Are attack values high enough?

[PoorOldSpike]

When I started, it would regularly take 4-5 hits to drop every single enemy unit. I figured that I was using '39 equipment though and that would change. I'm now up to '43 and it is the same thing and there are just so many of them. This game might be better balanced for multiplayer, but single player is getting real tedious..

I agree, enemy units are too hard to kill in PC2, I've previously mentioned it in another thread.
No matter how much we beat them up and force them to retreat, they always recover their strength and suppression too quickly over the next turn or two, so we have to beat them up all over again which is a bit tedious because it means we can rarely achieve a quick clean breakthrough blitzkrieg style.
A good solution in a later update would be to make their rate of suppression recovery much slower so that we can pursue them and finish them off before they have time to rally.

[comradep]

As long as you're fighting close to your own airfields, you will kill enemy aircraft very quickly. The 109 is, in fact, far superior to anything you'll fight in '39-40. Expecting one or two-shots on enemy planes when you're chasing them all the way across the map is a bit much, I think.

The Bf 109E is in most cases superior in initiative and air attack values, but in game terms not as "far" superior as in previous titles.

The stats for the early war modern Allied and Soviet monoplanes aside from air attack and initiative (and thus cost) are mostly identical.

The game seems to use "prestige cost categories" as even though the stats in the image below are not identical between Allied/Soviet aircraft, their cost is 90 prestige aside from the Dewoitine D.520 and Spitfire Mk I.

The Dewoitine D.520 is superior in range and equal in everything else, for the same prestige cost. The Spitfire Mk I has superior air defence. It's more expensive in the example, but that might be due to the star.

[econ21]

In terms of ground combat, I like the lethality being a bit low - although I am playing on the balanced setting, not Generalissimus (when your units get an accuracy debuff?). I found earlier PG type games got a little annoying in that one causal error could wipe out your precious veteran unit, particularly in the end game. The 50% miss chance seems a nice way of making the game a bit more forgiving for the player's units.

I do take the OPs point about the air war. I noticed my many Bf109s struggling to take down early war enemies. I guess it means the air war lasts longer than the first few turns, but it is a little tedious - especially when the surviving AI planes can just fly off and replenish.

Infantry versus infantry losses, however, take some getting used to. I guess it is the CD=0 but they really get hammered. The feel over-costed and rather too fragile, when I they would the most prevalent arm and typically the one left standing - in some numbers at least - when all the losing side's vehicles had been taken out. In this game it feels like the best thing is just bring a few engineers unless it's a city map (Moscow, Stalingrad etc.). But that has always been the tendency of these beer and pretzels type games (PG and Steel Panthers). If you make it realistic, you'd end up with maps full of cheap infantry that don't do a lot of damage to each other - too slow gameplay for this kind of thing.

[SineMora]

Looks like this is the first thing we disagree on. Compared to the original and SSI games, combat is not particularly deadly in PC2. It's more like Order of Battle, without the extremely annoying "units will nearly always have 1 strength point left after being attacked."

Tactical bombers do, on average, about 3 damage to enemy medium tanks. That means it takes 4 hits to kill them. If they also do 3 damage to infantry, it takes 5 hits to kill them. Tactical bombers no longer being as effective as an orbital laser is fine, but it does take more time to kill the enemy.

Combat in PzC1 could be ridiculous at times; you had Stukas flat out deleting IS2s. That's a different argument, though; the OP isn't arguing that combat isn't deadly enough, he's specifically complaining that too many units require 4-5 hits to kill. This is simply not true, unless you're doing it wrong. If you want good results from a bombing run you need high experience or recons to increase accuracy -- a Stuka with 80+ accuracy isn't likely to only inflict 3 kills on a medium tank. Early-game infantry is best dealt with using Rapid Fire tanks, not by hitting them with tactical bombers. Blasting a singly Soviet Conscript with your entire artillery line and then complaining that artillery is shit because it can't even kill a single Conscript is fallacious at best, and outright ignorant at worst.

Should combat be more decisive? Perhaps, but that's a different argument; shifting the goalposts doesn't change this.

Infantry being overstrength by default makes them much more sturdy than in earlier games. Even in the open, you need nearly full strength light/medium tanks to kill infantry in 3 hits.

If anything, I feel infantry is a bit too strong currently: they're nearly impossible to suppress in one turn, and at higher difficulties they will still do "chip damage" with 2 unsuppressed steps due to their accuracy bonus and the combat system not scaling very well when it comes to low strength point combat.

The inability to suppress infantry is quickly becoming my main pet peeve, as combined with base entrenchment and a combat system that targets suppressed steps instead of unsuppressed steps (another mechanic that I'm not fond of), it can make dealing with infantry rather costly. It's as if infantry can only be one of two extremes in games like this: pushovers or men of steel.

I'll happily admit that chip damage is one of my pet peeves as well, but we have to acknowledge that the conditions that promote this are more likely to occur on Generalissimus (and, I imagine, FM to a lesser extent). The resilience of infantry due to their numbers also help promote weaker tanks that benefit from Rapid Fire as a way to counter them -- if anything, I'd like to see more late-game tanks geared towards fighting infantry in the open, not by a higher SA but by benefiting from Rapid Fire. Interestingly, this is one of the areas where Armageddon shines, another Flashback game where you can choose between tanks with a large number of low-damage attacks and ones with few but extremely hard hitting ones; the former destroy infantry while the latter are a big threat to heavily armoured units.

I imagine supressed steps are targeted along with unsupressed to balance the fact that supression now lasts for the entire turn (and more if the unit is encircled); combat would certainly be faster if only unsupressed steps were targeted first, but it'd quite possibly make supression overpowered.