Isn’t part of the “theme” of OKW the disparity of late war German (specifically SS) units?
Volks are poor but numerous and cheap. Same goes for Rakettenwerfer. This represents the majority of late war German units that get some special equipment but not enough for all like the StG44s, but are mostly inexperienced troops with poor training.
The other end of the spectrum we have the most powerful starter unit, Sturmpioneers and the most powerful infantry, Obersoldaten and the most powerful tank, the king tiger. These elite units are really powerful and represent the overstretched and heavily relied on veterans who still remained alive from earlier campaigns. Few in number the have high manpower costs because they are so few, but also are just plain better than everyone else.
Sturmpioneers are designed to make you unable to do everything you want with them. They are supposed to be over worked by being the assault unit with high DPS and the minesweepers and the builder and the repair unit and now also a light AT platform. They fit the OKW theme perfectly making you really have to choose what you do with them because they are so critical to many roles but expensive to just build more of. You can either have a small but elite army that can do it all but be very inefficient in the long run, or you can have a larger more economical force that has some compromises due to your over worked veteran Sturmpioneers.
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Lowering its damage by a percentage and then raising its rate of fire by the same amount would help with consistency without changing its overall DPS. This would make it less frustrating to play against where you don’t end up losing a whole bunch of dudes to one lucky shot and less frustrating to play with when you fail to hit with what seems like every shot.
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Part of me wonders if this could actually work via making units out-of-combat, in addition to having an automatic action to reload, also gain a modifier which makes their reload speed instant.
...but I am no modder, so I must confess that's only conjecture. I'm also imagining this concept would allow HMGs to be reloaded automatically without being set-up, and I can't even say if that's possible at all either.
That might work brilliantly, or it might result with some sort of crazy bug like the full auto Sherman main gun bug. Lol
Regardless, the manual reload tied to hold fire would be easier to implement. I also like how it rewards players who choose to use it if they want to invest the extra tome and thought to “click the button”, but for players that don’t want to bother with it, it changes nothing. The auto reload would change how the unit behaves for everyone, while a manual toggle ability only changes the unit behavior of those who choose to utilize it. |
the reload thing is simple to implement, as soon a unit leaves combat it reloads, there fixed!
That sounds like a good idea at first glance, but in an older thread it was brought up in, someone pointed out that the auto reload function could be manipulated by your opponent.
An example could be to drive a light vehicle past the MG making it fire a burst at it then driving off to go do something else. The vehicle has now caused the MG to use up some of its ammo prompting it to reload after it is no longer in combat for a certain amount of time, for example let’s say it’s 10 seconds. Now our savvy opponent lies in wait and counts to 11 seconds and charges the MG that he knows is reloading. With this tactic an LMG blob could easily decrew an MG team that is busy reloading.
This is why I suggested the hold fire button prompt a reload. Since it’s controlled by the player, you can choose when to force the reload. |
Can you see how much HP dmg a single model from a squad received or take decisions based on the different damage each small arm fire weapon does?
There's a reason small arm fire dmg weapon goes all over the place while say anti tank tools are modeled around the magic number 160.
If you want to make infantry stats more approachable, they could start by listing the DPS a squad does in sets of close/mid/long range in the useless space we have now in the middle of the screen.
Ideally it should be dynamic, taking into account upgrades, vet and abilities.
I think your point about AT weapons already being modeled around caliber specific damage actually helps my case. The interaction of damage, accuracy, rate of fire and range is already there, using caliber specific damage and it works!
You can see the squads heal bar dropping with each shot and by which you can estimate how many more hits it will take to drop a model when you factor in how many models are left in the squad. In this case tanks and infantry work much the same way where you look at the unit icon, compare it to what’s shooting at you and thus determine how many hits the squad or vehicle can take. Simply, I would say that yes, you can see how much health a model has left and make decisions based on that.
And, once again, this is about CoH 3. In CoH 3 you might actually be able to see how much HP an individual model has left in it. Is that something you’d like to see?
In CoH 3 you might have a large health bar for the squad and smaller ones for each model. Or you might have different unit skins that show wounds or limping or bandages that indicate that a model is in good, fair or poor health. That could then translate to an oh crap moment when you look and see that your squad has two members at low heath and know that it will take only two Rifle shots each to kill them in the next fight, rather than look and just see a single heath bar at about 3/4 full.
I’m just saying that this system has advantages that exist outside of what CoH 2 has. Think outside the box. Don’t immediately think why a new idea must be bad or why it can’t work, but try to think of why new ideas can work. Innovate. |
I would like to see a hold fire button added to all HMGs that has the dual functionality that as soon as they are placed on hold fire, they automatically begin a reload cycle. I know some players are clamoring for a manual reload feature so they don’t end up shooting a short burst at a critical point followed by an unavoidable reload. If you go to the bother to add a hold fire button, then you could also give it the dual feature of making the gun reload. Two birds with one stone. |
Yeah. That’s just plain great work you’ve done there. Bravo.
Is there any way we can get this put into the live game in a future patch? It seems to be universally seen as an improvement. |
I think some folks are misunderstanding my intentions with this one, based on their counter points.
Simply stating anything about the current damage system or health per model or unit cost is totally irrelevant to the original point because this is a proposed concept for CoH 3, which could radically change the current system. For example, the 5 man Tommy squads with 16 damage per shot being able to one volley kill an 80 health model argument is a perfect example of this. Everything about this argument is true in the context of CoH 2, but none of it is relevant to an argument about CoH 3.
CoH 3 tommies could be a 6 man squad, or 4 man squad. They could all have 100 health instead of 80, or even 1000!
The point is that CoH 3 can have a totally new way of balancing infantry damage and unit interactions.
I know it doesn’t work for CoH 2, that’s not the point.
This discussion is about CoH 3. |
No.
Gameplay > realism in this regard.
I'd argue that one being 200 manpower and the other being 340 manpower and in a final tier structure would be pretty self explanatory. I doubt anyone not familiar with the game files even knows rifles have different damage and it's likely most players think it's just the accuracy of the unit that makes the difference in damage output.
The difference in damage is needed for (underlying) balance and gameplay tweaking.
The same differences could be done by varying other attributes.
Yes, gameplay is more important than realism. What I am saying is that realism can also benefit gameplay by giving players a better understanding of how units perform based on what they know about the real world and what they are observing on screen.
This dynamic was pretty straight forward in CoH 1, where Riflemen and Volksgrenadiers had the same accuracy and damage as each other at vet 0, but Riflemen fired slower at long range and faster at short range while Volksgrenadiers fires at about the same rate regardless of range. This was easily understood by the player and was also a more realistic way to balance the interaction between the two units. |
Recently in a forum about G43s, I got into a discussion about the lack of intuitiveness that the current damage system used for small arms in CoH 2. This post is to provide a place for discussion on this point specifically and to allow myself to clarify what I am proposing and why. Caliber Specific Damge: During WWII, most nations fielded very similar cartridges for their small arms. In real life we can argue the merits of 7.62 Tokarev vs 9mm Parabellum vs .45 ACP, but in the context of a game that has weapons ranging from revolvers to howitzers, it really isn't worth splitting hairs between the damage of different weapons in the same general category. Proposed is to separate small arms into four different categories and to make each of these categories do the same amount of damage per shot. Pistol Caliber Weapons: This includes all handguns and Sub-Machineguns in the game like PPSh's, Thompsons and Luger's. Rifle Caliber Weapons: Full powered rifles, Light Machineguns and Heavy Machineguns fall into this category. M1 Garands, Kar98s, Lee-Enfields, Mosin-Nagants, BARs, MG-42s all fit this classification. Intermediate Caliber Weapons: During WWII very few weapons were made in what is now the most common type of infantry weapon. This category is for the StG44, firing its 7.92x33 round also known as 8mm Kurz. The M1 Carbine also falls into this category. Both fire a round that is significantly more powerful than a pistol round, but also significantly weaker than a full sized rifle round, hence the nomenclature as intermediate. Heavy Caliber Weapons: Heavy weapons are those weapons in the .50 Caliber range, such as the M2HB .50 BMG Heavy Machine Gun, the Soviet DShK HMG and the Boys Anti-Tank Rifle. It should be noted that not all HMGs are considered Heavy Caliber Weapons, as most fired Rifle Caliber rounds.
The intent of normalizing the damage of the rounds is to fix the extremely complex damage system that CoH 2 has in CoH 3. For example, Grenadiers do 16 damage per hit from the same rifle, a K98k, that Volksgrenadiers do only 12 damage with. M1 Garands fire a round (30-06 M2 ball) that is ballistically the same as the Kar98k's 8mm Mauser round, yet in game it only does 8 damage per shot compared to the 16 or 12 above, and that's only two of the numerous types of K98s found in the game.
This also leads to the problem of not understanding why units perform differently, despite being armed with the same weapon. Obersoldaten are elite infantry that excel with their bolt action rifles even without an upgrade, but Ostruppen are the worst infantry in the game, armed with the exact same weapon!
By locking the damage of weapons to caliber, players can easily expect how much each shot will do, and how much damage they are dealing based on rate of fire and accuracy. This means that you can still have units perform differently from each other even when armed with the same weapon by adjusting their accuracy and rate of fire between shots. For example, in CoH 3 Landseer armed with bolt action rifles might start out very similar to an Infantry Section and perform close to each other at vet 0, but Landseer could gain accuracy with veterancy making them better at long range, while Infantry Sections gain a better rate of fire, making them better at close range.
Semi-automatic rifles of the era are the easy way to distinguish better equipped units from less well equipped troops. Military grade bolt action and semi-automatic rifles of the WWII era were basically equal in terms of mechanical accuracy making the potentially higher rate of fire of the semi-automatic rifles a clear advantage, while accuracy was primarily determined by the skill of the shooter. Very low rates of fire are possible with both types if it needed to be done to balance units like Riflemen who start with semi-automatic rifles.
This also allows for interesting scaling potential where US Riflemen could start out very bad, being inexperienced Americans in the North African Theatre, but veteran Riflemen out class all other basic troops with their superior rifles once they gain combat experience. Elite German units in CoH3 could also have G43s to show their higher damage potential compared to more regular troops with K98s, but their "Elite" status would also mean that they have a better vet 0 stats. Adding a Light Machinegun to a squad adds firepower in an obvious and predictable way and could be done to any rifle equipped squad, bolt action or semi-automatic. With careful adjustment of accuracy, cool down and rate of fire attributes, future CoH games could incorporate this type of system, which I believe would be better for all players, but be especially helpful to new players. |