Profile of Cyridius

I personally think LoL is pay2win trash because if you pay you get to dodge grinding for champions and it gives you an extreme competitive edge on your opponents.

The loot drop system is fine. They're dropped at random so everybody is on the same playing field from the start.

If it's such a huge deal to you, focus less on getting the commanders and just play the game. Eventually they will drop for you.

That's more or less a confirmation that those of us who paid for premium commanders need never have bothered.

I bought them and personally I don't care. "Premium" was just another way to say "pay2win" and frankly the game is better off otherwise.

Clearly it would be good to have some level of compensation, but they don't have to if they don't want to.

Paying for ingame content is bad. Even now if it's based on a random drop for non-payers, it's bad.

research grenades.

Read the thread.

This has enough content and is specific enough to warrant its own thread.

Ignoring the fact that Sturmpios will straight up beat any early game American infantry out in the open, and ignoring the fact that their damage output totally overshadows Volksgrenadiers, Sturmpioneers have a real big problem, primarily in the American matchup.

Americans have no hard building counter, no flamethrower. Their grenades are not strong enough to compensate for that fact.

Sturmpioneers in a buildings are virtually impossible to dislodge. Their damage output is insane(I don't know who thought it was a good idea to give the starting unit STG44s), and Americans have no way to put them out of a building. It requires an immediate investment into the Grenade package - which isn't economically possible. It then requires you to have the munitions available to throw 2-3 grenades, which means you need 2-3 Riflemen. Which isn't possible.

And during that, they're securing map control and you probably wont even get a squad kill out of it.

Sturmpioneers with their damage output against the Americans when they are in a building are batshit-insane OP. If you put that in context with the rest of the OKW, it is a legitimately unfair, and arguably unwinnable, match up.

Riflemen are a good frontline backbone unit, but they can't stick up to Sturmpioneers. In relation to manpower cost purely, that is arguably fair. But this leads to a total irrelevance of Volksgrens(Which makes Sturmpios internally OP) as well as a nigh-on impossible firepower disparity for the Americans to overcome in the early game.

And yes, Americans can put out a lot of damage in the mid game with BARs, amongst other things, but if OKW knows what it's doing, the game's effectively over by then.

OKW is an extremely map-dependent faction, and where the match up is balanced in more open maps, maps such as Stalingrad or anywhere where buildings play a focal point in controlling key points, it is heavily OKW favoured, and it is because of Sturmpioneers and how little Americans have in the way of early game counters.

I can live with the truck pushing(Well, not really that shit needs to be fixed), I can live with the heavy MG bike that suppresses me and does shit tonnes of damage, I can deal with things like Obersoldaten, I can deal with that ridiculously durable half-track with the Autocannon that does damage to vehicles on it(BTW it can straight up 1v1 a Stuart as well as rape infantry), but, fuck, the early game is so skewed towards OKW it isn't even fair.

OKW stand a very real chance of doing to CoH2 what the Brits did to CoH1, and honestly Relic should be afraid of that. I would rather an underpowered OKW that gets gradually buffed as opposed to an overpowered one that totally fucks balance for the next 6 months, and I think nearly everyone would agree with me in that regard.

I'm not going to shit on Relic here and say "Hurr Durr Relic y u so bad at this so ez", but really this feels like it has not been tested. Which is weird, because it has been thoroughly tested.

I know people are going to tell me "OMG game out for 2 days just calm down and l2p" and frankly, normally I'd agree with that kind of sentiment, but these are factional design issues that do not get fixed with time. They need to be addressed in a rather pressing manner or Relic is simply going to lose all the population is gained with WFA release.

My suggestions would be as follows;

Americans need an early game building counter. Whether that means making their grenades far more potent(This would be my preferable solution) or accessible far earlier(Or even straight off) or giving them access to Flamethrowers(Which would keep in line with design of Wehr/Sov), I don't know. But they absolutely need something. It gives Wehr(And OKW particularly) far too much map control.

Sturmpioneers need to be nerfed. Volksgrens are comparatively useless, and Sturmpios are essentially Panzergrenadiers. I get that you want them to be stronger than all the other starting units, and that their economy reflects that, but it's simply not good early game combat balance, and if the early game isn't balanced, then the game in general is not balanced.