they're really only good for bodies and a few flares. On the other hand, sappers aren't exactly great in terms of stats, but I've found them to have more effect early on. At the very least they can force an MG to run where sections can't really.
There's also times when I wonder what the fuck Relic was even thinking in the first place - like fallschimpioneer grenade launchers. Counters garrisons, cover, weapons teams, infantry standing still for more than half a second, light vehicles and just generally a one stop solution for everything up to actual tanks. It's ridiculous and has been abovious from day 1.
Edit: For all my complaints, I am finding some of the british stuff to be good. Guards and Gurkhas are top notch, and while the 5.5 inch howitzer may not be the most reliable for clearing areas, it will win an artillery duel quite handily.
-Engineers are excellent early on because they'll bully a most units off a point and if you can get in close, should win or almost win against early Axis line troops and will slaughter their engineers very easily. If they get vet, the early frag can also turn around a fight. Fallschirmpioneer have typically been the bane of my existence tho but that's because they're just a stupid unit. Sometimes I can stick the engineer under their drop fleers and slaughter them tho.
-Are you upgrading Sections with scoped rifles? They're cheap and frankly better than Brens imo but most important are their flares and the arty strike. I can usually force an MG42 to move with that combination because even if the unit gets pinned, I can typically drop it right on the edge and most people freak out when they see the flares. I also go for early rifle grenades and have managed to catch an MG as it's setting up at its new location.
-Dingo's gun is still bugged to always penetrate and does good against 250s, but I still don't use it enough so I can't speak from that much experience. Their artillery strikes are still useful to get MGs to leave as well, much like the recon upgrade
-Vickers is kind of crap (well, compared to MG42 of course) but its vet ability can be useful for outdueling other MGs if you can get the vision
-Med trucks are paramount to the way I play, getting the early one with the Arty battlegroup is good for me
-Commandos' buff to their first strike when coming out of stealth has made a lot of difference, and they're just generally excellent ambush units, though they can be underwhelming if they're not in position as well. They're not really great shock troops. Ghurkas are tho, from what I understand they might be the best infantry in the game? No AV of course.
-Upgunned Crusaders are still real good and usually come out earlier than other tanks. Pointless with out the upgrade though, so you're really paying a munitions tax. And of course they kind of fall off later but I've had some good micro opportunities with them, especially now that casemates actually turn slowly again
-I've been trying to make Matildas work to *some* success. Mostly against DAK, what with P3s being a lackluster medium tank, and their health pool letting them bear some amount of Marder fire
-An early Crusader AA really can turn things around if your enemy has insufficient AT. Meanwhile I always wish I'd just built a normal tank if I try the same thing with Air & Sea's Centaur
-Grants are fun in concept but I really only build them if I'm already winning. They're good against Infantry I guess, but that's not usually the problem I have playing UKF
-Having their only real heavy AV being a towed weapon is definitely a problem when team games go long, especially given Werhm's obscene artillery. They already have the Archer modeled and integrated in the campaign, why not use that instead!
Sections I've tried both recon and bren upgrades and still don't find them particularly useful as a fighting unit. The grenade package is something I'm uncertain on. I just never seem to find a good time to slot it in. Early in the game it's competing with training centre upgrades and getting light vehicles out soon enough for them to have any effect. Later in the game there are other solutions available. There's also the competition for munitions from mines, flamers and section upgrades. On top of all that, the MG42's supression means that straying into its arc at all means you're suppressed and the rifle grenade now has half range. Likewise, the axis tend to prefer close range troops which pretty much hard counter sections and rifle nades.
The Centaur CS is pretty much always a disappointment. It's just too unreliable and can't really give chase. The vet 1 also sucks - one smoke shell with a 180s cooldown is pretty bad. The Centaur AA can just do everything better. The truck based AA on the other hand is completely useless. I experimented with upgrading the truck that comes with the mortar to AA once, but it does so little damage that it's simply not a threat to anything. Grenadiers seemed entirely unphased by it and it barely scratched the paint of a halftrack. Astoundingly pointless unit.
On the Archer, the easy and cynical answer is that it's there for some future battlegroup. It could also be a relic of whatever the original plan for the british was.
Generally though, the way they've chosen units for the british is historically a bit weird and something of a pet peeve of mine, especially when compared to their direct peers. Since they've decided to cover the desert war, the british get stuff from the desert campaign - although I'd note at this point that the british are the main faction for the Italian singleplayer campaign. Begs the question if the brits were originally meant to be set in the Italian theatre but moved to accomodate USF/DAK in the game? Would explain weird units like the Archer and Black Prince a bit better at least. At any rate, they've decided to focus on tanks used by the british in the desert - except this tends to skew to very early in the desert war. The tanks themselves were pretty decent for that phase of the war, but the bulk of the opposition were Pz1, Pz2, Pz3 with the 37mm, short barrel Pz4s and Italian armour. By contrast, the stock tanks for DAK are the Pz3 L, long barrel Pz4 and the Tiger. What bothers me about it is that the british tanks are all skewed towards their weakness, while the DAK tanks are all skewed towards their strength (which in turn negates the strengths of the british vehicles). There's a whole host of other issues when throwing them into the Italian theatre vs wehrmacht when the british had long since withdrawn them as obsolete by that point. There was an opportunity to go to an early part of the war, before all the 'german engineering' nonsense came into play and to really do something different - but in the end they skewed back towards the late war stuff anyway (and all the myths/propaganda that comes with it).
One upside to the british design I've found is that they can work relatively well with low fuel income. The elite infantry (Guards in particular) can carry a lot of weight in the late game and the 17pdr can deal with any armour for a modest fuel cost (when it isn't being nebelwerfer'ed at least). The extra range has helped quite a bit with making it viable. Granted that's from 3v3 though, where mobility isn't needed as much on most of the maps.
Edit: Also wanted to add that Churchills are also pretty worthless. Barely competitive with a Pz4 because they've been given stupidly low penetration. The game will glitch and treat frontal shots as side hits often rendering the armour useless. It isn't even that good against infantry.
- Section Brens don't work most of the time. If you really go all in on it then sure, their damage is respectable enough (but can't be used on the move, unlike the LMG42....). Chances are you'll have better options though and the recon section utility/sniping is hard to pass up.
- Commandos can be fun but really hard to use and survive with
- LMG commandos are actually really good if you can use their range but a tough pick vs the pack howitzer
- The 17pdr vet 1 HE shells are secretly insane. Absolutely devastates infantry blobs and most of them have no idea what's happening. They just see an AT gun that couldn't possibly be a threat to infantry... Downside is that it will do no damage to tanks while HE shells are active, but again nobody knows that and they're not willing to risk it.
- There are too many damned planes. Every other fight in the mid-late game involves a luftwaffe strafe to instantly pin all your infantry and decide the fight if you haven't perfectly dodged it. Then there's the loiters, which also instantly pin infantry and can straight up delete tanks with undogable cannons (for the DAK one at least)
Funniest strategy I've encountered was the british player who built a few vickers and sappers to cover his "natural" points, then nothing but self repair Stuarts. He built 16 in total. By the end of the game he had a swarm of 9-10 of them that demolished everything them came across, including Tigers.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1677280/view/3666546210118756381?l=english
As is tradition, axis get significant buffs to compensate a few nerfs, allies get heavy nerfs to compensate a few (largely irrelevant) buffs. Why should I expect anything else at this point?
British got their mortar upgraded to merely "below average" as it now matches the number of shells everyone else gets in a barrage (but slower). The AA truck gets upgraded from "literally pointless" to "mostly pointless". The Stuart got its penetration crippled and is no longer guaranteed to pen the rear armour of a StuG. The Bishop now fires at a much lower angle so it's more likely to be blocked on any map with buildings. Strafes got plane health nerfed so that 88's can one shot them again. Huge benefit to the axis side, does not improve the situation at all on the allied side. Oh and the Flak 36 got extra health for good measure.
The overall win-rates are pretty even. I've felt Allies have been doing very well since 1.2 and its reflected there... but I didn't actually expect them to be greater than 50%. Though it's somewhat marginal. I was surprised to see British generally doing better than USF, but I have been playing a lot of British lately partially because they feel like they have some options these days with the buffs.
I think this little tuning patch is mostly good though. I think the Stuart is changes are... somewhat justified as spamming like 5 Stuarts happened a few times and is actually pretty hard to deal with. I would have preferred perhaps for them to tackle the root causes - British tech skipping using armored battlegroup being so strong - but that general tech flexibility doesn't seem to be considered an issue right now.
With Stuart spamming, I'm leaning towards calling it overpowered but I also only see it when it's successful so there's a bit of a selection bias. It's a tricky one to deal with though. I don't think it has anything to do with tech skipping, since it is the entire endgame. Centaur AA and Churchills simply don't feature (and also isn't a strategy I've had any luck with, they often come too late). The Stuart itself isn't that impressive. A single Stuart isn't good against infantry, can deter but not really kill light vehicles and is a bit of supplemental damage against tanks if you manage to flank them. With the associated tech cost I'd go as far as sying a single Stuart is just plain bad in most circumstances. Two of them working as a pair starts to perform better, but also costs more than a Crusader. It's when they hit a critical mass of 5 or so that they really become devastating. If the stats are lowered further it becomes even more useless outside of spam strategies. A sensible nerf would be to tone down the self repair rate (currently faster than an engineer I believe) which would keep them out of play for longer - but I don't expect Relic to be sensible, so here's to the next round of swingeing british nerfs to deal with one outlying strategy.
One thing it may highlight is that the side armour implementation might not be that good? As far as I know it's just "hit on the side = side armour hit", and doesn't account for angle of impact. This would tend to favour wider, shorter vehicles over narrower, longer ones and also make it relatively easy to get a side flank.
that spread is much more even then i imagined, but using wc3 as a baseline, a 1% disparity in wr in that game is considered scandalous
but honestly I expected to see 55-60% WRs in this game, and would really like to see it with the bottom 50% of players filtered out
Oh and they still haven't touched the MG42.
https://community.companyofheroes.com/coh-franchise-home/company-of-heroes-3/blogs/81-pc-umber-wasp-1-3-0-patch-notes
the minutia of who has what air power now and for what cost and in what durability category has leaked out of my mind so i have no idea how this shakes out
on that basis i cant say for sure whether this totals out to fair or unfair
but to me it doesn't matter anymore. i think the community is distrusting of the game's prospects long term and thats really bad for RTSes... they'll have to do something al a COH2 where they just give it away and try to make the cash shop work to bring blood into the matchmaker
i follow the reddit and every other day you see screenshots of people with 700 rating getting matched with 1100+ after 10 minute queues. thats a rough place to be
From my point of view, I was primarily a british player and they've seen unrelenting nerfs from back in April or thereabouts - the patch when they nerfed the boys AT onwards. I'm seeing a repeat of CoH2 play out - a faction that isn't stong but is carried by one or two cheesy strategies (boys AT spam, Stuart spam) to distort the picture. Relic systematically nerf them, remove any designed strengths, nuke the cheese strategies and when left with a middling core of below average units and the lowest unit count/variety in the game they inevitibly suck. Balance the faction around the crutches, then remove the crutches. At that point Relic just shrug their shoulders, say "it's a mystery" and abandon them.
I'd hoped that the patch would give me some reason to come back and try it out again, but instead all I'm faced with is another round of nerfs. Why would I come back if it's just going to be worse? The game has struggled with maintaining an allied playerbase for a long time and it isn't hard to see why - axis are just easier to play. I'd expected the DAK buffs, but adding a whole round of Wehrmact buffs was just baffling and added insult to injury. Some of them weren't even bad units to start with! It gives an already strong faction even more options to work with. If we take their excuse of buffing 'underperforming' units at face value - where's the work to improve underperforming allied units? Off hand I can point to the Centaur CS, regular Churchills, british armour generally but especially the Grant? None of these were underprforming but somehow the Panther and Nebelwerfer were? That's before looking at design failures like the entire right half or the british armoured battlegroup (or arguably the battlegroup as a whole).
Part of the reason I stopped was just that the british strategies were very stale and they've given me absolutely no reason to come back.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2068342/Company_of_Heroes_3_Hammer__Shield_Expansion_Pack/
FAQ:
https://community.companyofheroes.com/coh-franchise-home/company-of-heroes-3/blogs/89-pc-1-4-0-update-steel-shepherd-and-hammer-and-shield
Two battlegroups for multiplayer - one for the US, one for Wehrmacht. The US battlegroup includes rangers and some much needed artillery, while the wehr one contains even more fortifications and some italian flavour (including a howitzer). Both of them will be available for 10,000 merit. I have no idea how much effort that would or wouldn't take. Also includes a campaign company for the italian map and some "premium cosmetics". Unfortunately Relic are commited to the mist disjointed and haphazard cosmetics scheme imaginable, so the "10 premium cosmetics" they list are 10 individual units - four for DAK, two each for everyone else. It will not cover the entire army.
Honestly, it feels like a haphazardly thrown together pack of things they feel they can charge for. With the battlegroups being obtainable with merit the price seems a bit steep. If I do end up buying it, it will be a "don't let the game die" gesture more than anything else. I'm still astrounded by how Relic broke the cosmetics up into individual units rather than just selling "whole army" packs. For a paid expansion I'd expect complete army schemes rather than, for example, just the CWT truck and Dingo.
On the up side, the December update will finally bring replays to the game.
I occasionally want to jump back and finish it but when RTS's go this hard on rebalancing, the campaign can end up in really bad shape since the encounters are based on unit balance from launch.
Later I would learn the various MP fixes basically broke that game mode.
im curious about their revamp of the campaign because I thought it was cool just a little monotonous and grindy
its like okay, i dont mind massing this zillion manpower army to do this meme mission... once... maybe twice... but 12 times a day... nah man im good
AoE4, also relic, just had a dlc with 2 brand new civs and 4 "civ variants" (basically the same civ but with changes that make them play differently), plus a new campaign for 2 bucks cheaper at 15 dollars.
MS is probably putting more money into AoE4 than Sega is into CoH3.
CoH3 doesn't have any of these problems that I know of, but I also haven't touched the SP at all yet.
The secret to that one was buying the Ranger pack since that unit could almost do anything.
I had a really tough time just using the base units.
With the Rangers I just used them for every mission and cruised through it.
Full patch notes for reference:
https://community.companyofheroes.com/coh-franchise-home/company-of-heroes-3/blogs/93-pc-steel-shepherd-1-4-0-patch-notes
As before, I was primarily a UKF player and there's nothing here to draw me back. What I'm seeing is targetted nerfs (the Matilda? seriously?) and a few buffs that come from systematic changes rather than any desire to make the UKF better. Of the faction specific buffs, I doubt the grant penetration change will make it worthwile and the commando healing is arguably something they should have had already (germans already had it on similar units). Just adds to the feeling that UKF is a faction they don't want, and probably only exists so they could put the Afrika Korps in.
I haven't played in quite a while now, and with the initial read on the patch notes I'll just wait and see how it plays out instead.
but the issue is that the axis *also gets all the same indirect fire stuff if not more*, and you've got stuff like the sherman dozer and the centaur which is great on paper but they're buffing the marder to be able to counter them even harder...
its like they dream up all this gameplay and then they go through a flowchart of every way that the allies could possibly subvert the axis gameplan, then give axis a way to directly counter it... but it never feels like that runs in reverse
the allies gameplan seems to be "play significantly better than your opponent"
the coh community is really big on the little model animations and stuff which most people never notice at match speed... so maybe that's what they're buzzing about, I couldn't tell you after 50 hours if anything is better or worse
whatever they've done graphically is subtle
what I will say is they apparently redid the entire user interface and its way better now and it sounds like they did some appreciable changes to the audio which i immediately noticed
cant tell you how many times ive lost units because i just couldn't hear shit...
honestly, i think they are batshit on unit balance but they've put may more work into this patch than I thought the game would ever receive. may get the expansion just to support them
This video does a pretty good job of showing the visual changes, all told it's a lot sharper and less washed out.
ive gotten a few skirmish games in and the game feels pretty good right now... the battlegroup changes to britain are solid. i feel like i have options where I really didn't before and that was my main complaint
a couple of big things i noticed... normalized mortars... very nice. early mortar feels good.
tank movement apparently changed and I thought overall quite good... big thing I noticed is that tanks ability to polish off models is.... impressive... there was a lot of times where I just gave up on a kill and managed to get them well into the fog of war with my last shot. not sure whats at play here but its welcome i often felt that infantry was so good because it could yolo into armor and have a fair chance of retreating
and hey, the post-match stat screen finally works... after nearly 10 months! incredible!
i think they have sort of a wheel going where britain obliterates dak, dak obliterates usa, usa..... etc, etc, etc
mortar/bunker/mg spam is pretty insane right now but im feeling my way through it... i just had two back to back 3v3 games where I faced intense turtling and managed to overcome it as both britain and dak
i spent a lot of time trying to make wher work but I just can't get it going, among the many things that annoy me about that faction, 3 model engis is brutal
Granted, I don't have any direct experience with this patch but nor do I have any motivation to try either.
Patch notes: https://community.companyofheroes.com/coh-franchise-home/company-of-heroes-3/blogs/102-pc-year-1-anniversary-1-5-0-patch-notes
i dont think britain was bad but they were limited, the patch notes even say it, i think the dingo in particular is big, and the engi buff along with that will be a very firm point on british 1v1 openers...
double engi -> dingos -> ??? will feel similar to the now deleted US jeep opener and give brits an option other than section spam
im thinking you may be able to hold serve in the opener with engis/dingos and possibly skip sections entirely or at the very least not invest huge resources into sections... possibly get through to gurkas or commandos.. against Wehr especially, where section openers are already really good against Dak
Humber was kinda dogwater and i dont think its buffed enough but we'll see
there are larger issues in the game that go unaddressed, I think the overall meta of rushing to LVs and fast tanks and smothering your opponent before T4 can happen is a problem, i get a chuckle over them doing anything to the Grant because its like... the issue isnt that the Grant wasn't good.. its that hardly any games run long enough for you to even build a grant if you wanted one lol
they've nerfed some of the better LVs but I dont think its enough.. when I 2v2/3v3 with friends I am always in awe of how utterly ineffective AT is versus things like Stuarts.. they can just dive your line with impunity... i guess/hope that maybe the vehicle accel nerf will hamper this more than I imagine
ive been really REALLY loving Dak and even though I dont play the meta (i hate L6 spam and refuse to participate), i just.. i love the faction. i cant explain it. strong infantry + support vehicles is my jam
Whereas if I was playing brits I would just play three sections and have a good time. I actually quite liked the Grant before (though challenging to reach) so it will probably be incredible now.
The new weapon team training changes, vickers veterancy buffs and other changes make me wonder if I can make my old meme build that was triple vickers work again. I think with the 250 getting an armor nerf, the Dingo getting a buff it could work again. Particularly if the Humbar ends up actually being able to hold its own in the mid-game. Probably not... 5 armor will not protect it too much from predators like the Rad8. Still might be fun to try.
I also love DAK or any mechanized combat style. The interplay of vehicles, infantry and speed is great. They were a bit OP last patch, hopefully things get rounded out a bit. I wish they had hit the Flakvierling halftrack a bit harder than 10% speed nerf, but I'll take anything.