Profile of Hannibal

I also noticed most fresh wrecks are so fragile they can be easily ran over, and don't seem to bounce shots like wrecks in coh2

If the resource economy worked similar to CoH2 (which would be bad), I could even imagine that the recovery vehicle is worse in 4v4 than e.g. in 3v3, depending resource refunds after cancellation etc. If you overflow with resources anyway (at least fuel), there is less benefit of saving some by recovering a vehicle while still having the same - if not even higher - risks. But that is pure theocrafting from my end. I really hope larger maps will have more, but less valuable resource points so that income can be easier contested

Still does not make sense since one can probably also recover katyoushas so one player would have back all vehicles the other none...

Once more you should be looking at from a perceptive of how often this would happen. Abandon has something 5% chance (if I remember correctly) while now it would almost certain and it also available only to half the factions...

You're missing the point. You can tune how much recovery is worth it by just adjusting a simple slider of how much original cost you need to pay. If the truck is fragile, artillery could just shoot the wreck both to remove the wreck as well as to attack the recovery vehicle. Which in turn is not for free, too. But all this discussion is just for dives. Most vehicles die near the front line, where the long recovery process is way more risky.

That not all factions have it can indeed cause balance issues, but my point was that I do not agree with your specific suggestion due to aforementioned reasons. The current system is design wise fine. If that's true for balance as well, we will see.

That does not make sense. Currently the risk of abandoning a vehicle is quite low. With recovery the chance of recovering an enemy destroyed vehicle behind your line would be almost certain if one's faction have these tracks available.

Yes, that's what I wrote.
In CoH2, you dive based on the assumption that your vehicle will not be abandoned in case it gets destroyed. In CoH3, your vehicle will be recovered.
Diving a P4 for 2 Katys is absolutely worth it in CoH2 (unless RNG abandon kicks in). Doing the same thing in CoH3 would be roughly an even trade.

These are question that obviously can not be answered here since the require extensive planning the testing.

A rough idea though would be:
Number of vehicles need to be able to build a vehicle would be according to vehicle category (light,medium, heavy, super heavy).

Nope, when it comes to recovery wreck would only count for the specific vehicle or category.

Vehicles would be unlock one by one

answered in point 3

In addition one could use the wreck for other reasons. For example one salvages a dingo armed with bren now one can equip an infatry with bren, one salvages a hmg now can get a free pintle, one salvages one a PzIV, one can give skirt to PzIV or salvaged vehicles can offer discount to techs.

It could be explored in a number of ways, but at some point the mechanic will become to fiddly to be attractive. Do you really want to gather X light vehicles to be able to build one of them? Your opponent could just not build the 3 needed light vehicles that you need. Unit classes are even less defined than in CoH2. How do you deal with that? If you recover a Stuart and a Greyhound, which one are you allowed to build? Which one if the vehicles are even from different factions? What happens if at least one vehicle is from your own faction or the other Allied/Axis? Would it then be possible to exploit that you can build a unit of your Ally?
Is it really worth the micro and resources to build a recovery vehicle, micro it to salvage a wreck and then get a free pintle (or any other smaller bonus) for it? I'd have to do that an insane amount of times to be worth it.
Your suggestion would take a lot of focus from the rest of the game. There's so many questions that will give rise to logical and gameplay problems. Even if you'd achieve a system that is fair and balanced, it would probably not be fun, and that's what playing computer games is all about.

At least the current system is easy to understand and logical. There's a destroyed wreck on the battlefield. You need a specialized vehicle and some resources (spare parts) to get it into working condition again. Or you just scrap it for what you might be able to use and get some resources. That's easy and straight forward, still has some decision making and pre-planning involved and does not need any counters or other indirect mechanics to work. It's an overall better design. Does it fit the gameplay? Is it balanced? We don't know yet, we'll see after release and the first months or patching.

Imo recovery cost and fragility are too few variables to be balance the mechanism across all modes when the price can be something as important as Black prince. Providing more tools would help balancing the mechanism greatly.

To be honest I don't fully remember what the costs of recovery were. But if the recovery cost scaled with the unit's cost, it would already be a decent screw to tune balance. Especially if you don't get refunded if you need to cancel the recovery. You might get a cool vehicle for rather cheap, but pay resources, risk completely losing them, risk the truck itself and have an opportunity cost of not being able to use those resources earlier.

What is this argument that you can't do something because a game 10-15 years ago has also tried it and it was not fun, so it can never ever be tried again?

The world has moved on. We can try stuff with new technology and new ideas.

Because it directly affects two parts of the game. Do you choose to build a building or more control and units on the map? All this is not there, engineers at the start are meaningless, they have lost one of their
one of main meaning. Are you bad at command and forgot to reinforce your troops? You have lost the initiative. Now this is not there, all this reminds me of the Activivision initiatives so that it would be "friendlier" for a noob to play instead of understanding the game and improving skills.

I am mentally mostly thinking about the auto reinforce, but let's slightly split the argument.

Regarding autobuilding/teching, I can see a point. However, I think that CoH2 did a very bad job at this mechanic as well. Only 2 out of 5 factions need their engineers for teching, and neither engineer units have a larger impact on the front. Even if you'd need to retreat them at full health, their combat potential is relatively low. While you could obviously get a bit of DPS out of them or try to sweep a mine later on, you can definitely afford to retreat them. Adding to this, the time between building the tech building and acquiring enough fuel to build a vehicle from it is far apart, and there is no benefit from just having the building itself. It does not matter if you build tech as soon as you have enough fuel for it or you accumulate fuel and start building at the last moment, finishing just in time for producing the vehicle. This usually gives you a large time frame (e.g., during which you are almost guaranteed to retreat your engineer. The only instance where this influences timings and the game is getting the 222 out as Ostheer, because the window is rather small with 30 fuel for the 222 and mistimings between BP1-T2-222 can delay it a bit. I never really had issues with the T70 as Soviets. 70 fuel is roughly 3 min worth of income. That is a large enough window that I probably need to retreat my engineers from combat in between anyway. Ostheer T3 and Soviet T4 have even larger windows.
To fix that, engineers would have to be potent in combat so that not having them on the front actually made a dent in your defense and the time frame between teching up and actually getting something useful out of it need to be reduced. But still: Is this really worth and fun, to take so much of your attention away from the battle? People where already complaining about OKW T1 needing to be clicked so often for tech ups that are both necessary, but only worth little. Yes, a good player will time everything correctly, but this is memorizing stuff and has nothing to do with tactical skills, which should be the focus of an RTS.


Regarding the auto reinforcement, I do not see a point. This is mostly memorizing stuff that you'll usually not think about anyway. You will skip over your base, select everything and reinforce >90% of the time anyway. In very few times, there will be some decision to make to tech up or reinforce either squad A or B. But those are rather scarce. Again, is it really worth taking focus and time from real tactical decision making? I personally don't think so. But even if you disagree, your argument "Are you bad at command and forgot to reinforce your troops?" can be used to justify a lot of clicking. (Exaggeration obviously All your squads fall asleep if they don't get an order for 30 secs, after which you need to press the wake up button and they go through a 10 sec animation before taking commands again. If you're bad at command and forgot to wake up your troops, you have lost the initiative. Which is exactly how you justify manual reinforcement. This example actually comes fairly close to reinforcing. Squad is not combat ready (asleep/not reinforced) -> go to squad, spam button without having to decide anything in 90% of cases (reinforce, wake up) -> do something else for a while -> give order to squad again.
What about auto healing then? This should surely be manual. With a long cool down, it could even include some actual decision making (do I heal the troops now or after the large battle?). The healing automatrons should be very bad for gameplay and differentiating good from bad players if I follow your argument.

And this can be expanded hugely. Refueling tanks, automatic reloading, autotargeting of squads. Your main differentiator is who can remember and click things faster than the other player, not who is actually able to pull of the better assault.