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Thread: Making M-42's canister shot more player friendly16 Jan 2022, 20:41 PM Jump back to quoted post11 Jan 2022, 16:17 PMVipper M-42 come with canister shot mode and in that mode it fire AI rounds as reduced range. The current implementation has an issue where the when in canister shot mode the weapon will retain the engage vehicles mode and will not fire on soft targets. Possible solutions: make free engage the default mode for canister shot remove the option for this mode or Since the mode is not that great replace with single AI shot. As a QOL, toggling it to cannister should take off vehicle priority and toggling back to AP should resume vehicle priority. That said, the unit is really bad. Canister shot doesn't do much damage or suppression so anything can walk right up to it and decrew it easily. It's too expensive for its current state. The pop cap is only 6, but even at 6 it will later prevent you from having another unit that actually does something. If the unit is going to stay at it's current cost, it should get a little bit of suppression added to it. Maybe enough so that two rounds would suppress a unit. It would act a little bit like a MG. That would still give players about 4 seconds to react to keep from getting their units suppressed. It doesn't rotate very fast so would still be easy to flank. It would then be useful, but only with screening infantry. In: Lobby
Thread: Upgunning the soviets - the IS-2 25 Dec 2021, 05:41 AM Jump back to quoted post24 Dec 2021, 15:32 PMsome one I truly believe is 2 must have special rounds that automatically used every two tree shots and when it fired and hit it would delete enemy tank turret it special animation during wich turret goes up split in two parts or more with loud boom sound killing all only ENEMY infantry within 2 screens including buildings So kinda like a Sturmtiger? PS - see my signature In: COH2 Balance
Thread: Hannibal's personal gameplay design23 Dec 2021, 19:08 PM AFAIK, tanks only had vision slits to the front. If they had an exposed commander, they should get 360 view, but the exposed commander should be vulnerable to small arms. It should cost around 30 munitions to get the commander, 50 if they get a pintle MG. Open top TD's like the M10 should have 360 view, but b e vulnerable to small arms fire. One of the models should be the gunner resulting in a main gun crit. It would eliminate the BS of trying to crush with an open top TD. One vast improvement would be to limit the number of arty pieces to 1 per player, or possibly one rocket and one howitzer. Also, if both Axis factions have stock Panthers then the Soviets should have T34/85's and the USF have Easy 8's. The Walking Stuka badly needs to be reworked. The all or nothing works badly in small game modes and much too well in 4v4's. The OHK radius is so large that it routinely wipes full health Soviet squads, including Penals. Spreading the shells out, increasing the AOE range but having a smaller OHK radius would work much better. Units that get hit should be suppressed, as that would help it to be useful in a breakthrough push. In: COH2 Gameplay
Thread: Upgunning the soviets - the IS-2 23 Dec 2021, 15:28 PM Jump back to quoted post23 Dec 2021, 05:12 AMMMX This is a good point IMHO. While getting 7 bounces in a row isn't exactly likely with a bit under a 1% chance, it's not astronomically improbable, either. Yet the perception about how rare such occurrences are often depends if people find themselves on the receiving end of RNG or not. TTK is certainly not the only and most important performance figure, but I'd argue it is also far from irrelevant and can be quite suitable to prove a point (at least as long as it is put into the right perspective). It should, however, more be seen as a surrogate for DPS/DPM that also takes things like over damage into account than as a simple measure of 'how long does it take A to kill B'. After all, the fact that firefights usually don't last more than 20 s doesn't mean it can't serve as a good benchmark for comparing the relative performance of different units against a similar target. In the end, though, you're of course right in that TTK shouldn't be taken as the only measure and things like alpha damage or the variety of mobility and other non-combat relevant stats also play an important role. Getting 7 bounces in a row doesn't seem likely, but if you have 100 Sherman shots in a game, the odds of it happening to you are about 50%. Since most people here don't use Excel, I decided to see if I could make the same spreadsheet in Sheets. Here it is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Doyd3MrUB83xvzYpcqS3TkeXsWtziEI-uCbJPbqusr0/edit?usp=sharing It can be recalculated by hitting the refresh button if you're looking in a browser. Scroll down and see the streaks of bounces or penetrations. You can change the odds by editing the "if" statement. You're right that I overstated the "irrelevant" part. It has relevance when talking about infantry as target since reinforcing costs manpower. There is less relevance when talking about tanks since repairs are free. It can be a substitute for DPS as you pointed out. In: COH2 Balance
Thread: Upgunning the soviets - the IS-2 22 Dec 2021, 14:44 PM Jump back to quoted post8 Dec 2021, 10:44 AMHannibal Let's put this into a test setup: 20 meters distance (120 penetration vs 180 armor), flat terrain, only frontal shots possible, only actual hits counting. We count 50 hits, assuming that the players in the discussion above would have their last roughly 50 shots in mind when thinking about the engagements. We do 20 tests to form each player's experience. Basic statistics tells us that the real penetration chance is 66.7%, meaning 50*(120/180) = 33.33 shots should penetrate with a standard deviation of 3.33 shots (10% of the mean in our case). This means that almost one third of the players discussing will have had the Sherman penetrate less than 30 times or more than ~37 times. One player will have had the experience of the Sherman hitting less than 27 times or more than 40 times and probably be screeching about the trash Sherman or saying it were OP. Even if all discussion was fully rational (good luck with that), players will regularly report a penetration chance anywhere between less than 60-75%. This is human nature - remembering anything that seems out of the ordinary. I once had 5 shock troops killed by a single Panzershrek shot because they walked around a corner and were stacked on each other when it hit. Clearly the Panzershrek should've been nerfed! I just couldn't motivate myself to start a thread over it so justice wasn't served..... Normal people (meaning everyone that didn't have to take a statistics to get their degree) often underestimate how common "uncommon" results are. Take the normal heads or tails. Theoretically it's 50/50. Would you ever expect to roll 9 tails in a row? You can simulate this in Excel by putting "=rand()" in cell A1 and "=round(A1,0)" in cell B1, copy that down 99 cells. Rand will recalculate every time you hit F9. If my Sherman had a 50/50 chance of penetrating a Tiger and I fired 100 shots, I would've got 9 bounces in a row on my third recalculation. Streaks of 9 are somewhat uncommon, but 5-7 are really common. Excel will also simulate your test. Replace the Round function with "=IF(B1>0.667,1,0)" and add "=COUNTIF(B1:B100,1)" to any cell near the top. Hit F9 a bunch of times and see how bad or good your Sherman is. In short, Excel is OP. The two counter arguments I'd make against just looking at the numbers in Excel are about the effect of alpha damage and time to kill being irrelevant. In a RTS, alpha damage has an outsized effect because it greatly increases the risk of losing a squad. That was a lot of the problem with the old IS2. It seemed to go miss, miss, wipe on squads a lot, but sometimes it started with the wipe. The other problem is that people like to argue about the time to kill. I've seen multiple comparisons where people are comparing TTK times in the 20-40 seconds and trying to use that to make a point. In an actual game, 20 seconds may as well be an eternity, as nobody has reactions that are that slow. The bazooka was once nerfed because Relic thought the TTK was too short. Back to original topic - Based on how often the commanders are picked, it doesn't seem like the majority of the top 200 think the IS2 is trash. It's just that the commanders have fallen into the "B" tier. Trash is more like Conscript Support, Tank Hunters, any Partisan commander, etc. In: COH2 Balance
Thread: OKW best beginner faction?21 Dec 2021, 19:43 PM With the low player count and my CELO rankings from 82 to 3171, there are lots of times I play against players who are beginners. Based on those observations, I wouldn't recommend OKW as a beginner faction at all. OKW is better than average only in 4v4's. Even then, it is only because of map shape and a couple units. The LEFH, Sturmtiger, and Walking Stuka are what make them good in 4's, but mostly in maps like Port of Hamburg where the LEFH will eventually range everywhere and the other team has to funnel into the middle from a few points so you can just bombard those areas (assuming that the other side doesn't know how to counter LEFH's). Those map shapes are also good for the Walking Stuka. The Sturmtiger is still good on a few maps, but not as much of a go-to as before. Other than that, OKW doesn't seem that great right now. I play most games as Soviets and they always have counters for OKW. When I'm playing as axis, OST feels the same as Soviets. Both of them are easy to pick commanders that counter what the other team does, whether it's Storm or Guard Rifle Combined Arms, Spearhead or Guard Motor, etc, etc. OKW's weakness is that it doesn't always have counters, particularly when playing with randoms. In: COH2 Gameplay
Thread: Poll on new zoom out level in CoH3 alpha21 Dec 2021, 07:57 AM A lot of other RTS's let you zoom out and in as much as you want. Overall, I'd rather have this than the COH2 zoom levels, which seem really small even in comparison to COH1. In: COH3 Central
Thread: COH2stats.com match and player statistics 2.016 Dec 2021, 05:34 AM Jump back to quoted post15 Dec 2021, 13:43 PMBasedSecretary Exactly. If I join and see 2 of my teammates less than level 20 and they start their build by spamming engies or mortars you bet your ass im dropping, especially if it's a map like port of hamburger or shitball express. This is the second most frustrating type of player to play with. The worst is when the game goes on for 40 minutes, but it feels like you've spent the last 10 minutes playing by yourself, then you look back and see your teammate has 5 Katy's so you now know why it feels like that. Inevitably, someone gets a Panther behind the front lines and you teammate pings it constantly because they want you to kill it while they run with their 5,4,3,2,1,0 Katy's, then calling you a Noob after the Katy's are gone. In: Lobby
Thread: Lefh 10514 Dec 2021, 06:46 AM Jump back to quoted post14 Dec 2021, 05:21 AMMMX You're right about the shell count. For some reason I was under the assumption that the latest patch equalized both arty pieces, I should probably have used common sense and checked this quickly before posting. My apologies! In any case, this should of course tilt the probability slightly in favor of the leFH. As to the second part, this comes down to the question if this can be broken down into a simple binomial distribution (A beats B) instead of two nested distributions that each have their own variance (A beats B before B beats A). After giving this some thought I think you are correct and this case is much more straightforward than I assumed. 8/10 should indeed be quite a bit more unlikely given a 50/50 chance and 10 trials. Good points overall and a healthy reminder to double-check one's assumptions every now and then. Mistakes on patch notes and effects happen. I've done that myself a couple times. Have a nice day In: COH2 Balance
Thread: People thought relic was going to close down 201814 Dec 2021, 04:59 AM Jump back to quoted post13 Dec 2021, 15:44 PMHannibal They didn't really convert the AoE2 base though. The DE version has only slightly decreasing player numbers. It does not explain where those ~20k AoE4 players come from. These must, for the most part, be players that are either new to AoE or older gamers that decided to pick the game up. I think CoH2 will remain after CoH3 is released. I think the Mediterranean theatre is interesting, but probably not as widely known as the western and especially eastern front. CoH3 however has quite an advantage over AoE4 though. AoE4 had to somehow outperform a VERY highly acclaimed and polished AoE2. CoH3 on the other hand has to outperform "only" CoH2, which still lacks a lot of features and fixes. That's were CoH3 can really shine. I hope Relic realizes that. OUCH! This wasn't aimed at me but it felt like it was. I hadn't played AOE in so long that I can't remember if it was AOE or AOE2. AOE4 is a good game. I'm a lot happier with it than the vintage games that Blizzard has been remaking. In: Lobby