One way to nerf the ISU could be to lower the frontal armor and give it some more HP instead (obviously not so much that it results in a buff in total).
This would mean that lower tier vehicles would work more reliably against it and give it longer downtime due to repairs. However it would also be able to stay longer in fights and be contradictory to the general design of casemates (strong front, weak rear), since the difference between front and rear armor would be smaller.
Out of interest:
Is it possible that someone explains what was the root of the Panzerfaust bug? This was one of the longest standing issues of the game.
Due to the nature of this issue overriding other capture bonuses provided by ability, we are removing the capture bonus.
10% Capture Speed Bonus Removed.
Last patch, OST got a de-/capture buff when T4 was up. This has now been removed because some abilities like counterattack do not work anymore if T4 is built.
Small Visualizer script that draws graphs for a variety of stats
Download:
This is the "release" of small pieces of code that make some of the rather abstract stat numbers more visible and comparable.
Due to the DeCoHde project and previous attempts in Excel, I already had some code, data and calculations lying around. So I decided to move them into one Python file and polish them slightly. Unfortunately there are issues with making an executable file out of this, so only the Python script is available.
Usage is straight forward and simple:
1. Enter your vehicles of interest into the txt file with commas as separators (I already added some as an example). Make sure the names are exactly the same as in the "Name" column in the Unit_Data file. The first vehicle you enter will always be treated as the target for some calculations, all others are shooters. For some plots only two vehicles are used, so the first one will be target and the shooter will be the second vehicle
2. Run the script
As an example, we'll have a look at the following vehicles (these are the same vehicles as in the txt file after download):
T-34/76, PanzerIV(OKW), JagdpanzerIV, Tiger, SU-85
-> the T34 is the first in the list, so he will be the "target". For some plots, the P4 will be used as the only shooter to not clutter the graph with lines. If you only enter one vehicle, plots that need two vehicles will not be displayed.
Your output:
AoE damage profile:
Quite straight forward. Take into account that also the scatter area is important and the profile has only a limited explanatory power.
Scatter area:
Also very straight forward. These should be familiar from MMX's "Scatter This!".
Base accuracy profile
Again, bear in mind that the scatter area here is important as well. T34 and P4 have the same profile, so the T34 plot is not visible.
Damage plots
top: natural hit chance, penetration chance and the natural damage chance (bear in mind this does not calculate scatter hits!)
mid: The chance of the attacker to deliver the deadly amount of penetrations within x hits. In our example, the chance of the P4 to penetrate 4 times in 4 hits at range 40 is about 29%, the chance to pen 4 times in 5 hits is 38%. Additionally, the expected hits to kill are displayed as a vertical line. For every vehicle combination, this will be displayed at max range of the shooter and range 10 (dotted lines).
bottom: Same as mid, but additionally the "survival function" is displayed. This shows the chance that the deadly amount of penetrations occurred up to shot x. In our example at range 40, the P4 has an ~80% chance to kill the T34 within 6 shots.
Penetration chances:
The conglomeration of pen chances of all the vehicles in the list against the target
Finally a big thanks to MMX for letting me steal his data on the units and even agreeing on changing it so that my scripts run better.
Well, my personal take on it is that KT, ele, JT, ISU and these two should NEVER be in the game in the first place, but they are and let's do whatever is needed to keep them niche options instead of wanting to buff them to meta level.
ST might be harder to use then AVRE, but we've seen games where it wrecks everything just as well as AVRE.
This is why I'm saying both are fine.
It might be my ranking, but I have not seen a Sturmtiger in ages, and I have also not seen a Sturmtiger in any serious higher level stream.
I agree that the AVRE is way better, but the AVRE is approximately the level these units should be at. Good aiming + somewhat late reaction of the opponent gives a decent chance for a squad wipe, everything else does damage but not wipe. The Sturmtiger is just waaaaay to buggy. With the projectile colliding everywhere it can't get long range, the impact effects don't allow to rework it to reduce the damage.
All animations around this unit say it has to have a big, wiping boom, everything else would look and play very weird.
If possible, get the ST up to about AVRE performance. But I feel like this unit has issues beyond saving, mostly due to the design of the current game and the CoH2 engine.
Since SOV is a given in team games due to the Katyusha, we maybe should take a look about what USF and UKF have to offer compared to each other.
UKF has:
- mines
- a normal ATG
- a mortar pit that has proven to be very resilient due to hiding behind shot blockers and the OKW T2 teching (at least true for the recent 2v2 tournament)
- a more beefy Comet if needed against Panthers
- the AEC that synergizes well with the T70
- decent recon options with the AEC and the pyrotechnic sections (and flares on Royal Artillery as one of the most prominent commanders)
- can build both an MG and a ATG
USF has:
- the Jackson (however I'd argue that it is only that great because it's USF's only reliable late game AT)
- the PaK howie
- the HE Sherman
USF's ATG is quite a muni sink though if you want to use it in the late game, and people tend to spend more muni on commander abilities and grenades. USF's LVs don't synergize with Soviets and scale worse into the mid game. And the lack of mines and either ATG or MG makes them more prone to being overrun.
USF is good in 1v1, but since team games focus so much in late game artillery there is not much USF can offer beside the doctrinal Calliope. And in the early game it's better to have an AEC against the inevitable Puma that can actually force the Puma back than having a Stuart or AA half track that are just prey. Yes the ATG can fight the Puma very well, but then you end up with a munition sink in the late game and you're locked out of an MG for quite some time.
Allies won 5/5 games in the finals without Perimeter Overwatch. Many of the games were not even close either.
I also had a +5 win streak once. Good times...
No but seriously, I hope you don't want to argue based on 5 games?
We really cannot make conclusion if we have that little info. Game for third place was 3-2 for Allies, and Axis did very well apart from the last game were Brosras+Artavick completely fell apart mostly due to lack of micro. I could argue with those five games and come to a completely different conclusion.
In automatch people get matched based on their elo rating so WR will always be close to 50%. Not sure how that says much about balance.
Yes, the thing is that the the curves are relatively stable and equal also at the end of the rankings. If you get a better ELO ranking just because your faction is OP, then we should see a higher win percentage than usual for that faction at the low ranks. This seems to be the case for OKW, while SOV and UKF have an even lower win rate. On the other hand, if a faction is UP, then it should also show this on the top percent of the player ranks. Here again we can see that SOV is lower than the others and the rest seems to merge into similar spots (UKF has a slight bulge though).
Allies having 60-70% win rate in the last 2v2 tourney makes you think the game is balanced? I am confused. If we only took the win-rates from the later rounds it would be even higher and in the finals Axis didn't win a single game. So I definitely would not call this balanced unless the balance team is striving for historical balance.
And correct me if I am wrong the only person that won with OKW for all those rounds in MLNZ is Asiamint. Doesn't seem balanced either. Ostheer crutching on doctrinal infantry to win games is also far from being a good design/balanced.
I have not seen any aggregated stats yet on the 2v2 tourney.
I also got the feeling that Allies were able to bleed Axis a bit more due to the mortar pit, but from what I saw balance got much better once perimeter overwatch was banned, which would make it mostly an issue with a single ability. Judging that almost everybody chose SOV/UKF as a matchup, the synergy might be slightly too good.
I am still hoping for Siphon X to do his magic and to give the communit a somewhat decent basis for discussion, but from what I know everybody at the moment can just judge from a hand ful of games they saw on Twitch. Or am I missing something here?
The last bigger analysis that I remember from Siphon X looked pretty balanced, but I think the basis was still the pre-patch heavy meta. So yes: for the time being I call this game mostly balanced, as I have no reliable reason and data to believe otherwise.
There are still some issues with Grens etc, but at least I find them personally less game breaking by far than most of the issues we had two years ago
This is a topic Ihave been thinking about for a while now.
I have been a member of this forum for about a year now after being a silent reader for another one and half. So overall my overall memory of the forums and general discussion topics datee back to about the end of 2017.
This was a time where CoH2 was basically still full of exploitable units and mechanics, at all times at least one of the factions was next to unplayable because it was horrendously underpowered, every new update fixed an issue but created another and balance was more and more transitioning to the community.
You don't have to stretch you imagination too far to guess how discussions looked like back then. "Axis Op!", "Allies OP", "XYZ UP!" etc pp. Of course there have also been 'vivid' discussions how to fix these units and what would be the best approach to that. Every day was a new topic, a new thread popping up. Obviously not all of these discussions were constructive (by far not), but usually the laid out issues were quite clear.
Looking through the forums now I have to say it has become quite (for the lack of a better word) boring. Some people complain about lack of polish and missing text strings, the M20 might be under used, the price of the first cache could go down by 50 MP, Comets might be slightly too reliable, the Raketenwerfer does weird little dances when repositioning. Just like it did for the last 5 years. Now I don't want to discredit any of the OP's or topics they want to discuss, they are all valid points when it comes to opening a discussion. The last big outcry we had have been that sections are too strong and Tigers were nerfed too much. The first has settled down and disappeared into nothingness after players took the time to actually play the game instead of just watching Twitch only, while the latter has become a rather specialized discussion about certain stats that many are not able or willing to follow.
But in general I have got the feeling that topics have shifted quite drastically to more minor parts of the whole machine, while neither CoH2 nor the community here on .org has taken a significant hit from what I can tell. Is that shift bad? No, not at all.
I think it tells us more about how far this game has come thanks to mostly the balance team though. At the moment, all factions are playable, there is no clear unit or combination that roflstomps everything across half the map, no 5x maxim or 4x JLI spam builds, and meanwhile also no heavy-only meta anymore. Katitof and Vipper still get into fights regularly, this hasn't changed.
This game is still far from perfect, some units like the SU76 lack their niche, SOV mid game is a bit dull, the Jackson somehow lacks a real weakness,there are missing and outdated text strings, some mechanics or abilities are badly communicated and many more. The biggest I can think of right now if that the Elefant and ISU are a bit too much of a no brainer in team games. And of course some faction have design issues, but fixing them is beyond what the community is capable/allowed to do by Relic.
So, considerung all of this, I have been wondering: what do you think are CoH2's big (gameplay) issues at the moment? Because to be honest, I cannot think of any that would come close to 2018s and also early 2019s problems. Most things have been solved, every faction has a variety of different strats and commanders to chose from, the game is still good fun, nothing is brokenly OP. Everything that we would change at the moment would just add something additional to the game.