Profile of Hannibal

It's also why people complaining about the damage of the mg34 confuse me very much. Good damage really isn't necessarily a good thing for an HMG

It's because people want to counter HMGs with... other HMGs. And only high damage will win you that minute-long shootout.

Mortars apparently are not an option.

While I appreciate the effort and thought that has gone into this idea, I don't think that it is the best way to go at the end of CoH2s life cycle.

TL;DR version:
I don't think that this higher resolution by 1-2% will provide enough benefit to legitimate all the issues it will likely cause. This proposal would have been perfect 6 years ago where there was still enough power behind CoH2 to make big changes and lay a good foundation, but now I think it is too risky.


For the sake of being, I will sum up what your approach gives us:
It widens the target size differences from 12 to ~30 depending on the approach and formula. The latter approaches, which would be preferred by you from what I can tell, widen the differences to "only" ~25. Overall, we get a higher "resolution" of target sizes by a factor of 2 to 2,5. While we currently need to fine-tune with about 4-5% natural hit chance, this would allow us to fine tune with ~2% natural hit chance. At this point I will already point out that the actual hit chance is lower than that. From my simulations between a T34/76 and an PanzerIV, I saw that about half of the scatter shots still hit (standing shoot out; take this with a grain of salt as I do not have the actual in-game hit box sizes of the tanks so I took the real world size for calculation). Assuming this is true, this would bring the actual hit chance down from 2-2,5% (current target sizes) to ~1% (OP's proposal) for each target size changed.


The two biggest concerns I have:

- While you can normalize the natural hit chances and compare them, the actual hit chances will be different due to scatter hits. as described above. I am not sure how "stable" these conversions are to rework all units without introducing artifacts, as there are quite a lot of different accuracy profiles and target sizes.
Of course this is also the case with the current implementation, but reworking all target sizes and accuracies will lead to multiple patches of rebalancing and for the first patches we probably have to hope that we will reach the current level of balance again.
The other option would be a complete rescaling of scatter as well, but this would then affect anti infantry performance and just cause additional unwanted problems.
So to make the first point short: While your idea brings a lot of benefits, I am not sure if there will be enough support by the community, balance team and Relic to go through what will probably be multiple iterations of rebalancing a big rooster of units.

- The other issue is that I don't know how large the benefit is to rebalance units compared to the current model.
The game provides three layers of RNG to fine tune combat: accuracy, scatter and penetration. Game play wise, it does not matter if the shot missed or bounced.
If the issue with small vehicles is that they are hit too often by TDs, we can adjust this with mainly target size. If they are too good vs heavies we can adjust mainly the armor. The effect of target size reductions of small vehicles are also more difficult to calculate, but for this case we do not need to go through multiple cycles of patching beforehand. And also your model does not guarantee that we do not need to rebalance armor or something else afterwards, it just allows us to do this more precisely. And to be honest even while I do not doubt the overall qualification of the balance team, I don't think that any of them will be able to make a difference between the impact of 1% or 2% higher hit chance. I don't think anyone is able to say "No, these -3% definitively won't cut it, but -4% is the perfect spot for unit XYZ" with any guarantee. The previous -3% coupled with -5 armor or so might have effectively done the same.

I used my simulation to let every of these units shoot at a Sherman, All tanks needed about 4 shots to kill it, which would give the ISU a TTK of 31,3 s and Elefant Jagdtiger about 26,7 s.

Against a heavy:
Elefant -> IS-2: 4,7 shots or 32,8 s
ISU -> Tiger: 8,5 shots or 77,8 s

All sims done at range 70 and only frontal hits allowed.

Now bear in mind I do not have the in-game hitboxes for scatter shots, so I used the real life tank sizes. Actual numbers might differ a bit. But it is also true that 77% of the shots are natural shots/hits which are simulated correctly. And even of all the scatter shots most should be simulated correctly. So even if these numbers are not 100% like in-game, they are not far from it.

Conclusion:
Using the ISU against heavy tanks is an absolute waste

You understand that blobing requires zero micro and puts all the micro on pin-point positioning and timing of MG42 and pinpoint timing of which particular section to supress before they run out of the cone of fire. If the Ost player is able to supress all of them, Brits lose very little, one or two men and they simply retreat back to base, 30 seconds of map control. If Ost fucks up, they lose their mg EASILY. The difference in required micro to combat brit blobs far exceed micro for Brit blobbing

Plus the map control you're loosing while blobbing if your opponent is spread out.
Don't compare apples and oranges.

I am intetested in chipping a build in, but:
For which modes? And how far do you want to take the build? Late game really relies on what your opponent is building. Early game is way more stable for build orders.