2.3.0.0 balance...

[IoulianosApostates]

I have already voiced some of my concerns on another thread, but as it was pointed out to me, it was the wrong one.

Remember, this is just my opinion.

Basically, I think that some of the tweaks to the Ostheer are kind of undermining the point of the faction. The Ostheer, it would seem to me, are supposed to be a faction focused on going on the offensive, using infantry and late-game armor to strike at and harras the enemy.
In this sense, the faction is very reminiscent of the Panzer Elite in their combat role, with less early and mid-game light and medium armour and more efficient infantry. However, this patch has unfortunately struck a blow to the faction's ability to employ effective infantry harrasment tactics behind enemy lines, as the Panzer Elite can do with light and medium armour.

The removal of the medikits as an ability removes a lot of micromanagement, which is a nice thing, but if infantry that are supposed to harras and be really offensive cannot heal in the field, the entire tactic is put at risk.
Sure, the americans also have to retreat to the HQ to heal, but the americans are much more defensively minded and can upgrade buidings to reinforce. If we are to compare the Ostheer to the Panzer Elite, the Ostheer is at quite a disadvantage when it comes to fulfilling the offensive role as the Panzer elite has way better mobile early and midgame amour (not to mention the insane late-game armor of the tank-hunter tactics tree), can upgrade buildings to have a passive healing ability and have infantry that are almost as tough as the landsers.

Now, i'm not complaining that the Ostheer doesn't have enough early and mid-game armor, because if you added that, you would basically turn them into PE 2: Electric Boogaloo. Instead, I think they as they somewhat already are should be focused on expensive, versatile and efficient infantry fighting in a harrasing/offensive role. I like the passive healing, but I think forcing the OH to run back to their bases kind undermines the purpose of the faction.

TL;DR

Please add some kind of field-medic for the OH.

My suggestions for future versions of the OH:

1. Make the landsers more expensive. 320 to 350 would be fair for a unit like that.

2. Add an upgrade for the landsers giving them a single StG 44 or MKb 42

3. Add pistol-wielding squad of combate medics with stats like the soviet conscripts. Useless in combat, but has an ability to heal in an AoE for 40-50 munitions. Healing increases with xp.

4. Put OH snipers back to their original reload speed. They fire a bit fast now.

5. Nerf the OH mortar. OH should be about keeping on their feet.

6. Lock the 75mm leiG18 to the Army Fortress doctrine and make them a bit stronger.

[chaosval3]

I thank you for taking the time to post and I respect your opinion. However, I would like to tell you the reason why some of these things were already tried before and changed for a good reason. As I remember you stating that it has been a while since you came back( before OH came to play in fact), I can understand that you missed some of these things.

The medikits will not return. We tried them before and we deemed them either to be too effective or too weak in our tests. Plus, Wehrmacht already has medikits so we didn't want another direct copy (healing in this case) from Wehr for OH. I remember playing a game against Darc where I managed to force of a Guard squad by using a vet 3 medikit pop on one of my Landser squads. It was just too effective, you could deploy it en masse. Furthermore, I don't know why we should cover up one of OH's weaknesses. Why should we? It's only fair for each faction to have some gaps in their basic tech tree so that doctrines can fill in the gaps so you have an idea of what you are facing. SU has no Halftrack for example, so no mobile forward reinforcing. I think it is a clear case.

I deem your statement about Americans to be inaccurate as well since Americans where designed versus Wehrmacht. Wehrmacht is a defensive faction revolving mostly around MG42 play, which means the Americans are the aggressive faction since they have to flank the HMGs, they have the fastest vehicles, they have mobile suppression (BARS) so forth and so on. I don't know if it's still available, but you should either watch the games from The Frontline Network or check guides on Gamereplays to learn all you need to know about the vanilla factions and their designs. Ostheer has some similarities in T1 and T3 compared to the Americans. Relic did their research when it came to the original factions. D-Day was when the US army was in full-scale offense against the Atlantic Line and other defensive garrisons by the Wehrmacht.

For the other points:

1. Making a starting squad more expensive without touching upon anything else is basically deemed heretical. Plus, we spent quite some time matching up the vanilla Landsers versus Conscripts and Strelky, so changing the whole mechanic again will only lead to confusion and discontent amongst the community and the team as well. As Darc said some time ago, the time for drastic changes has past.

2. We tried this before. It was utterly broken. In the initial phases of OH, one could equip his Landsers with an MKB 42. At first it would look okay, but when the veterancy started coming in, scaling issues would become apparent. In fact, the weapon's DPS output would surpass that of all the other members of the squad COMBINED! On top of that, the weapon wasn't droppable, which made it even worse.
If the model carrying the MKB 42 would die, it would simply pass on to another soldier without losing any real DPS. So even if one member was alive of the squad with the MKB42, it still performed the same as a full health landser squad. This made Landsers too potent, we had to divide it into multiple weapons in order to split DPS more appropriately.

3. This could perhaps be an idea for a doctrine, but otherwise, it's not going to happen.

4. We need the OH sniper to fire faster as Soviets have larger starting squads. In the future, it might become even more as we are fiddling with extra numbers for Soviets squads that earned vet. Even so, the increase in ROF is only marginal and it won't really affect your sniper battles unless snipers are poorly microed.

5. OH mortar is fine. It's basically like the Wehr's, but only with a slight defensive bonus in cover. It's especially good against cons because even chickens have more health than conscripts ha ha. If anything, it needed a price decrease. It was too expensive compared to its counterpart, the LeIG 18.

6. Thematically speaking, it would have been great to see the LeIG in a mountain warfare doctrine, but this is not to be. Currently, we are testing some changes in the early tier (T1 and T2) pool units. We shall see what that brings.

Once again, we are still working on the faction balance, but it's more or less set in stone. The time for major changes regarding the non- doctrinal design is over. I appreciate the effort and I hope I didn't discourage you to keep on posting on the forums. We look at every nook and cranny.

Peace!

[donthateme]

...

2. Add an upgrade for the landsers giving them a single StG 44 or MKb 42

...

Adding or changing any kind of (unit-)upgrades in order to fix balance should be the last step, cause it changes game-(flow-)mechanisms too much! First way to adjust unit-performance is to try to regulate by costs, if that fails, unit-values have to be changed (damage-output, accuracy etc.). If all that fails, u can think about adding upgrades. IMO Ostheer-faction already has too many upgrades/unlocks...

[Hendrik 'DarcReaver' S.]

...

2. Add an upgrade for the landsers giving them a single StG 44 or MKb 42

...

Adding or changing any kind of (unit-)upgrades in order to fix balance should be the last step, cause it changes game-(flow-)mechanisms too much! First way to adjust unit-performance is to try to regulate by costs, if that fails, unit-values have to be changed (damage-output, accuracy etc.). If all that fails, u can think about adding upgrades. IMO Ostheer-faction already has too many upgrades/unlocks...

True that. We won't add more upgrades or units to the existing factions, apart from the stuff that comes with reward doctrines somewhere in the far future.

[IoulianosApostates]

The medikits will not return. We tried them before and we deemed them either to be too effective or too weak in our tests. Plus, Wehrmacht already has medikits so we didn't want another direct copy (healing in this case) from Wehr for OH. I remember playing a game against Darc where I managed to force of a Guard squad by using a vet 3 medikit pop on one of my Landser squads. It was just too effective, you could deploy it en masse. Furthermore, I don't know why we should cover up one of OH's weaknesses. Why should we? It's only fair for each faction to have some gaps in their basic tech tree so that doctrines can fill in the gaps or you have an idea of what you are facing. SU has no Halftrack for example, so no mobile forward reinforcing. I think it is clear case.

Yes, I see your point and I actually agree with the desicion to remove the the medickit as combat upgrades. Those were perhaps a bit too much of an advantage to hold over the enemy. What I think should be returned however, is the ability to heal in the field, perhaps by way of adding the combat-medics I mentioned before to the one of the doctrines (Perhaps the infantry-focused Elite doctrine instead of call-in artillary?). However, I know that I am not  a developer, nor am I a tester, so my opinions are just that; opinions. This recent change doesn't mean that the OH sucks now, just that I will have to learn to use them a bit differently from before. However, mending this weakness slightly won't cause balancing issues, I believe, as OH has plenty of weaknesses from their lack of defences.

I deem your statement about Americans to be inaccurate as well since Americans where designed versus Wehrmacht. Wehrmacht is a defensive faction revolving mostly around MG42 play, which means the Americans are the aggressive faction since they have to flank the HMGs, they have the fastest vehicles, they have mobile suppression (BARS) so forth and so on. I don't know if it's still available, but you should either watch the games from The Frontline Network or check guides on Gamereplays to learn all you need to know about the vanilla factions and their designs. Ostheer has some similarities in T1 and T3 compared to the Americans. Relic did their research when it came to the original factions. D-Day was when the US army was in full-scale offense against the Atlantic Line and other defensive garrisons by the Wehrmacht.

I sorry, I was unclear about that; Compared to OH and PE, especially the latter, the americans are more defensively-minded (being more of an all-round faction). Yes, I know that between the Wehrmacht and the americans, the americans are the offensive ones I used to play as a brit with my friend being americans before I got this mod, with him attacking and me building a line of defence.

1. Making a starting squad more expensive without touching upon anything else is basically deemed heretical. Plus, we spent quite some time matching up the vanilla Landsers versus Conscripts and Strelky, so changing the whole mechanic again will only lead to confusion and discontent amongst the community and the team as well. As Darc said some time ago, the time for drastic changes has past.

Well, the british have starting infantry at 450. Wouldn't it make sense thematically if Germans have to be a little more careful with throwing the lives of their soldiers away, especially since landsers and Jägers are basically supposed to be early-mid war werhmacht/waffen-SS men, who were at that time, honestly, some of the most well-trained troops in all of europe? Give them another MP if the price seems too steep, but It seems weird to me thematically, that they are cheaper than volksturmgrenadiers. I understand that things may already be set in stone, but I am just saying...

2. We tried this before. It was utterly broken. In the initial phases of OH, one could equip his Landsers with an MKB 42. At first it would look okay, but when the veterancy started coming in, scaling issues would become apparent. In fact, the weapon's DPS output would surpass that of all the other members of the squad COMBINED! On top of that, the weapon wasn't droppable, which made it even worse.
If the model carrying the MKB 42 would die, it would simply pass on to another soldier without losing any real DPS. So even if one member was alive of the squad with the MKB42, it still performed the same as a full health landser squad. This made Landsers too potent, we had to divide it into multiple weapons in order to split DPS more appropriately.

Personally, I never found it too overpowered, but I did find it kinda silly that you bought an upgrade that upgraded ALL landser units with the MKB 42 and that landsers came at such a cheap price. Personally, I would have just made it an individual upgrade at 100 or so munition each and made the landsers cost more.

3. This could perhaps be an idea for a doctrine, but otherwise, it's not going to happen.

Well, anything I can do to contribute
 

I appreciate the effort and I hope I didn't discourage you to keep on posting on the forums. We look at every nook and cranny.

Peace!

No, not at all! You have laid out your point in a concise and polite manner, and I appreaciate the fact that you took the time to do so
I hope you will consider my points, but I understand and fully accept it if you feel that what you are doing is the way to go forward. All I can do is humbly thank you guys for an awesome mod that is beyond incredible, even if I would personally have done a few minor things a little differently

[chaosval3]

You might (not) have noticed that we aren't too fond of Brits at EF team. Starting squads with 450 manpower basically forces them to be 'OP'. They also have reduced manpower reinforcement costs to compensate for their ridiculous pricing. The reasoning behind it is flawed in my opinion. They are even more expensive than most doctrinal infantry . The veterancy for Brits is also weird. It's either a massive blob overwhelming everything due to area of effect veterancy with their leaders or it's game over because you managed to kill the lieutenant or captain. There are also non-doctrinal howitzers which leads to arty spam, especially in team games. There are many more issues I find with them, but I will refrain myself from proceeding.

Yes, out of the 4 factions, PE is the most aggressive, Brits the most defensive, Americans the most versatile and the Wehrmacht the most specialised I suppose.

But I implore you to realise that the versatility of the infantry and vehicles of Americans is more suited for aggressive play than defensive play. There are few american defenses that can compare to Brits or Wehrmacht. Defensive play with Amis will probably lose you the game.

The only thing which OH lacks is a non-doctrinal buildable bunker, instead, they have specialised mines. And for the in-field healing, you'll need either the medical airdrop for army support or passive healing in secured sectors with army fortress( if this wasn't removed, not sure).

Maybe you could add me on Steam ?

Steam: warhammerchaosgod

Cheers!