Profile of Gbpirate

I think most people are making good points here.

I disagree with you, NorthWeapon, on your conclusion, that Relic shouldn't have any community input on balance.

I would prefer if members of the balance team weren't just volunteering, but actual paid, part-time employees. I'm a sucker for labour rights, but that's not what this website is for. Having community members with a voice on balance is important for having realistic and desired changes. But those community members shouldn't be top 50 automatch players. They should be map designers, they should be casters, they should be active community members at several tiers of automatch. they should be anyone who wants to respond to a call for balance perspectives. I want a balance team that asks for and looks at the opinions of everyone, not just what someone who is paid to make games thinks. I don't think those people have enough time to play their games to the degree that many of the fans do.

With regards to actual balance in this game, I think this quote from Mirage from page 3 says it best:

Faction Flavour Should Be done Without Compromising Core Aspects

Having no core tools for core systems such as reliable suppression - Kubels will never cut is as MGs late game to counter blobs - should not be the case. All factions in their core should at least have the basic tools to counter either large infantry assault, defensive positions, and/or heavier armoured vehicles.

Can't always be done due to lack of assets, but the core tools should be there.

I'd expand this to the opposite as well, where flavour shouldn't negate a core aspect. Classic example of this was Obersoldaten ignoring Retreat modifiers. When I was playing USF back in 2014-2016 I was so frustrated that I would lose games to OKW that were in an even dead-heat until the late game, when OKW's veterancy design eventually made them better than my riflemen. When we had traded evenly, both losing a combat squad, both losing a light vehicle (or not), see-sawing on VPs, it was fun and engaging. But once those squads got their fourth and fifth level of vet and my squads were stuck on triple vet with 2x BARs, it felt like the OKW player was being rewarded more for their preservation of units and that would snowball into more lost manpower, less map control, etc. on my end.

Every faction should have access to reliable suppression, mobile indirect fire, anti-personnel and anti-tank mines (either split mines like Ost or dual-purpose like Sov). There are a bunch of other things that are too numerous to mention here but y'all get the idea I hope.

I'll admit, the balance changes can be daunting especially when I'm playing less 1v1s or even team games regularly. But I would rather have balance changes and "revamps" every 4-6 months (that also fix bugs!) than leave the game in broken and bugged states. Who knows what would happen if we were still playing the game we were in mid-2017. I think it would've died. Maybe not completely, but it would be a steady hemorrhaging of playercount.

On this idea:

I think competitive COh2 would benefit and be elevated by having a competitive tournament mod/build where the game would be more "competitively" minded and balanced in terms of cheese strats, and abusive mechanics/faction combos, etc. The mod could be designed by a committe of the "pros" , guys that know about the meta, and all the individual units and mechanics, and what not, kinda like the current build of the game is designed.

But I think we havent seen this because it would split an already smallish and honestly already currently divided playerbase, and the top players probably would find it difficult to practice properly,...i think? Maybe they dont wanna change how things have been done for almost 2 decades at this point going back to Coh1?

obligatory shoutout to Wuff for making the Tourney Mode mod and for AE/MasterLeague for promoting its use.

I think this is a great idea. I would love to be able to play against random people in a more competitive setting. I'm not sure about balance changes, but I like what Wuff's mod has done and kept it relatively barebones, but eliminating some of most egregious non-competitive elements. I'd also be for replacing OKW base defenses with MG emplacements so OKW can be base rushed.

I think the way to implement this would be to have temporary leagues with fresh leaderboards. There would be global leaderboards like we have now, but just use that same ELO system in a separate leaderboard and search system (that is saved online so people can always go back and look at their stats or other players' stats) in a league that lasts 4-12 weeks using the hyper-competitive mod.

I'm responding to a bit of the posts from before discussions turned towards maps, but

I think it's right to say that balance and faction choice can't really be extrapolated from one tournament, let alone one with only half the VP count of standard tournament rules. I think it can be something to have in the back pocket, but not something you should be using as a primary case in an argument. Even in terms of early game dominance it's difficult to extrapolate because there is so much more time in a 500vp game.

If someone wants to go through each and every game (or at least the ones that were broadcast by a streamer) they could come up with commander-specific data, but I didn't have the time to do that on my own with real life getting in the way. Again, I don't think that would be too relevant on game balance either way. all replays are in the discord!

I can speak a bit about the future, though. A_E put out some ideas for ML4 and a popular idea is some variation of commander elimination. Commander Terminator was quite a successful event in terms of live viewers, I believe, and had a lot of hype around it! So hopefully we can come to expect more of that in the future.

*Edit* Looking at World Championship data so far, there have been 11 matches played to game 3 (ace game) out of 26 total matches (~30%). That matches up with ML1 and ML2 stats more or less. I think this may come down to several factors, the largest of which is player fatigue. More time means more mistakes even from dominant players. And coh2 is designed to allow comebacks, with fuel and muni from every point, more manpower income with less population cap, etc. The strategies and habits of lower-seeded players may throw off some of the higher-seeded players who are used to playing a certain way against those closest to them. I can go on about this phenomena idea but I'm tired. I think these factors together make it possible for seeding upsets (take Elpern vs Luvnest in ML2, for example).

Stormjäger said that first round doesn't count because of skill gap between seeded players, but I don't think that's the right attitude in general. Those closest to the middle will have the most equal matches. There's been plenty of coh2 tournaments where seed 16 vs 17 battle it out and hold the brackets back while they slug it out. If you wanted to exclude first round data, take away the games from the top and bottom quarters and look at the closer middling matches.

I like looking at expected seed outcomes (hence the # of upsets) and when they occur. in WC2020 as well as ML3 they only happened in the top 8 (excluding lower bracket here). I really think the top eight or top ten seeds with these players is a roll of the dice in terms of who will win. Their skill and the way the game is make it that way. Maybe by the middle of next year after ML6 and WC2020 and maybe another big 1v1 tourney will give us a clear winner but so far every ML tourney has had a different person at the top!

Nice recap.

Out of curiosity, what percentage of the USF commander picks were Mechanised. WC51 OP!

And correspondingly, how much was osttruppen favoured. I know there were also some mechanised picks for the assault grenadiers.

Thank you!
Unfortunately, real life got in the way of me parsing out any more detailed information besides this. All I can recommend is watching some of the linked videos to get a few pieces here or there. I think if you subscribe on Patreon you get access to the replay channel so you could find out yourself if you’re that motivated and curious!

Ostruppen was definitely a favorite. That capping power early game can be real deadly. WC51s are super fun and kind of a meme because they can do so much!

C.Panther


Damage drop off for PzIV

Do you have the right stats here? is the "C.Panther" a typo on your end?

If the stats are correct, it seems like the command P4 would be more consistent in its damage with the higher near radius and lower scatter. Not sure what RoF is for either but CP4 doesn't seem that bad on paper.

Its buff is really good though, right? Is it still -20% received damage? I feel like it was changed a while ago but to something less powerful but still good.

How difficult is it for Relic to have a couple of freelancers like Osinyagov to work on iterative updates for COH2? The game has more broken text-strings, typos, grammatical errors and general UI inconsistencies than most mods for any currently played RTS!

Is the game so barren financially as to only barely warrant the operation of the servers?

Before I continue to stray off topic: these are great suggestions. Yes. so many ways to make the UI better.

See, I'm not too sure about this.

There's the 64-bit update Relic has been working on and wanted to launch last week. So they've spent money on those employees dedicating their time to that process. There's also $20k USD they've dropped for last year's World Championship tournament and another $20k USD they've dropped for this year's World Championship tournament!

I think it's more about what they choose to put money in to. But they have several projects that they've been working on that are unannounced besides AoE 4. My belief is that they've been hard at work with CoH3 and they're gonna announce it this month when they have the spotlight during SEGA's 60th anniversary stuff!