Hey Guys,
Design Team is currently reviewing a few key balance complaints in the game and we would like your feedback
Disclaimer: Everything you read below is work in progress and not guaranteed to go into the game.
Elite Rifleman:
At the moment this ability provides no real downfall to its usage except for its long recharge time. We implemented slight cost increase as well as starting it on a cool down. However we are currently exploring possible redesigns of the ability such as increasing the rate in which rifleman will accumulate Veterancy.
The whole point of the Veteran Riflemen was to give the USF player an early advantage in the first engagements as the trade off for not picking another doctrine like, say, Infantry Company. The downside was that if you wanted to maintain a Veteran Rifleman force you took far, far longer to get them out and as a result had significantly less map control.
When you started it off on a cooldown you essentially handicapped its use. There's no real point to actually getting them now. They're more expensive(20mp is not much, but it is something) and their very early game advantage is simply gone. They functioned very much like an early game soft counter to units like the Kubelwagon.
By the time having Riflemen with Veterancy becomes vitally important and useful again is in the mid game where there's light/medium vehicles running around the rifle grenades can sort-of-maybe scare away, at which point all your standard Riflemen will already have that veterancy.
When taken in context with the rest of the commander, pretty much the only useful aspects to it were the Veteran Riflemen's extreme early game advantage, and then a tonne of entirely useless crap until you got the Easy Eight in the mid-late game to compete with other Medium Tanks.
So, with the Veteran Riflemen's utility essentially neutered(They're not bad, just the call in was over nerfed), you could safely rename the "Rifleman Company" to the "Easy Eight Company".
The whole point of that commentary, was to say that if you want to do something with the Veteran Rifleman, you either need to backtrack a little on that nerf to the call in or you need to totally revamp it into something
useful. EARLY GAME useful. Having a passive increase in the rate of veterancy as my 0CP commander stuff doesn't really do jack for me in the early game if it's not going to become noticeable until the mid game.
Increased veterancy gain can be useful, but it'll need to be a real improvement. It's not a bulletin, it's a commander. None of that 10% crap.
Another option would be to allow you to spend a resource to selectively vet up a single infantry unit(Not just Riflemen, now). An ability like that has the aspect of not simply being a "zero downside use", you have to actually purchase the unit and you'll have an additional cost on top of that, but with that it'll maintain constant utility throughout the game.
Long Range Combat:
With our change to lethality in a previous update to make cover more important. A side effect of that change was that it made long range weapons extremely effective, especially LMGs. The combination of cover, lethality, and long range has resulted in medium to short range units being overall less effective. In most situation, units that require closer range will lose too many men on approach resulting in a significant drop in offensive performance.
I personally don't see the problem here. The premise seems to be that close range units should have some utility in all situations. A squad of flame pios shouldn't be able to run across the field and proceed to kill a squad of Pathfinders, nor should, say, Panzergrens be able to just run out in the open and get close to a squad of Guards Rifles with DPs. When you take that approach it's supposed to have risk attached to it; The risk that one too many models goes down and you don't have the damage output to overcome entrenched troops anymore.
Assault troops like PzGrens, Sturmpio, Paratroopers and so on are all already very, very effective once they get in close, it's just a matter of knowing the map, using flanking routes to your advantage and knowing when to pick a fight. If you can't do that, that's a map design issue, not a balance one.