Tactical Escalation
Overhauling and enhancing the familiar COH experience for all types of game modes, including large team games and PvE. The mod refines the core CoH formula to address long-standing series issues, tries to push the interactivity and depth of the game to new heights.
IMPORTANT: Make sure to select both a TE game mode and tuning pack when setting up a lobby! For purposes of PvP, there aren’t any differences between game modes, Extra Settings game mode is only for adjusting AI settings.
Recommended settings:
– VPs to 400 to 450.
– Population cap to 125.
New Mechanics:
– Clump-up Penalty: Reduces combat effectiveness (accuracy/scatter) of clumped squads, slightly increases damage taken. Penalty exponent scales with distance.
– Flanking Fire: Units that are flanked have increased received accuracy. Effect is based on the severity of the flanking angle.
– Passive Self-Healing: All infantry heal out-of-combat & while not retreating. The effect is strongest at low HP and tapers off near full health.
– Aircraft Suppression: AA ranges are rebalanced, plane abilities are generally less punishing, planes are 75% more survivable, but will have their effectiveness reduced as they take damage.
Economy & Objectives:
– Anti-Snowballing: Added base fuel/munitions income, reduced territory point income, and normalized capture speeds to prevent runaway resource leads.
– Upkeep Changes: Added fuel upkeep for vehicles. Increased upkeep in general, especially for infantry.
– Victory Points: Slightly slower to capture and revert. Lower VP count is recommended alongside this. Combined with anti-snowballing changes, the matches should be prolonged when they’re close, but shortened when they’re one-sided. VP rush will be a more viable strategy, but with downsides.
– Barrages cost munitions: Generally, barrages are more effective at swaying individual fights, but cost ammo. Ammo cost makes artillery spam in team games more difficult.
Infantry & Combat (TTK):
– CQC is highly deadly, but long-range fights take slightly longer, allowing time to reach cover.
– Moving accuracy penalties and aim-times are increased to prevent oversimplified kiting/stutter-stepping & improve the feel of first volleys in general.
– Added small arms target prioritization. Infantry will choose targets intelligently, stop shooting at vehicles when better targets are available. This also makes it so small arms focus-fire individual models instead of spreading damage.
– Base sight slightly increased to spot threats earlier.
– Base ranges slightly increased to offset the sight range increase and reward defensively well-positioned units.
– Explosives (artillery, grenades) now suppress.
– HMGs reworked to prevent a-moving and to reduce unfair-feeling AOE suppression. Range increased, setup time increased, teardown time decreased. Additionally HMGs can now be used as a soft counter to building cover.
– Weapons that create craters now also create yellow cover.
Vehicles:
– Higher frontal armor but lower HP and speed, making positioning more important.
– Target sizes are larger – fewer misses, almost completely removed close-range misses.
– Ballistic weapons are more consistent – less scatter, but less AoE.
– Early/super-light vehicles are considerably more vulnerable to small arms.
– Garrisoned squads are penalized when firing from moving vehicles.
– AT sources are buffed to counter increased frontal armor.
– Spammable vehicles (mediums, well-rounded light tanks) have higher fuel costs to keep vehicle counts in check.
– Repair rates are reduced.
General:
– Veterancy requirements increased.
– Tech costs adjusted to encourage side-teching.
– Faction-defining "no-brainer" abilities overhauled. e.g., Grenadier merge now costs MP; Rangers lost heavy weapon moving-fire for a suppression-cleanse sprint (fire-up); Pioneers cost more but fight better; 250 Halftrack is weaker early without upgrades.
– Implements Advanced AI, fully tailored to the mod.
– Supports Cheat Commands Mod (Thanks Janne252).
The mod is open-source! All of its files are available here: https://gitlab.com/coh3-te-mod
Full changelog is on gitlab[gitlab.com] and each update will have its changes listed in change notes.
Special thanks to Quicksilver for being an amazing help developing this mod!
