My point was that the RNG of 1) and 2) is the same. There is no way to distinguish between a shot that missed and a shot that hit but bounced. The player only sees two outcomes, regardless if there are two layers or only one layer at work behind the scenes. And the chance for success in any matchup of two squads will be stable. For two squads, you can fully transfer the penetration chance to accuracy and the other way around, as long as there is no deflection damage. The main difference between options 1) and 2) is that the behaviour of 1) is more intuitive if you look at multiple different squads.
If we assume 3 squads, one having low armor and pen, the second medium armor and pen, and the third one high armor and pen, this becomes very clear: The low squad loses the medium one. The medium in turn is weaker than the high one. Everyone will assume that the last squad is just the strongest of them all and should absolutely wreck the low one. But nope. The low and medium squad die at the same rate, because the high squad will 100% pen both of them at all times, so armor does not matter. That is the problem with armor on infantry. Top it off with the fact that all of these people are made from meat and bones, there is no reason for them to have any "armor" beside gameplay reasons.
From my experience when I tested small arms fights, the main component for RNG was not accuracy, but if the squad focuses down one model or if they target different ones. If they target at least two models, early drops rarely happen, because too many shots have to be made before the first model is killed, meaning that you will be close to what you expect from the fight. Only the old vCoH system can actually lower the effect of early model snipes, but not cancel it out.
I doubt your system will really solve the issue you are describing, but in the end also create other problems. From what I get, you want to remove e.g. model snipes and similar high impact RNG based stuff from small arms.
But as long as there is a decent chance to penetrate and deal full damage, model snipes will always happen at a regular rate. One option is to increase the range of armor values, so that your chance to penetrate is actually fairly low. Model snipes would then be a really rare occurrence. However, this leads to the problem I described above with the "low/medium/high" squads: If armor of infantry is not standardized, there will always be very odd and unexpected behaviour of different squad match ups. There are too many options to discuss them all, but at the moment I don't see how to really avoid that. Keep in mind that the average player only plays a couple of matches per week or month. He does not have the time to find out how a unit fares against the tons of different enemies.
My main guideline is that the mechanics must be intuitive and as authentic as possible. Yes, you can find some explanations for basically everything in the game. You could even find very odd explanations for the old vCoH system. But the more explanations you have to strap on the less it will be authentic.
Assuming your explanation of
More experienced soldier maybe moving differently, exposing less of his vital parts
is true. Why then does this soldier know how to hide from a pistol shot (low pen), but not so much from a rifle and even less from an MG bullet? This does not make an awful lot of sense. Why does it depend on the calibre of the weapon? Behaviour in the game will therefore be unexpected again.
Most of this I have covered with the above points I guess.
I'll leave it at some last comments/repetitions:
I am fully in favor of keeping infantry armor standardized. This is what I would expect from the game. Experienced soldiers being harder to hit can be believably described by RA.
Fiddling around with standard armor levels will almost guaranteed lead to weird behaviour in some or most matchups that is not intuitive.
And finally, I'd like to come back more to the actual point of the thread, because I initially did not aim for discussing infantry armor in general: Cover should change armor. This makes sense intuitively and logically. All the penetration and accuracy values would affect the fight in an expected way. High penetration weapons ignore more of the cover because they can just shoot through it.
I did not argue to fully remove it. It can be a full removal, it can be a decrease. This is about general design, not exact numbers and the effect of this change to the current state of CoH2.
Basically, some of the durability of the RA and damage reduction modifiers should be moved to an armor bonus, the extend is debatable and the point of this thread.
Making explosives perform more as expected is one of the (minor) points of this change. What you point out as an issue is already in the live game: If your opponent is heavy on arty, it is better to keep squads in the open field than sticking them to yellow cover, which is the second prominent oddity additional to the one that I described. This doesn't make any sense. Every soldier would still stick to some wood or a crater during artillery shelling. CoH2 says the best thing is to stick to open field if no green cover is available.
I won't respond to the LV point due to the reasons mentioned above: This is a general design thread, not about the current balance of CoH2.
I think it would do game unnecessary more complicated. Its either RA or Armor which should stay.
Advantages of RA - its easier to balance, since only accuracy and RA RNG are affected, at the same time lack of any complacency behind it means that RNG can screw you over. With either models being sniped, or squad taking almost no damage.
Armor on inf on the other hand provide somewhat more or less predictable outcomes, BUT in CoH2 armor was much stupider iteration of RA, when squad effectively ignored damage if hit wasn't a penetrating one.
vCoH "armor" was much deeper system, but at the same time a very complicated one, with different armor types and different weapons which had different bonuses against different types of armor. But essentially it was just either reduced or increased damage, depending on who is attacking who.
I don't understand how in the current design armor will give you more reliable outcomes. There is no difference between a miss and a bounce, and not even a visual clue to what happened. Although there are three different results (damage/miss/bounce), the player will only be able to see two consequences: damage or no damage. He also cannot influence them, so the RNG overall is the same.
I don't like the concept of CoH1's armor. Your weapon is not suddenly less deadly because you shoot at a different soldier from the same distance. CoH2's old armor system streamlined the concept, but didn't solve the core issue: Getting scored hit with any caliber makes the same damage regardless of its target.
There's three things that CoH2 is currently abstracting:
1. A distant target is harder to hit - accuracy does the job -> easy and intuitive for the player
2. An experienced soldier knows how to not be hit - RA does the job -> easy and intuitive for the player
3. Cover makes you harder to hit - RA and damage reduction do the job -> RA is somewhat intuitive, damage reduction not so much.
I write 'somewhat ', because it works if you don't think about any further than necessary. I'll bring up the wooden plank example again: It obscures the target, so the target is harder to hit. Technically, it could also increase aim time, since the attacker needs more time to place his shot. However, simplifying this to accuracy is doing well enough to not look odd.
If you think about it however, this fence should not stop a 50cal at all. If the 50cal was dangerous to even light armor, the gunner will just shoot through that fence as if it were butter. However, this is not captured in CoH2 at all. The wooden fence will have the same effect on both the major shooting with his shitty pistol and the 50cal gunner.
What I think should be done for CoH3:
1) Keep Armor in favor of RA, simply because it allows more macro balancing of units.
2) Inf armor should not work like in CoH2\vCoH.
3) Instead armor should act like a damage reducer. Meaning, say we have a squad A with armor value of 1 and squad B with penetration value of 0.5 and damage of 1.
*If squad A was hit and hit was a penetrating one, it takes a full damage.
*If squad A was hit, but it hit wasn't able to penetrate armor, it takes half of the damage, meaning 0.5, because squad B was able to pass accuracy check and was able to hit the target, there is no reason to force it pass another check to even deal the damage. Its better then RA\vCoH with only one check, and better then CoH2 old armor system with 2 checks.
As for cover:
1) It can still work as a damage reduction, which will lead to a tougher squads being more tougher in cover, but it can result in a stalemates behind cover
2) Or it can work as additional armor, meaning that squad A in yellow cover will have armor of 1.5 and in green cover armor of 2. This will make whole cover system easier to understand, but can result in squad being damaged quite badly if RNG isnt on your side.
3) Or just add new value "accuracy against cover" and leave armor\damage reductions without changes. This will allow to create squads which are worst\better against units in cover and performance of mentioned unit could be balanced on macro level aswell.
I don't fully agree on this.
Armor variation between different soldiers will yield odd results. A hitting bullet does the same damage, no matter how experienced the target was. Everything else would just be odd. A human cannot bounce a bullet to magically take less damage than any other human.
I actually support every soldier having the same armor value in CoH2. That's "realistic". What is not realistic though is that heavy weapons are affected exactly the same as small weapons by cover.
Your first point for cover (=current CoH2 green cover) cannot simulate that at all.
2) Is basically what I suggested. I assume you combine it with armor working as damage reduction, which would not really be intuitive, on the other hand it might still work because it is not really noticable compared to just dealing full damage, but less frequently.
3) Since we cannot tell apart a "bounce" from a miss, I see this as a variation of point 2).
There is no need to add target tables one can simply change the cover table and change the damage cover modifier of mortars and grenades from 0.5 to 0.75 vs heavy cover for instance.
That's what I meant by target table. The problem I described stays the same.
The problem with removing cover damage modifier and replacing them with armor is that it will increase the damage for light vehicles weapons and HMG/AP rounds.
For instance m20 has penetration values of 3/2/1 and Dhsk has penetration values of 7/6/5.
I already acknowledged that this would not be an easy change of some numbers and then everything were perfect in the opening post.
I am making a general point about the design of cover. The current system works for gameplay, but falls short on authenticity and intuition on quite a few ends. However, while AoE weapons can be solved by an engine update, small arms not so much
The last part would be working though as intended. Concrete numbers aside, large calibers and armor piercing ammo should have higher penetration and be better suited to hit enemies behind cover.
There is currently a complete penetration system implemented for small arms that next to useless. Introducing different armor values to infantry squads is neither authentic nor intuitive. The battle hardened PGren is not able to magically deflect a bullet because of his experience any more than a green Conscript on his first day of battle. He will have a better understanding of how to keep his profile low and how to move, which is summarized in the abstract RA value in CoH.
Cover can be an interesting way to give relevancy to small arms penetration without sacrificing authenticity.
The damage of certain weapon like mortars and grenades can be fixed changing the damage modifier they have vs cover and imo it would make more sense since this weapon should be specialized in dealing with entrenched troops.
This unit specialization does not need to be touched at all. My main point is to give more meaning to weapon penetration. Removing the oddity of staying within the explosion radius on purpose is a bonus and just an example of how the current system leads to unwanted side effects, which then have to be countered with special modifiers to make it more believable.
To my knowledge, the target tables don't check for directionality. If that's true, adding modifiers will lead to other issues, mostly with grenades. For example, if you storm a squad behind sand bags and lob a grenade behind them, currently you do half damage (odd behaviour). Introducing a 2x damage modifier will bring it up to full damage again and negate the benefit of sticking to cover (wanted behaviour). However, throwing the grenade in from the side, you'll suddenly do double damage, because the target table still applies while the damage reduction does not.
Given that much of this could be fixed by updating the engine, I'd rather focus on small arms. As stated above, explosive weapon behaviour against green cover is an odd symptom of the current system.
Cover at the moment gives a RA modifier and damage modifier, depending on the type of cover.
I was thinking if it weren't better if Relic had replaced some of these modifiers with an armor bonus instead.
Both make intuitive sense - hiding behind a wall both decreases your profile as well as your chance to be hit through the object. Harder objects such as brick walls (green cover) are also harder to penetrate than e.g. fences (yellow cover).
For small arms, they do almost the same thing: Increase the effective health of the squad.
However, there are two advantages:
- Currently, green cover grants an additional damage reduction modifier. Due to this, explosive weapons often behave unexpectedly bad. Most prominently, it is often better to wait and leave your squad in the blast radius of a grenade and then retreat if you reacted a little bit too late, because that way your squad benefits from damage reduction.
- Penetration values on small arms could finally be somewhat meaningful again. Almost all small arms weapons have a penetration of 1 at all ranges, with LMGs going up to 1.2 and HMGs even higher. These values barely matter. Only against the unicorn exception of Shock troops and some LVs, there is a difference. But even in these cases, it is often a bad decision to use small arms fire against that vehicle. To sum it up: The armor and penetration system of small arms has basically been removed from CoH2.
And that is bad. An HMG should just rip through some wooden planks, while and SMG should have issues doing so. There would definitely be some balance issues and even some logical issues such as craters providing very little penetration reduction, but overall this would be benefitial.
Obviously not for CoH2, that ship has sailed, but I assume for CoH3 there would be an advantage.
Caping the rest of the map is less important in large modes because there are more people caping, I pretty sure you are aware of that.
And the same goes for the enemy team.
Every time an ally has to cap a point for you because you as UKF push the UC+Sapper combo, there will be a gap in his front line where he is down one squad to his opponent. There is definitely an advantage in good coordination, but again: prove how this is game breaking, how Axis have a hard time to recover from that.
Securing the fuel early is very important and it can in some cases decide the game especially vs OKW.
Transports are like the M3 are used to get wipes in 1vs1 and not in order to cap the map.
Your whole argumentation revolves around
1. aggressive sapper drops - a quick glance over the available counters will tell you that this is not a large issue
2. UKF being able to have more units on the field for about 30 seconds and therefore being able to take a fuel point first.
Arriving 10-20 seconds earlier to a any point does not decide the game. If it does, there is a huge skill gap.
If that were the case, Ostheer should win way more often, since pios+MG beat almost any combo of pio+mainline with somewhat competent players. Especially in larger modes where flanking is hard. OKW can generate a similar combo stock by building Volks+Kubel. But they don't. They might lock down the sector first, but the game is too much back and forth and will always be in even games.
All this while there is so much speaking against it being OP. There is no point to make here, you make claims and don't back them up with tests, and the reasoning provided is fairly weak.
I even just tested it: On Whiteball, rushing fuel, OKW's SP arrives there at 1:05, the first Volk about 20 seconds later, the Kubel arrives at 1:35.
Trying the same thing with the allegedly problematic UKF strat, first IS arrives 1:05 (no surprise), while the Sapper+UC combo arrives at 1:32.
Now, Whiteball is not the largest map available, but it shows the scale of the "problem": You're arriving maybe 10 seconds later than the UKF player. You've not shown in any way how this is problematic. If it were, games would be decided by the first engagement only.
Since neither you nor I have access to how often is being used it is not important.
And I have already point out in other threads that the correlation of something being op and something being used often is no not simple as that.
The point is that if something seems to be barely used at all, then you need to make a really good case why it is OP. Strong units get used more frequently than weak ones, that's pretty much a fact. We're on page 4 and you have no strong arguments why this combo were so problematic.
How fast one can get hit troops on fuel or other important point for the initial fight is a an important factor in game.
No one invests 500 MP for the first 20 seconds of the game if it also means not capping any other point at all. This combo needs to continuously pay off to be viable. As I pointed out, both Axis factions have the necessary counters. The game is not decided by the first engagement.
The WC51 analogy is and cav rifles is simply not relevant. Actually the reason why Cav rifles are CP 1 and not CP 0 like ASIS is because the combo of minute 0 WC51 and Cav riflemen would be broken.
You can see it too by the link I provided so there is no "maybe" here ...
Once more I have not claimed that this tactic is very common so I have no idea why some people are fixating on how often it is being used.
Have you see the UC ASIS combo? if you have why do you bring up irrelevant thing like M3A3 and WC51
I pointed it out because you wrote this:
...transporting troops works much better in larger modes and maps where it enables to concentrate units faster.
to claim that this topic is more relevant to team games.
I replied that I barely see transports for transporting troops in 2v2 and 3v3, whereas I remember it being used extensively in 1v1 tourneys, as well as other points I made.
The UC - as a transporter - is still not "much better in larger modes". Not to my knowledge, not to my experience. On some huge maps like general mud, I could imagine a niche but that's a niche function and micro intensive.
How often it is being used is important. If it were OP, you'd see it regularly. So, if the tactic is not OP, this leaves the question if there is any other larger design issue with it.
The recovery sappers are coming a bit earlier to the frontline than originally intended. Minor point, but no real issue.
Point was that distance is a factor contrary to your claim. Do we agree that distance is factor?
If you already focus on single words and exact phrasing, then don't make up that I claimed that "distance was not a factor".
Anyway, I have no idea what you define as a "factor".
A factor for synergy and getting more out of your Sappers? Yes. A factor for making this strat OP? Nope, because it is not.
It still does not show how this combo is problematic because they can push you off the map easily, which was the whole reason you started this thread.
It enables UKF an aggressive start, definitely. Still, that is not a problem at all.
Not really the Jeep donated to UKF was completely broken in larger modes and was part of the reason why it lost its crew.
Maybe someone else can chip in. I cannot recall seeing the Jeep being abused in 3v3. The reason why it lost its crew is also a different one.
My point still stands: The WC51 can transport units, it even comes with close range cav rifles. Outside of 1v1 streams and tourneys, I have not seen this being used/abused.
The m3a3 is used in 3vs3 and 4v4 and there are player who even spam them but it not really relevant to UC and SMG troops case.
A UKC player can have move his IS produce the UC and call in the RoRE(or ASIS) and concentrate those units.
Distance is a factor in this case because the transport allows RoRe do arrive earlier that they could if they where moving on foot and partially negates the effect of starting on CD.
Maybe you have seen some players use it. I have been playing CoH2 as one of my major games for the last 4,5 years, and I have not seen any transport + CQC cheese at noticable level in 3v3 and 2v2 apart from >occasional< uses of the M3 back when Penals where the way to go for Soviets.
The UC+Sapper combo that you describe I have seen exactly once this patch. Judging by what other users write, I am not alone in this assessment. Apart from some people trying to have fun or just trying to cheese, this strategy is rarely being used, nor is it viable or problematic.
A UKC player can have move his IS produce the UC and call in the RoRE(or ASIS) and concentrate those units.
Distance is a factor in this case because the transport allows RoRe do arrive earlier that they could if they where moving on foot and partially negates the effect of starting on CD.
So why should he not? Commanders allow for different openings, that's a good thing. Winning the first fight is important, but nothing game breaking or unrecoverable.
Transporting troops to arrive earlier on the front lines is, well, exactly what transporters are meant to do. There is nothing to prove that those 10-20 seconds you save on that specific combo are wildly problematic.