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3. What Hannibal is saying is wrong. It's a very significant decision whether to reatreat your pio early or wait for it to retreat "naturally". If you rush a 222 a lot of the time you will have to retreat your full health pio after about 4 mins. If the Soviet wants to rush a T70 he will have to sacrifice either sweeping capability (which is significant considering T70 could run into tellers) or a big part of his combat strength (flamer) for a while. THOSE are interesting trade offs. They are just examples of the general principle I'd like to see applied in CoH3.
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Edit: I think you should reread Hannibals quote. You agreed with him but he seemed to be saying somethign entirely different from you. His point was that it's not really a meaningful decision anyway when to reatreat your pio for building base.
I'll just chip in here quickly, rereading my post I might have phrased it incorrectly.
Personally I found this decision making very annoying, because as OST and SOV I always had to have a pioneer in base just to get the timings right, whereas all other factions could get their timings without even having a pioneer unit on the field. Obviously this does not matter for CoH3, unless someone wants to make the point that this faction difference was good and important - which for me is not the case.
Yes, it indeed can make a difference if you get your vehicle out a bit earlier or a bit later, especially since vehicle timings are indeed quite important in CoH2.
Is that system good though? In CoH2, it occurs only 2-3 times per match and always and only in the early to mid game. There is no such decision in the late game. I personally never felt as it there is so much weight in this decision to really create so much micromanagement around it. Having half a minute of map presence is nice, but not having it does not break your neck either. I'll add that I primarily play 2v2 and 3v3, so map presence is less important.
My conclusion is that if CoH3 has more unit types, pioneers will probably be less frequent and also less important. Therefore it is only logical to decide for the system that does not require your pioneer unit to build tech buildings. I'd also rather move away from the design that timings are the most important aspect of the game. Missing your unit timing by only a minute can already make it almost useless in CoH2. That's really shitty. Shock value is a cool feature, but it also creates balancing issues of units being useful only once and only if built in a narrow time frame. Relic said they want to address the usefulness of LVs in the late game, which hopefully also translates into less reliance on timings as well. The units usefulness should be determined by its usage, not by the question if I got it out in time or 30-60 secs too late.
I'll just address 3, because that's most important here.
It is not about significance of the decision, its about the fact we have gross inequality in making that decision, only 2 out of 5 factions are forced to make actual tactical decision impacting their field presence and tech timings directly while remaining 3 just derp around without giving it a second thought.
I'd be equally fine if all potential factions had to make the choice, but they don't, hence it directly impacts balance of tech timing and costs by requirement or lack of it for presence of engineer for specific factions.
It is only about the significance of the decision. This is the CoH3 forum. We're starting fresh, so the way factions are designed in CoH2 and that they are still not treated equally regarding teching does not matter for the discussion about CoH3. If you want it changed in CoH2, the CoH2 section is the way to go.