Profile of ZombiFrancis

Very much so, they were two very different takes on the same kind of army: a complete and versatile one.

Just to use one example of how this manifested: The different veterancy system for US and Wehrmacht made the objectives different for each team. Getting kills meant nothing for Wehrmacht. Giving up kills to the enemy meant the world, because as American forces got kills and stayed alive, their vet would surpass all the purchased vet in the world.

Americans needed to deny fuel more than they needed it themselves. Fuel in Wehrmacht hands meant facing veterans, vehicles, and veteran vehicles.

Ostheer and Soviets all gain veterancy the same way, including getting shot in the face.

It's a huge change that offers a much more simplified set of useful objectives for effective strategies: body count.

The problem with 3v3s and 4v4s is that no faction is really designed to cope with any amount of 2v1 action.

You can double and triple team players in these game modes, and all you really sacrifice is one or two territory points amounting to a measly few points of fuel or munition for a given period of time.

How do you balance that?

Map design for games greater than 2v2 is a challenge because it either becomes a series of concurrent 1v1s, or a situation where an otherwise competent player gets facerolled by a second player's entire army and loses 1000ish manpower in one maneuver.

That's a challenge to recover from, and it's not really something that's easily preventable or countered. This game just isn't designed to have players facing superior numbers. The main/only counter to that is to have your own team simultaneously double team the opponents.

But ultimately, the whole strategy behind virtually every metagame decision is just reaching the critical mass of firepower, and no one player alone can field units faster than multiple opponents. The fact that maps overlap for 3v3s and 4v4s doesn't help, because it more or less leaves it to be a diceroll to how well balanced the front lines are every game.

Well, the British weren't the only thing wrong with vCoH, but they were most of it. I alt-f4ed every single game that contained a brit for a good long while through 2.601. Screw ranking, I just wasn't going to put up with roospam in the time after work I had to play games.

The British were the main reason most people I knew never played competitively, and never joined any tournament featuring OF. The lack of british were one of the reasons a few actually expressed interest in CoH2. And of the few that stuck around, nazi Brits kinda drove them off permanently.

But for them it was mostly the realization of who Relic IS sunk in. Every incarnation of the essence engine for eight years has been the same people trying to coddle their British Faction baby.

They knew that developmentally CoH2 didn't/doesn't have the direction, and most likely never will. Every step, every patch and every update has been further away from what anyone I knew who enjoyed this franchise wanted.

The last thing this game needs is more, earlier AT and armor.

There's a reason everyone waits til heavy tanks: anti-tank weaponry precedes light vehicles and tanks.

Hence, the only units able to absorb any kind of anti tank fire are the only units with any semblance of shock value and survivability that people need to field.

Why field a unit that is already hard countered? Heavy tanks have no real effective counter other than superior firepower, so they're the only units worth fielding.

Because, you know, this game isn't about a dialogue of decisions and counters, but more about reading your opponent's loadout before the match and acting accordingly.

If someone managed to mod coh2 to be an exact mirror of vcoh. or mod vcoh with the new coh2 engine.

My life would be complete

Other than ice tech (with frozen puddle portals), blizzards (everyone's favorite), and the one or two maps with mud on them, the only thing that CoH2 really has is it's 'trusight' mechanic. And even that is a mixed bag. (It's synonymous with shot blocking, and rarely correlates to what is visually represented by map objects.)

Quite frankly, I feel vCoH still has a better shot at being an e-sport than CoH2.