Profile of Basilone

How enjoyable/addicting is it compared to CoH?
Is the game play mechanics similar?
Has the community grown or shrunk after the realse of CoH2? (How many people play it)?
Is the game well balanced with interesting units?

1) Ive had fun playing team games with friends, but 1v1 is boring as fuck compared to vcoh imo.
2) The game hit rock bottom for a few months because of the P2W DLC but the recent sales and patches are slowly turning it around (maybe). The average player count now isn't any higher than it was shortly after release, if that answers your question.
3) Community size is probably the same, lots of new faces but most the well known vcoh players are done.
4) Short answer: yes its relatively balanced. Long answer: right now Soviets are really UP, there have been lots of OP units of the month since release but I prefer an unpredictable meta game over a extremely well balanced but super stale meta game. Are the units interesting? Not to me, but maybe they are to someone else.

I wouldn't recommend buying CoH2 unless you have friends to play with. If you're just looking for another game to dump some time in to, there are far better games out there right now. CoH2 has been a huge disappointment to me and a lot of other vcoh players with high hopes. But putting that aside and just looking at CoH2 as its own thing, I would still say you wouldn't be missing much if you skipped out on this one and here is why:

-Titanfall
-DayZ
-ESO
-Arma 3
-Wargame
-Insurgency
-GTA5 port (soon)
-Watchdogs (soon)

3) Re-scale all grenades to account for decreased infantry armor (less damage)

Infantry armor is an accuracy modifier, not a damage modifier. The changes in armor values had nothing to do with grenades working better this patch. Pre patch grenades had a 40% chance to not deal any damage to models along the edge of the blast, now they don't. Its a good change too, so no.

What does need to be changed is rifle grenades, either in cost or functionality. Nothing stupider then watching a blob of Grens waltz right in to a Maxim and then just rifle nade it to death.

Just blows my mind that after almost 4k games played your best faction is struggling to maintain a .700 winrate....you might not be a "noob" but you're a real scrub for sure.

I really like the idea of new factions, this really opens up the types of stratagies and NEW units. But....

WHY AMERICAN?? WHY THE WESTERN FROUNT!??!
I strongly feel that relic needs to take a step back and look at the original CoH2 trailer 'a new warfare experince' not the old one just altered. Why cant they add something from the eastern front. There is other contries that fought on the eastern front (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) why not add these, this will give us different units and something which is more historically accurate.

Americans are more interesting than countries that in comparison made a relatively small impact in the war. Collectively those other countries made a difference, but any one of them by itself cannot compare with the US, UK, USSR, Germany, or Japan.

That said I would've rather seen another conflict, USA in Europe is getting old. The Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, or even modern warfare would've been a nice change of pace.