Profile of Angrade (Ægion)

Jump back to quoted post31 Dec 2017, 16:31 PMNubb3r

There's one thing I would like to suggest which is a general redesign of light indirect fire. It's cancer. Moreso in team games but random mortar shells wiping squads are just too much for a competitive environment and this shit happens on a regular basis.

I would propose making mortars more responsive overall and changing them as follows (I'm only looking at non doc, so we can get that straight first. As was said before, one problem with the game in general was it's lack of coherent design decisions and the gap filling with commanders which has done a lot of damage to the balance (see doctrinal flamers, M10 vs Jackson etc.).

All Mortars should have their core function in effectively combating team weapons (forcing pack-ups, retreats and repositions) and softening garrisons/emplacements (but not outright hard-countering them). Further, all of them should have smoke.

OST and Soviet: Ost and Soviet both have a mortar in an early tier and rocket artillery in T4, but that's it.
Therefore I'd say these two mortars should have a "quick barrage" and a "long barrage", where the difference between two barrages is that the long one takes longer to get started, but overall has a way longer duration, like 8 shells or something, making it best suited for anti garrison and anti emplacement (softening them up!). The short barrage should be kept very responsive, since it will mainly be used to force team weapons away and thus it consists of about 4 accurate shells.
For flavour we have the vet abilities which can stay as is, I see no big deal here, except make that flare shell work properly please, since it's been bugged since forever.
The late game rocket artilleries on Ost and Sov should be heavy blob and emplacement/garrison killers, but they are not the main concern here so allow me to skip that part for now.

OKW is in a similar spot with ISG and Stuka, but their timing isn't as distinctively spread apart like for Ost/Sov. I don't know how to fix the ISG without making it UP/OP, so maybe give it slightly more AOE first to make it more consistent and appyly similar changes like for the Ost/Sov mortars.

USF are bloated with indirect fire and I would suggest giving the mortar only the quick barrage option and leave it at that, plus smoke obviously. The long barrage should go into the Pack howie, but apart from this distinction it's getting fuzzy, since there's still the Scott which could be/stay a long range squishy Stug-E type of unit?? This is a part in my proposal that could use some more work, but I can't think of anything good right now. Maybe making the Pack howie a doctrinal airdrop and replacing it's role with the Scott would be good like it was already suggested here.

UKF is also in a wird position, but you already have great ideas for it and I'd go with the little mortar pit that you drafted there. Maybe have the long barrage locked behind being inside the mortar pit and otherwise treat it like USF mortar? There are base howies for late game heavy artillery so I don't see much of a problem there.

That's all the factional indidrect fire units covered, but here's the most important change of them all which should be applied to ALL of them:

Nerf automatic firing! Either increase the delay between aiming and firing, increase scatter, decrease rate of fire, decrease auto-fire range or maybe all of that to preserve their role as anti team weapons and soft garrison/emplacement counters. As of now, they add inconsistency by wiping squads randomly and just increase the "explosive noise" on the battlefield.
I'd hope they'd be more micro heavy and thus more rewarding compared to their passive use, which isn't all that worse than microing them heavily as of now. This is my personal pet peeve with this game and I hope It's okay that I post my ideas here, but since this area of the game needs some major work IMHO, I thought it could be done in a mod and you asked for ideas, so there you go!

TL;DR
Make mortars fit their role (anti team weapon + soft garrison/emplacementcounter) more distinvtively and make them more rewarding to play with and against (by rewarding micro and punishing negligence), all by nerfing their auto-fire heavily and splitting the normal barrage in two distinct versions, each sercing a specific puprose each which have been mentioned above.

cheers!

Jump back to quoted post30 Dec 2017, 18:55 PMZombiFrancis

Oh hay, me too.
Would you be interested in trying 1man officer squads that can be merged into riflemen? There's a lot of ways that sort of thing could go, so I'm interested in how radical you're trying to get with this.

Jump back to quoted post29 Dec 2017, 10:27 AMTiger Baron

Lol.

THQ was Relic's publisher until 2013, the game got released after almost an year under SEGA.

And honestly, I'll risk sounding like an asshole but I just need to say this, I have a lot of respect for you as a modder, but I see that as a person you're probably younger than me and have never played the first CoH.

And that's the problem, most of you come from DOTA and LoL's competitive background, and that's why SEGA changed Relic's direction towards CoH2 and DoW3 and that's why we have these shitty balance changes.

As others have mentioned, the game was more balanced between the Ostheer and Soviets in the beginning, what changed was Relic's new direction towards competitive and ESL with the release of the WFA and trying to implement gimmicky asymmetrical balance for some stupid reason, so it's not just the bugger amount of Armies needed be balanced.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, CoH and CoH 2 were made for fun, tactical, semi realistic, fun. They were never meant to be competitive StarCraft type games, and never will be. Continuing to balance CoH 2, DoW 3 and any future games in this direction will lead to their ultimate bankruptcy because whatever they do, they will not be able to cater to the MOBA fan base.

Jump back to quoted post22 Dec 2017, 17:02 PMgeneral_gawain

2) Targeting of base sector: This doesn't seem to got a change. As we left it was still possible to target base sector with some offmap abilities. Lolbomb was only one example for this. Does this got changed? If not please do it for all offmap artillery/plane abilities.

3) Binding tank call-ins to tier: We always thought either adapt fuel income across all maps and gamemodes or bind all call-ins to tech. this way the don't come too early in 1vs1 and not too late in all other gamemodes. Looking at the list of units that got adresses I do think that still not all units got adressed. The Sherman Dozer springs to my mind for example, which is curious because the M10 in the same commander got adressed. I would say do this for all tanks off all factions with the exception of the super heavies (I do think that it is a good thing that they do come later in big game modes)