So I’ve put my first dozens of hours into Moscow and made the jump to Tunisia recently and I’m super blown away by how much less difficult axis is in this campaign.
I am a big proponent of folks trying out Moscow if they’re frustrated by alleged imbalances in Normandy. The factions are balanced, both in weapons trade offs and skill levels across the board. It’s very common for matches to be won and lost by single digit or 0 point values, and during prime times on the North American server it feels like every match ends that way. Battles are intense and the ferocity translated in gameplay it super tangible.
By contrast the in game experience as Allies in Tunisia has been so easy it’s boring. I’m regularly top 3 in my team and often #1 and it seems like Axis just folds over when they don’t have a distinct
and l solid advantage early match.
Every vehicle slot on the axis team is usually full, pulling a 3rd to up to half depending if they team mates disconnect, giving them a clear disadvantage at point control. To make it worse the tanks are sniping from the grey zone and providing no direct infantry support, and with less infantry on the ground their friendly aircraft have less marks to guide them drastically changing it’s effectiveness.
Meanwhile infantry, maybe because they’re often outnumbered or out maneuvered, can’t hold the objective as easily so they camp just behind the objective each time. Typically getting obliterated by artillery or flanking rifle squads (rifle squads being drastically more effective in Tunisia than Moscow)
On offense the same problem appears: Axis camps outside the point rather than pushing into the point. Racking up kills and often more than the allies, but still losing the match.
In both these cases there are standout Axis players who do their best but can’t get their team to push the point.
while the only (effective way) to get exp progressions will be kills, this will happen everytime,
from the new players perspective: why to waste time conquering/building (and diying a lot) a point that give you a joke amount of exp, while you can just snipe and get tons of kills?
I think the battle on the Eastern Front in the game is much more balanced than the battle on the Western Front. At least when the Eastern Front was at full level, both sides had their own strengths. The Western Front is a complete mess, and the weaker side is weaker than the strong side in almost all aspects from level one to full level. The only difference between Tunisia and Normandy is that the The Normandy U.S. Army can have the fun of the game through the powerful P47, while Italy has nothing.
Well… I did experience this myself, we were pushing with infantry and planes, but 1 of the 2 tank was continously camping from the other side of the bridge doing little to nothing while a poor AB41 was trying to face off 2 A-13. in the end we lost this battle on the last control point because we wasted too many mens facing infantry and tanks without armored support.
I personally hate those players.
Also the allies in Tunisia have better equipment overall, the grant, the PIAT, now they get a new squad with the event, the got a fully spaded Daimler Mk. II with twitch drops, while axis got 2 unique soldiers, subpar tanks (the semovente with the 75mm doesn’t even has a commander MG on the roof and lacks the HEAT shell), the APHE bursting charge of the M14/41 is heavily reduced from the damage it causes in WT, some of the best italian smg are behind a paywall (FNAB) or aren’t even in the campaign (M1918), and the list of rants could go on and on, but you get the point i guess
I am at lvl 10 in the campaign for both Allies and Axis and I can say with certainty that the issue as pointed out is more or less the players themselves and not really a issue of balance when it comes to the Axis teams. The worst game mode to play as Axis on is destruction where it all just devolves into players camping in buildings with a very few number rushing to any objective. And rally points… Most of the time I find myself to be the only one who builds rally points in the matches I play, seeing two or three is a miracle in of itself
moscow is the most balanced of the 4, there are no OP tanks and airplanes, there are no automatic spammable weapons in all squads (fg42), unless you spam 3 teams of assaulters, bolts are used for almost the entire campaign (winchester op), and the advanced weapons for regular infantry are only the semi-automatic rifle which in some maps are inferior to bolt-action.
regarding rally points the fact that the engeneers are at level 9 doesn’t help with the lack of them, but genrally i see very little fortifications effort from the defenders beside sporadic flak.37 used to mow down infantry or some pak.38 on rooftops to engage tanks.
Engeneers are a rare sight in Tunisia
I still don’t understand why they chose lvl 9 for engineer squad on Tunisia considering that it takes quite the amount of grind to unlock that class and I must imagine that the grind is worse for those that don’t have premium account. But the issue still stands, too few are using them and this is from my experience something that Berlin also suffers from. Don’t know about what it’s like for Normandy and Moscow now since it has been a long while since I played on those two
I think the issue is less with players or vehicles than with the small arms balance. The Italian tanks are pretty workable I had a game yesterday where I plowed through a grant and 3 AC13s in consecutive order. I think the issue comes with the SMGs. The number of times I’ve seen the biker squad dismounted and clearing buildings with their Thompsons is too high.
Nice to see a complaint that actually addresses this as a playerbase issue.
This has been the case with the game since CBT, where one nation just turns into complete dead weight for no logical reason because the community has collectively declared it doesn’t want to play it.
This needs to be the #1 priority for the devs to solve, probably with greater incentives to play cross-faction.
Essentially you can say that all problems are due to low-skilled players on Axis side, but that’s too narrow-minded. Yes, on one hand you have a lot of incompetent/braindead players for Axis. On the other hand you have better equip on Allies (it can be debated what where is some kind of asymmetrical balance with guns but Axis tanks suck balls against infantry meaning you loose half the fun). Truth be told if I had to pick who to play for, Axis or Allies, I would go with Allies for sure. Axis, as I see it, offers you nothing but suffering, meh equip and low-skilled teammates or bots. Also, I’m pretty sure that some people play for Allies just cause fuck Nazis or I don’t want to be a bad guy attitude so that also can be part of the problem.
i know , but is the mentality of many of the player base, usually there are just 3 or 4 players carrying the whole team while the others just go try to get kills.
The truth is that the axis is full of low-skilled and low-level players because the majority of the community takes the path of least resistance and will switch sides whenever there’s a winning streak on the other.
The exodus then makes the winning streak even more pronounced (because the bulk of the capable players left) until something happens that makes players try to grind the losing faction again.
It’s happened so many times and has flipped to an extreme degree twice now for no logical reason.
It’s all entirely due to the community’s whims and the weak-mindedness of players who switch sides on a losing streak.
I think what we’re seeing in Tunisia that we’re not seeing in Moscow is a bad case of Console Culture Syndrome™.
That’s not intended as a dig at our console players, just an observation. The vast majority of console FPS games in the past have rewarded high KDR either more than PTFO, or the same. Combined with a historical emphasis on TD matches on console, and the recent rise of BR, these guys are used to their primary objective being to stay alive, secondary to kill, and then worry about an objective if forced to.
Consider also that past-gen consoles only have access to Tunisia and Normandy, where Axis players get great success from taking overwatch positions watching the point, but not always in it, and greyzone tanking with their superior cannons. If you started as Axis Normandy, and then made the switch to Tunisia, those are gonna be hard habits to break, while console guys who start in Normandy Allies are going to be used to throwing everything they have at the point just to have a chance at taking it.
Because winning gives you a 50% bonus to experience, after XP cards and premium bonuses are calculated but before battle hero. It can be a huge difference.
I’m level 14/13 both sides in Tunisia, it’s the only campaign I’ve played both sides in, at least to that level. I’ve had success as the axis, but I have noticed that it’s harder, and I’d say that’s mostly because my teams as axis there just don’t play the objective effectively.
I main Moscow Soviets, and I only have two points to make here: The Armor on the T-50 is ahistorically strong, and it’s a little overbalanced because of it, correcting the issue wouldn’t make the tank bad but would help with the armored combat balance there, and the planes we get in Moscow perform better than I think they should in flight. The IL2 in Moscow is a Stalinium UFO, when I fly the similar plane in Berlin it’s not nearly the same experience.
