The modders for this game have done a good job polishing and following through on ideas people have had from the dawn of Coh times. No retreat, large squads with few rifles, many cheap infantry to swarm the opponent and impact units that heavily impacted the war such as katushas and t34's and is2's. All of this isn't new, they just did it for the first time. But now that were seeing it all work together, there are some glaring difficulties that come with changing how Company of heroes works, not having any sort of retreat is a huge problem when it comes to squad preservation and that is one of the cornerstones of COH gameplay as you simply shouldn't be able to win when you've lost 2-3 squads, but the russians simply go against this age old mechanic. You know the british also went against Coh mechanics, and people still dont like them to this day, as they simply made the game different and frustrating as they work with new principles. Im ok with new principles, as long as they are fair and have their appropriate drawbacks, and so far I have seen potential from the mod, but the doctrines and faction as a whole has been drawn up to be blatantly overpowered, but I'm not going to go into the doctrines right now.
Actual suggestions:
I understand you guys want to have a nice Russian feel to the faction, mirroring the order to not retreat, but not being able to retreat gave way for you to start using all of these ridiculous anti-suppression abilities.
Why not give the commander a retreat order with a timer, so you could bail out individual squads out of trouble instead of bloobing and firing up "ala-british". This would be way more unique than the heroic charge and it would require nice timing and skill and would be really unique to the soviet faction. Then later on in the game each individual squad would gain retreat timers (instead of anti-suppression abilities) that would serve to reward people who are careful with their units and give it more of a Coh feel.
Aside from this, I am worried about munition-free abilities, how powerful they are, they are just no brainers like the strafing/bombing run and the god of war, please remove or tone these down, as they simply are ridiculous, and free. I have no idea how no one in the balance team thought they might be problematic.
Munitions is supposed to be for upgrades, yes, but letting you use only munitions-based upgrades lets you gain too much manpower over your upponent since your not wasting manpower on teching nor veterancy so then you can use that extra manpower to get more units/tanks, and you opponent goes into a hole very quickly to the sheer number of units spammed. Plus you aren't restricted to needing munitions for abilities, so that creates another vortex that sucks up more enemy resources. It's like a trench that costs nothing, yet the opponent needs to spend resources to try and counter..
my suggestions would be to decrease the munitions requirement on some of the upgrades and to associate a fuel cost to it as well, leaving you enough munitions to be able to use doctrine and faction abilities.
