Was playing with 2 friends and we were getting rolled by 2 easy computers
then we decided to actually play real people and it matches us with people who were all level 15 or higher
how are we meant to get better if we don't have a chance
I have lost every single online match I've played thus far, and I am having an absolute blast. Granted, they were all 3v3 / 4v4s and atleast one of my teammates always seemed to have no clue how CoH fundamentally works so that sucked, but I was too busy fighting to care. I need to try 1v1 abit sometime soon, see how I do. Once I adapted to the comp's silly mortar spam it hasn't been that much of a challenge on easy or standard now. I wonder if high diffs cheat on resources? Not that it matters much - listen to TychoCelchuuu, play vs humans. It's way more fun and much much better practice.
@TychoCelchuuu - Are you going to be casting for CoH2 once the NDA is lifted / retail hits? You've always been one of my fav casters along with Bridger, Vitensby, Rogers, ect. I used to cast for DoW2 abit, and I had alot of fun doing that. I might try to cast abit for CoH2 if I can find the time. I'm really hoping CoH2 keeps that small but dedicated community feeling that CoH1 has enjoyed.
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@TychoCelchuuu - Are you going to be casting for CoH2 once the NDA is lifted / retail hits? You've always been one of my fav casters along with Bridger, Vitensby, Rogers, ect. I used to cast for DoW2 abit, and I had alot of fun doing that. I might try to cast abit for CoH2 if I can find the time. I'm really hoping CoH2 keeps that small but dedicated community feeling that CoH1 has enjoyed.
Text NDA was lifted today and video/screenshot NDA is lifted on Monday, I think, so I'll have casts coming out after that. As for the full game, that depends if it's any good - I still haven't preordered it, and if they don't make a lot of changes to the beta I'm not sure if I'm going to buy it. The UI is awful, the early game is nonexistent, the commanders are dumbed down, doctrines are locked behind level ups (or maybe microtransactions/preorders), and in general the game feels much more like DoW 2 (an RTS I did not particularly enjoy) than CoH (an RTS I loved).
While I don't feel quite as negatively about the game, I'd have to generally agree with you on that. Definitely agree about the UI overall. I really really hate the map, hard to read at a glance. The commanders being dumbed down sucks because there is no choice at all anymore. Before it was right / left side of a doctrine, which was nice. Only thing I don't understand is what you mean about there being no early game, that doesn't seem very different to me. Unless you mean the time between when we're fighting with just infantry , mgs, and mortars ect vs when vehicles and at guns hit the field?
I kind of expected this, since the original CoH guys are long gone from Relic, so this is more the DoW2 crew's take on how to make CoH. I don't think they entirely get it, but it's fun enough for me thus far. I wanted to like DoW2 alot more than I did in the end. It really captured the feel of WH40k in terms of the fighting and units ect, but it was on such a small scale - low army sizes, small maps, focused on heroes ect. I'd still enjoy playing it some but the community is so small now that it's really hard to find matches.
Cool that you will be casting some beta games though. If CoH2 ends up kinda sucking I might try getting into Men of War or just back int CoH1.
I dunno that it's just that there isn't anything else to spend your fuel on early. I think it's more that it's just too cheap to tech right now.
I mean in CoH1 you could of course go BARs with stickies for awhile before needing AT guns, which cost a decent bit of fuel (the upgrades, not AT guns). However I can't think of any alternate fuel spending path for Wher, and I played as them most of the time lol. Fast ranks I guess?
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I don't know if it's cheaper to tech now: this person did the math and it's about the same in CoH 2. The alternate path for Wehrmacht is dropping fuel on veterancy. The other big change is that cutoffs and fuel points were much more important in CoH - in CoH 2 there are fewer cutoffs and you can get fuel from normal strategic points too.
Ahh, point taken. Yeah the resource system is flat inferior to CoH1 IMO. I really liked having specific fuel / munitions points. Like you'd have some maps that had 2 VPs on one side, and the other would have 1 VP and a big fuel point. So you had a choice - go for the VP lead, or go for tech from the high fuel. As it stands, I don't think the current system in CoH2 really will be that way. The current fuel / munitions points only give alittle more than the other points.
Also funny that I never really got into early vet for Wehr. I guess I just love stugs and pumas too much.
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Well this discussion is sounding fairly depressing.
On the flispide though, there's still a possibility that the devs will acknowledge that the gameplay design needs some work and will refine it.
I mean CoH when it first started out used to be a Tank-fest. And DoW2 needed a massive re-working in "There is Only War". So I'm relatively hopeful that even if they don't get the design right initially, they'll rework it once they see it's not as effective as it should be.
Heh, it's funny, but "Mother Russia" was rather uncommonly used in common language during the GPW, and practically never in propaganda or rhetoric. On the chances that you were personifying Russia, it didn't get the prefix "Mother". There are letters of people writing home about the war, where'd they'd say "I'm doing this for Russia" for example, but never "Mother Russia."
"Mother Motherland" was the term--though apparently, in English it's been translated into "Mother Russia" since that term was used back before the First World War, some translators might be more conservative, and it might sound less awkward (it sounds perfectly normal in Russian: Rodina Mat versus Rossiya Matushka). Plus there was so much fighting not actually in 'Russia' proper, but still in the USSR.
Still, interesting Machinima. Hell, I wasn't expecting this game to be finished period after what happened to THQ.
EDIT: To the guys in the beta, how does the game look in motion?
I can't be that negative about it's graphics. The game definitely looks very good, with great textures and lots of little details just like CoH. If I had a negative critique, I think the explosions aren't as good as CoH1 because they look more like explosions from DoW2. The gritty dirt smoke and fire from CoH1 arty hits isn't quite there in this one I think. But the infantry and tanks are very detailed and seem to animate just as nicely as CoH1. The foliage and lighting quality is superior to CoH1 IMO, as the lighting looks more consistent overall.
This all might just be a matter of preference though. I also think some of you guys are going to be WAY too harsh on this game because you love CoH1 so much. I love it too, but give Relic a chance here. I feel lucky to get a sequel and that it isn't something stupid like Company of Heroes Online sounded like it would be.
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I've given Relic 3 chances already with OF, ToV, and CoH:O and it has fucked all of those up, and I'm giving it a fourth right now, but I'm not going to magically like a shitty game just because we're "lucky" enough to get it. In fact I don't think we're lucky to get a game that ruins everything good about CoH and charges us $60 plus microtransactions for the privilege. As someone who put hundreds if not thousands of hours into Company of Heroes and who shoutcasted more than a hundred matches and who went through a lot of effort (despite its many failings) to make people aware of and excited for Relic's game, it's very disappointing to me to end up with a sequel that is worse in almost every way. It makes me not want to put any effort into promoting the game and making people excited about it and if it's wrong for me to feel this way I'd love to hear some reason other than "well you're lucky you even got the game in the first place." Because I'm not!
From a competitive standpoint, how is CoH2 shaping to be? I know that it is a beta, but you can get a feel for the game. It's pretty obvious that CoH was competitive up until the point OF came out. They had the same problem with DoW2 Retribution, balance was ok but when the Exp came out it fucked it all to hell.
Relic makes amazing games, but they have a real hard time balancing them. Can you see evidence of casting support, or tournament support, or any competitive features? It's safe to say all of that stuff won't be turned on, but the UI should still hint at something.
Balance is fucked up right now but Relic games have never not had balance fucked up. Casting support is less than the original CoH (you can't even fast forward as much), tournament support is nil (looks like mirror matches are out) and competitive features are completely and utterly absent. Relic gives zero shits about anyone except people who jack off to fantasies of imaging themselves as Nazi commanders going up against T-34s in a blizzard.
The UI is six steps backwards, the general readability of the game is crap, the graphics aren't as nice, the maps and the resource system have been ruined in order to (according to the developers) make it easier for shitty players not to get their faces stomped in (I am not joking, this is the reason), the pacing of the game is entirely off, commander trees have been removed in favor of less interesting, more limited commander archetypes that Relic is probably going to sell in its microtransaction store (or at least to people who preorder), there are basically no interesting teching choices which turns every game into a rush for vehicles/tanks, and Relic does not seem to think half of these things are a problem, or if they do, they've decided to instead to respond to a bunch of other concerns on the beta forum that nobody who knows what they're talking about would give much of a shit about.
At this stage I'm not going to preorder and unless some magic happens in the beta I'll probably give CoH 2 a pass. It's not a bad game - it's about on par with Dawn of War II. It's just far, far worse than Company of Heroes, which was (and is) a legitimately good game with legitimately great features, no matter how many times Relic has tried to fuck it up with its shitty expansion packs. The best thing to come out of CoH 2 is that Relic hired the original CoH devs to port CoH over to Steamworks so it won't die when the old servers shut down.
Wow, sorry you feel that way TychoCelchuuu. I guess I can understand. I've had fun with CoH and all it's expansions. I enjoyed DoW2 even, quite abit. I don't think it's wrong for you to feel the way you do. I guess I just have low standards or something. Sigh.
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Wow, sorry you feel that way TychoCelchuuu. I guess I can understand. I've had fun with CoH and all it's expansions. I enjoyed DoW2 even, quite abit. I don't think it's wrong for you to feel the way you do. I guess I just have low standards or something. Sigh.
Having a different opinion from someone doesn't mean you have low standards
DoW 2 had a legitimately amazing single player campaign and the last stand expansion was excellent
and I enjoyed all the CoH expansions immensely but I only ever played them with friends against bots or other friends which is where I assume the disconnect between my opinions and TychoCelchuuu's come in because I have not really experienced proper PVP in any of them
I love RTS games but I do not like competitive multiplayer in them so I've never really had bad balance affect me in a big way
Yeah I only really played CoH against bots. Mainly because I knew that the factions were not well balanced.
I had actually forgotten about trenches. Man, before they became a Royal Engineer building those things were crazy.
Edit: Also the first two campaigns for Dawn of War two (they link together) and Last Stand are incredible. If GFWL was not required I would play those more offend.
I really hated how they added units to the campaign. DoW was awesome because it was you and your squad of Space Marines against incredible number. Micromanagement and skill use was vital. All gone with Retribution.
because for some inexplicable reason when the units you made died it refunded the resources to build them so it was all but impossible to lose campaign missions because you could just make a bunch of units at your base, attack move them to the objective and just make more units as they died and repeat until all the enemies are dead
basically no player input besides actually making the units was required
Balance is fucked up right now but Relic games have never not had balance fucked up. Casting support is less than the original CoH (you can't even fast forward as much), tournament support is nil (looks like mirror matches are out) and competitive features are completely and utterly absent. Relic gives zero shits about anyone except people who jack off to fantasies of imaging themselves as Nazi commanders going up against T-34s in a blizzard.
The UI is six steps backwards, the general readability of the game is crap, the graphics aren't as nice, the maps and the resource system have been ruined in order to (according to the developers) make it easier for shitty players not to get their faces stomped in (I am not joking, this is the reason), the pacing of the game is entirely off, commander trees have been removed in favor of less interesting, more limited commander archetypes that Relic is probably going to sell in its microtransaction store (or at least to people who preorder), there are basically no interesting teching choices which turns every game into a rush for vehicles/tanks, and Relic does not seem to think half of these things are a problem, or if they do, they've decided to instead to respond to a bunch of other concerns on the beta forum that nobody who knows what they're talking about would give much of a shit about.
At this stage I'm not going to preorder and unless some magic happens in the beta I'll probably give CoH 2 a pass. It's not a bad game - it's about on par with Dawn of War II. It's just far, far worse than Company of Heroes, which was (and is) a legitimately good game with legitimately great features, no matter how many times Relic has tried to fuck it up with its shitty expansion packs. The best thing to come out of CoH 2 is that Relic hired the original CoH devs to port CoH over to Steamworks so it won't die when the old servers shut down.
The worst thing is that the only reason they set the first game in the second world war was for player readability. I'm sure they've said many times that the gameplay experience they wanted for Company of Heroes required it to have easily recognizable archetypes to make it work. You know, so that you don't need the game to tell you that tanks are immune to small arms fire, or what can or cannot crush a stone wall.
And yet somehow this has turned into a strange fetishization of the war, as though all along Company of Heroes was some die-hard homage to the greatest generation, or a super serious representation of human frailty or some other bollocks. When all along they just needed players to tell the difference between small tanks and big tanks.
Now, with COH2, they've really lost all need for it to be set in the second world war. All of that necessity has vanished because nothing behaves as it should. Resourcing is somehow more arbitrary, the units are not as interesting because they are more true to real-life, a complete reversal of what made vanilla COH so good. And worst of all the game has taken a step back from the core principles of the entire franchise. Every unit has a use. Every unit can stay useful if you want it to. Every unit has strengths and weaknesses.
You're absolutely right about the game progression. I've played only a smattering of COH2 games (after struggling for a while with technical issues) but it's simply a race to the top. I've played many a COH game where I've never even teched past tier 1. Rifleman are totally viable late-game units, and getting BARs is a pivotal turning point in the early-mid game. Zombiegrens are also a potent strategy on most maps, especially against American opposition, and form the core of your fighting force in most encounters. These are men in uniform, the basic game unit, developing through experience and utility to become hard counters to the most powerful of end-game units. Truth be told, a smart KT driver will flee from rifleman if it is not backed up by infantry.
But in COH2, they've simply made a Dawn of War-esque game with a WW2 skin. Tanks and vehicles are simply better than infantry. And not just that, but infantry have nowhere to go. There's no forty minute piospam, or tier 4 Knights Cross rush. As soon as you get something with an engine, that's it. There's no flexibility, no development. There's no freedom for experimentation, or any creativity. It feels so stale. Which is to say nothing of the freezing mechanic, serving no gameplay purpose whatsoever other than to annoy you and to somehow appease the 'Eastern Front's Greatest Weapon Was Father Winter' ultra-nerdy WW2 fanatic. So too are the changes to standard units, like the 6-man weapon teams or the sniper units. Like, I get it, in the real world the Eastern Front was a grinding of human misery and sacrifice. But form should follow function, and changing the early game to a Dawn of War 2 style resource fandango with no cohesive front or potential for cut-offs just makes it a boring stall until flamer half-tracks or light tanks get on the field. And the changes to pop-cap compound this by making any kind of map control moot, because it encourages turtling and holding what you have, instead of what made COH1 so great which was a risk/reward of stepping across enemy lines.
The UI is a mess, with no unifying theme of design. Some parts are static, some collapse and fade, some parts are 90% art-filler when what is really needed is a lean, condensed version. The map is too busy but also, amazingly, not detailed enough. I could go on and on but I think I've said enough. In almost every single aspect of design, balance, gameplay and art, Company of Heroes 2 is a significant step back from vanilla COH1. Just thinking about playing it again makes me want to be sick. Another great franchise killed by poor choices and a complete misunderstanding of what they had in the first place that made it so good.
That said, the fire fx look great. And the new sightlines thing is nice. But whatever.
Agreed. I still haven't completed a game because CoH2 always crashes at some point, but I'm always thinking I'd much rather play the first game ..
I love the active unit overview on the top right, but that's about it. The blizzard mechanic is extremely annoying and hurting to infantry, whereas I loved in CoH1 where smartly placed/upgraded/moved infantry still had some use. Blizzards slow everything down in favor of tanks.
Perhaps I haven't played enough to appreciate all the snow/ice stuff, but at first glance I'm not really in favor.
How's the matchmaking going for CoH 1 now it's up on Steam?
I haven't tried vCoH yet but I did install the new version because playing the CoH 2 beta mostly made me want to play CoH again, so at some point I'll try it out.
I totally see how every game becomes a tank rush because you have nothing to spend fuel on.
But tanks dominating everything? Are we playing the same game? Every game is tank heavy because fuel has to go somewhere, but tanks seem really weak compared to CoH1. They get critted more easily, can take less punishment (how many of you saw a stug go low by 3 hits in CoH1), and holy shit are panzershreks ridiculous.
I'm serious, if you're facing tankspam (you're probably not, you're facing arty spam because mortars and soviet AT guns are -ridiculous-) grab the shreks. Unlike CoH1 they can snipe tanks from max range against any armor facing, maybe except on the heaviest of heavy tanks because I haven't tried that yet.
Infantry are in the same boat as tanks - the entire squad can lose 3 guys or even get entirely gibbed by a tank shot, because explosive weapons like mortars/tank shells are now ridiculously powerful and inconsistent (just like damage vs. tanks is now ridiculously powerful and inconsistent, with crits popping up every which way for no reason). They changed CoH, a game of careful positioning, unit preservation, tactical flanking, moderately paced combat where the tide is turned by careful use of abilities and careful maneuvering, and so on, into a game where you build enough units to reach the cusp of the magic "your pop cap starts to reduce your income" level then hurl them at the opponent hoping for enough lucky crits to kill the shit out of them in one flash of aggression that they can't retreat from.
I don't dislike high-lethality RTS games on principle - Men of War is one of my favorite games, and because it's quite realistic, one AP shell can knock out a Tiger tank and one mortar shell can kill 8 infantry men if they are doing a group hug sort of thing. So it's not like I'm bad at unit preservation in a cut-throat world of disposable men and tanks. It's just decided not how the original CoH played, and in fact this was a way CoH was way different from other RTS games. What sets CoH apart from Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Men of War, Age of Empires, and so on? In all those other games, you have individual units and you pretty much accept that a lot of them are going to die in each battle. In CoH you don't have individual units, you have squads, and that means fewer pieces to play with and more of an emphasis on preservation. CoH 2 fucks this up because just letting any infantry fight against a flamethrower or a tank or just letting a tank fight in the vicinity of an AT gun or shrecks means that if you get unlucky, you can lose the squad or the tank in the blink of an eye. A game about shaping the battlefield by moving around threats and setting up engagements has turned into a game of hoping nothing gets gibbed.
I've also been somewhat disappointed. I actually was really enjoying CoH2 for a good many games. Reflecting on it though, I think I was mostly just hungry for some CoH action and there's a certain joy I get from just exploring the balance and possibilities in a new RTS.
It sort of hit me the other day when I did go and play the new Steamworks vCoH beta. The readability of CoH2 is just atrocious. Men blend in too much into the surrounding terrain. Shots from weapons have no tracers. It is often difficulty to understand who is fighting who a simple glance. The UI is not great. The resource system is less interesting. Hell, the voice acting is more bland as we've already covered.
The balance issues are certainly there. I actually downloaded a handful of replays from the official forums (You were in one, @TychoCelchuuu!) to watch a little 1v1 play as I usually only play when folks jump on vent and we'll 2v2-4v4. I was absolutely shocked by the 1v1 games because people were actually using infantry. Most games seemed like there was a previously agreed on "no tanks 15 mins" or something. My experience with team games was one of fast teching and a minimalist approach to tier 1. In fact, I usually skip tier 1 as Germans for a fast tier 2 (Panzer Grens are really good right now and scale with Panzerschreks). As Russians, I maintain field presence with snipers, flamer engineers and M3A1 scout cars while I hit CP 1 enough to get Guards Rifle Infantry who also scale well. Conscripts, most weapon teams, grenadiers, they're all just units you use to cap points with late game.
I do think the pacing of the game is screwed. I didn't really expect pacing issues like this though. I think back to Dawn of War 2: that team ran into the exact same problem that this game has. Tier 1 units scaled terribly. Teching costs were super low. In the end they changed the cost of tier 1 research from 35 to 125 power if I recall correctly. This feels like a similar mistake repeated again. I wrote up a page and a half for the official forums on the pacing, the need for unit scalability out of tier 1, and other things that have already been mentioned. I still can't post that post because it contains "Forbidden Text" somewhere in it. I tried to ask their webmaster and I've gotten no response. Maybe because my post to him was thrown out due to the same "Forbidden Text"? It's infuriating to not even be able to give feedback after typing up 1-2 pages of it.
I expected balance issues. Relic games always release balance issues. How long did it take for them to fix Tyranids in Dawn of War 2? Practically until Chaos Rising if I remember correctly.
I still have fun when I boot up CoH2. The musical score is excellent. I actually really like TrueSight. I don't know how to feel about the Blizzards and cold maps but I like the change of pace with them. Blizzards feel too arbitrary but sneaking infantry through blizzards or having one of your MGs suddenly outflanked by enemy movement in the storm is actually sort of fun and interesting. Then map freezes over and you don't entirely know what's happening. Obviously it pulls more strength to the units that can operate during the storm (surprise surprise, that's tanks and vehicles and anti-infantry like mortars and snipers). Most of these issues could be overcome! I'm not confident enough will be though.
Give me the text and I can post it - I think until you have 10 posts or something the official forums do that weird forbidden text things sometimes. Alternatively, look for hidden swear words: those forums censor "arsenal" because it has "arse" in it, among other ridiculous restrictions.
As for the 1v1 replays you watched with fewer vehicles, part of that comes down to player preferences - in that replay I was in, for instance, I was floating 400+ fuel because I wanted to see whether it was viable to play without vehicles or not (answer: no, Tycho, you're a fucking idiot, build a tank).
Some of the units in this game just seem misplaced.
What is the point of the German sniper? Every infantry unit that the Soviets have is 6 man squads except for the engineer squad. In CoH1 you wouldn't waste your sniper rounds on Riflemen but use him for eliminating weapon teams, knocking out elite infantry like Airborne and Rangers, and (perhaps most importantly) counter sniping. Well guess what! The Soviet sniper has two snipers in the squad, and they're going to build multiple because your squads are small and elite. The Russian weapons teams are mostly garbage and also have 6 people in them too. Units like this will continue to fall by the wayside until infantry fall into place for this game.
Give me the text and I can post it - I think until you have 10 posts or something the official forums do that weird forbidden text things sometimes. Alternatively, look for hidden swear words: those forums censor "arsenal" because it has "arse" in it, among other ridiculous restrictions.
As for the 1v1 replays you watched with fewer vehicles, part of that comes down to player preferences - in that replay I was in, for instance, I was floating 400+ fuel because I wanted to see whether it was viable to play without vehicles or not (answer: no, Tycho, you're a fucking idiot, build a tank).
Thank you. I will edit it and send it over. Honestly, some of my opinions have changed since I wrote it a couple days ago...
Also, I'm pretty sure you won that game (although he refused to spend fuel too...)
Actually, now that we can talk about this game I thought it would be nice to crowd-source some of my suggestions.
What I wanted to see originally and still sort of want to see (tl;dr):
-Bulletins (the unit upgrade items) should have meaningful changes to your army.
-Tier 1 units become obsolete combined with tier 1 being too short makes early game units really awful.
-Russians have a punishing tech tree that could stand to have some better "backteching" power
-Most tier 1 infantry really need to be better/scale better.
My reasoning/post is below (it's not short). What do you guys think of these suggestions? I'm going to go get some lunch but any input would be wonderful.
One thing that could be changed is that Bulletins are very... marginal. I would love to see some Bulletins that change the role or strengths of a unit rather than making them veryweak upgrades to your favorite units. CoHO had some of these upgrades. Upgrades that would meaningfully change the range of units or abilities so that their effectiveness changed.
I would also like to see more of these unlocked at the start. Give players a little room to play around with this mechanic. I assume the limited selection is probably because of the game's beta status.
I have some misgivings about tying Bulletins to achievement-like unlocks. I don't know if I'll ever build 50 T-70s. I'm not sure I want to play with someone whose goal is to build 50 T-70s in games ASAP.
Balance Feedback
I'm hesitant to post too much on Balance feedback because I still feel like I'm cutting my teeth on each unit's role and effectiveness. I love balance analysis though so I'll probably just throw some thoughts out.
The Early Game
In the alpha, I was really hesitant about the early game. I didn't even know if there was an early game. The fuel costs to tech up tanks and vehicles were insanely low and the 222 Scout Car for Wehrmacht was completely overpowered. Staying in Tier 1 for both sides for any amount of time seemed like a bad idea. Most of the units from tier 1 did not scale well so you wanted to move past that phase completely.
That was the Alpha. The scout car has been brought into a much better place damage and versatility wise. In fact, I feel like the whole early game improved in some ways. The amount of fuel needed to tech is still so low however that early game units become obsolete very quickly.
In light of this fact, I usually skip tier 1 as Wehrmacht. Skipping tier 1 as Wehrmacht is very viable still in my experience. It's what I do most games. There are a few reasons for this.
Conscripts are terrible. They're pretty much the only infantry that can punish you early before your tier 2 is up. They don't scale well, they need upgrades like M. Cocktails to pose a considerable threat to units, they need munitions to do anything... I feel like this unit needs a good hard look at. Their window of usefulness (let alone dominance) feels so tiny that a german player can play fairly greedy and not get punished very easily. They don't scale like Riflemen with BARs (although you can get those nice SMGs with doctrine abilities), so they don't really come into anything but as a munitions sink on a pretty weak unit. This unit needs to be invested in to be good but I hardly see the point.
Panzer Grenadiers are great. Being greedy and rushing these guys out is so much better than grenadiers. They have incredible anti-infantry power against the Russians. They're a close quarters troop that dominate everything with no gun upgrades and a great grenade. They scale well into the late game with a viable AT upgrade, the Panzerschrek.
The biggest weaknesses of Panzer Grenadiers is countered by the other units that come from the tier 2 building. The scout car 222 can harry and eliminate threats to the grenadiers (such as flamethrowers and snipers) very effectively. With the upgraded gun it can kill the M3A1 Scout Car of the Russians in a matter of seconds. Speaking of the Scout Car 222 weapon upgrade, the tooltip should be changed. It says that it makes it more effective against vehicles and infantry. This is a lie. Since the changes from the Alpha the upgraded gun appears markedly worse against infantry. I think that's fine, but the tooltip is now inaccurate.
In general, I am pretty frustrated with Russian early game. The M1A3 Scout Car is demolished very quickly by early german munition investments in the form of a either an upgraded Scout Car 222 or a panzerfaust from Grenadiers. This unit seems very key to success as a Russian, but it's made of paper and requires a fuel investment. It makes every encounter very binary, if you understand my meaning. You win big or you lose it. Throwing a flamethrower inside makes a very deadly unit that kills snipers, MGs, and observation points very quickly and with little hope of retreat. It will die near instantaneously from a Panzerfaust or scout car though. A sniper creates a similar effect when inside of the M1A3. Tier 1 is so short however that the car has no point and no upgrades aside from that.
Company of Heroes has always been a game about unit efficiency and survival. Reinforcing squads is cheaper and more effective than building a new one. Units are judged based on their roles and upgrades. The scout car does not become more durable or gets a line of sight upgrade or anything. It just becomes a rolling coffin that is very deadly for about 1-2 minutes at the start of the game. Even the Bren Carrier from the original game had an upgrade that took away the garrison-able trait for increased durability, suppression and some light anti-tank power. It was able to evolve into the later stages of the game if you kept it alive. The Wehrmacht scout car evolves like that as well in CoH2: With a single level of veterancy it gains a powerful scouting ability. Today, I killed two Russian Rocket Artillery trucks with an early game 222 Halftrack. The anti-vehicular power of it's upgrade is potent against Obseravation Points and light artillery units. The light scout car that the Russians get is not like this however. It does not evolve very well and requires passengers to be effective. I would take a look at that unit. Give it an option into the mid game.
In short, I feel like the early game could be improved. The crux of the issue is that the early game is very short and the units that emerge from tier 1 buildings do not scale well at all. The early game could be extended or the units could be made more versatile with upgrades or abilities to make them more valuable as you move up. The only units that tend to scale well out of tier 1 are mortars, snipers and AT guns.
The Late Game
There were a few points I wanted to touch on here.
First of all, I feel like Russian teching is very limiting. The high fuel cost of units from Tier 3 and Tier 4 combined with the high fuel costs of the buildings themselves creates a situation where Russians tend to be locked into two buildings for the entire game.
Let's look at Wehrmacht costs, by tier and building.
Escalate to Battle Phase 3: 200m, 35fuel / Support Armor Korps: 160m, 25 fuel
Escalate to Battle Phase 4: 200m, 50fuel / Heavy Panzer Korps: 160m, 30 fuel
It takes a total of 190 fuel to access every unit as Wehrmacht.
Now Russians:
Special Rifle Command: 200m, 40 fuel
Support Weapon Kampaneya: 240m, 50 fuel
Tankoviy Battalion Command: 275m, 90 fuel
Mechanized Armor Kampaneya: 275m, 90 fuel
It takes a total of 270 fuel to access every unit as Russians.
Russians have a very marginal bonus to fast teching:
A rush from tier 1 to tier 4 as Russians and Germans? Russians: 40+90 = 130. Germans: 10+25+35+50+30 = 150.
I don't think that really offsets the high costs of teching as Russians though. I feel like backteching with the Russians is too prohibitive. You're trading more than an entire tank for the ability to build a different one. Russian AT needs are thinly stretched as is.
I would propose a discount for "backteching" for Russians. Russian buildings are divided into two tiers, tier 1+2, and tier 3+4. If you already have a building from tier 1+2, make the remaining building cheaper. As an example, if I build the Support Weapon Kampenya as my first building I would then get a discount on a Special Rifle Command if I wanted to build that afterwards.
This would not change the relative speed of when a T-34/76 can come out, but would allow you to switch over into SU-85s without spending the full 90 fuel.
I don't want to significantly "Homogenize" the two sides together with perfectly similar tech trees, but I do feel that Russians are limited too harshly now.
Well this thread has become massively depressing. But I want to thank everyone here who has messed with it and gave their impressions. The points that were made are pretty much everything I was worried about.
I'm not very informed on Relic's comings and goings, but did a significant number of the COH devs leave after it was released? Because DOW2's MP was pretty awful, and while the SP was pretty good, that game never really lived up to the hype. And now reading your all's opinion of COH2 it sounds like the current devs have no idea what made the first game enjoyable.
Fun fact: Smoking Gun Interactive is the company Relic hired to port CoH 1 over to Steamworks so that it will survive the coming multiplayer server shutdown. This is presumably because the only people who have ever understood how CoH works and how to make it fun left Relic and work at SGI now.
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I have lost every single online match I've played thus far, and I am having an absolute blast. Granted, they were all 3v3 / 4v4s and atleast one of my teammates always seemed to have no clue how CoH fundamentally works so that sucked, but I was too busy fighting to care. I need to try 1v1 abit sometime soon, see how I do. Once I adapted to the comp's silly mortar spam it hasn't been that much of a challenge on easy or standard now. I wonder if high diffs cheat on resources? Not that it matters much - listen to TychoCelchuuu, play vs humans. It's way more fun and much much better practice.
@TychoCelchuuu - Are you going to be casting for CoH2 once the NDA is lifted / retail hits? You've always been one of my fav casters along with Bridger, Vitensby, Rogers, ect. I used to cast for DoW2 abit, and I had alot of fun doing that. I might try to cast abit for CoH2 if I can find the time. I'm really hoping CoH2 keeps that small but dedicated community feeling that CoH1 has enjoyed.
Text NDA was lifted today and video/screenshot NDA is lifted on Monday, I think, so I'll have casts coming out after that. As for the full game, that depends if it's any good - I still haven't preordered it, and if they don't make a lot of changes to the beta I'm not sure if I'm going to buy it. The UI is awful, the early game is nonexistent, the commanders are dumbed down, doctrines are locked behind level ups (or maybe microtransactions/preorders), and in general the game feels much more like DoW 2 (an RTS I did not particularly enjoy) than CoH (an RTS I loved).
I kind of expected this, since the original CoH guys are long gone from Relic, so this is more the DoW2 crew's take on how to make CoH. I don't think they entirely get it, but it's fun enough for me thus far. I wanted to like DoW2 alot more than I did in the end. It really captured the feel of WH40k in terms of the fighting and units ect, but it was on such a small scale - low army sizes, small maps, focused on heroes ect. I'd still enjoy playing it some but the community is so small now that it's really hard to find matches.
Cool that you will be casting some beta games though. If CoH2 ends up kinda sucking I might try getting into Men of War or just back int CoH1.
Edit - Lots of cool info here for anyone interested. http://www.coh2.org/topic/2325/coh2-beta-findings
I mean in CoH1 you could of course go BARs with stickies for awhile before needing AT guns, which cost a decent bit of fuel (the upgrades, not AT guns). However I can't think of any alternate fuel spending path for Wher, and I played as them most of the time lol. Fast ranks I guess?
Also funny that I never really got into early vet for Wehr. I guess I just love stugs and pumas too much.
On the flispide though, there's still a possibility that the devs will acknowledge that the gameplay design needs some work and will refine it.
I mean CoH when it first started out used to be a Tank-fest. And DoW2 needed a massive re-working in "There is Only War". So I'm relatively hopeful that even if they don't get the design right initially, they'll rework it once they see it's not as effective as it should be.
I hope anyway.
"Mother Motherland" was the term--though apparently, in English it's been translated into "Mother Russia" since that term was used back before the First World War, some translators might be more conservative, and it might sound less awkward (it sounds perfectly normal in Russian: Rodina Mat versus Rossiya Matushka). Plus there was so much fighting not actually in 'Russia' proper, but still in the USSR.
Still, interesting Machinima. Hell, I wasn't expecting this game to be finished period after what happened to THQ.
EDIT: To the guys in the beta, how does the game look in motion?
It looks very good, but after a while it's just a snowier CoH1. Which is still good, I guess.
Wii U - 'Nocero'
XBox ID - therealmasume
PS4 ID - realmasume
This all might just be a matter of preference though. I also think some of you guys are going to be WAY too harsh on this game because you love CoH1 so much. I love it too, but give Relic a chance here. I feel lucky to get a sequel and that it isn't something stupid like Company of Heroes Online sounded like it would be.
edit: actually the voices were pretty funny/well done.
though Tales of Valor certainly didn't have enough content to justify being called an expansion
Relic makes amazing games, but they have a real hard time balancing them. Can you see evidence of casting support, or tournament support, or any competitive features? It's safe to say all of that stuff won't be turned on, but the UI should still hint at something.
The UI is six steps backwards, the general readability of the game is crap, the graphics aren't as nice, the maps and the resource system have been ruined in order to (according to the developers) make it easier for shitty players not to get their faces stomped in (I am not joking, this is the reason), the pacing of the game is entirely off, commander trees have been removed in favor of less interesting, more limited commander archetypes that Relic is probably going to sell in its microtransaction store (or at least to people who preorder), there are basically no interesting teching choices which turns every game into a rush for vehicles/tanks, and Relic does not seem to think half of these things are a problem, or if they do, they've decided to instead to respond to a bunch of other concerns on the beta forum that nobody who knows what they're talking about would give much of a shit about.
At this stage I'm not going to preorder and unless some magic happens in the beta I'll probably give CoH 2 a pass. It's not a bad game - it's about on par with Dawn of War II. It's just far, far worse than Company of Heroes, which was (and is) a legitimately good game with legitimately great features, no matter how many times Relic has tried to fuck it up with its shitty expansion packs. The best thing to come out of CoH 2 is that Relic hired the original CoH devs to port CoH over to Steamworks so it won't die when the old servers shut down.
Having a different opinion from someone doesn't mean you have low standards
DoW 2 had a legitimately amazing single player campaign and the last stand expansion was excellent
and I enjoyed all the CoH expansions immensely but I only ever played them with friends against bots or other friends which is where I assume the disconnect between my opinions and TychoCelchuuu's come in because I have not really experienced proper PVP in any of them
I love RTS games but I do not like competitive multiplayer in them so I've never really had bad balance affect me in a big way
I had actually forgotten about trenches. Man, before they became a Royal Engineer building those things were crazy.
Edit: Also the first two campaigns for Dawn of War two (they link together) and Last Stand are incredible. If GFWL was not required I would play those more offend.
that expansion is probably the only thing from Relic that I actually regret buying
because for some inexplicable reason when the units you made died it refunded the resources to build them so it was all but impossible to lose campaign missions because you could just make a bunch of units at your base, attack move them to the objective and just make more units as they died and repeat until all the enemies are dead
basically no player input besides actually making the units was required
The worst thing is that the only reason they set the first game in the second world war was for player readability. I'm sure they've said many times that the gameplay experience they wanted for Company of Heroes required it to have easily recognizable archetypes to make it work. You know, so that you don't need the game to tell you that tanks are immune to small arms fire, or what can or cannot crush a stone wall.
And yet somehow this has turned into a strange fetishization of the war, as though all along Company of Heroes was some die-hard homage to the greatest generation, or a super serious representation of human frailty or some other bollocks. When all along they just needed players to tell the difference between small tanks and big tanks.
Now, with COH2, they've really lost all need for it to be set in the second world war. All of that necessity has vanished because nothing behaves as it should. Resourcing is somehow more arbitrary, the units are not as interesting because they are more true to real-life, a complete reversal of what made vanilla COH so good. And worst of all the game has taken a step back from the core principles of the entire franchise. Every unit has a use. Every unit can stay useful if you want it to. Every unit has strengths and weaknesses.
You're absolutely right about the game progression. I've played only a smattering of COH2 games (after struggling for a while with technical issues) but it's simply a race to the top. I've played many a COH game where I've never even teched past tier 1. Rifleman are totally viable late-game units, and getting BARs is a pivotal turning point in the early-mid game. Zombiegrens are also a potent strategy on most maps, especially against American opposition, and form the core of your fighting force in most encounters. These are men in uniform, the basic game unit, developing through experience and utility to become hard counters to the most powerful of end-game units. Truth be told, a smart KT driver will flee from rifleman if it is not backed up by infantry.
But in COH2, they've simply made a Dawn of War-esque game with a WW2 skin. Tanks and vehicles are simply better than infantry. And not just that, but infantry have nowhere to go. There's no forty minute piospam, or tier 4 Knights Cross rush. As soon as you get something with an engine, that's it. There's no flexibility, no development. There's no freedom for experimentation, or any creativity. It feels so stale. Which is to say nothing of the freezing mechanic, serving no gameplay purpose whatsoever other than to annoy you and to somehow appease the 'Eastern Front's Greatest Weapon Was Father Winter' ultra-nerdy WW2 fanatic. So too are the changes to standard units, like the 6-man weapon teams or the sniper units. Like, I get it, in the real world the Eastern Front was a grinding of human misery and sacrifice. But form should follow function, and changing the early game to a Dawn of War 2 style resource fandango with no cohesive front or potential for cut-offs just makes it a boring stall until flamer half-tracks or light tanks get on the field. And the changes to pop-cap compound this by making any kind of map control moot, because it encourages turtling and holding what you have, instead of what made COH1 so great which was a risk/reward of stepping across enemy lines.
The UI is a mess, with no unifying theme of design. Some parts are static, some collapse and fade, some parts are 90% art-filler when what is really needed is a lean, condensed version. The map is too busy but also, amazingly, not detailed enough. I could go on and on but I think I've said enough. In almost every single aspect of design, balance, gameplay and art, Company of Heroes 2 is a significant step back from vanilla COH1. Just thinking about playing it again makes me want to be sick. Another great franchise killed by poor choices and a complete misunderstanding of what they had in the first place that made it so good.
That said, the fire fx look great. And the new sightlines thing is nice. But whatever.
I love the active unit overview on the top right, but that's about it. The blizzard mechanic is extremely annoying and hurting to infantry, whereas I loved in CoH1 where smartly placed/upgraded/moved infantry still had some use. Blizzards slow everything down in favor of tanks.
Perhaps I haven't played enough to appreciate all the snow/ice stuff, but at first glance I'm not really in favor.
How's the matchmaking going for CoH 1 now it's up on Steam?
But tanks dominating everything? Are we playing the same game? Every game is tank heavy because fuel has to go somewhere, but tanks seem really weak compared to CoH1. They get critted more easily, can take less punishment (how many of you saw a stug go low by 3 hits in CoH1), and holy shit are panzershreks ridiculous.
I'm serious, if you're facing tankspam (you're probably not, you're facing arty spam because mortars and soviet AT guns are -ridiculous-) grab the shreks. Unlike CoH1 they can snipe tanks from max range against any armor facing, maybe except on the heaviest of heavy tanks because I haven't tried that yet.
I don't dislike high-lethality RTS games on principle - Men of War is one of my favorite games, and because it's quite realistic, one AP shell can knock out a Tiger tank and one mortar shell can kill 8 infantry men if they are doing a group hug sort of thing. So it's not like I'm bad at unit preservation in a cut-throat world of disposable men and tanks. It's just decided not how the original CoH played, and in fact this was a way CoH was way different from other RTS games. What sets CoH apart from Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Men of War, Age of Empires, and so on? In all those other games, you have individual units and you pretty much accept that a lot of them are going to die in each battle. In CoH you don't have individual units, you have squads, and that means fewer pieces to play with and more of an emphasis on preservation. CoH 2 fucks this up because just letting any infantry fight against a flamethrower or a tank or just letting a tank fight in the vicinity of an AT gun or shrecks means that if you get unlucky, you can lose the squad or the tank in the blink of an eye. A game about shaping the battlefield by moving around threats and setting up engagements has turned into a game of hoping nothing gets gibbed.
It sort of hit me the other day when I did go and play the new Steamworks vCoH beta. The readability of CoH2 is just atrocious. Men blend in too much into the surrounding terrain. Shots from weapons have no tracers. It is often difficulty to understand who is fighting who a simple glance. The UI is not great. The resource system is less interesting. Hell, the voice acting is more bland as we've already covered.
The balance issues are certainly there. I actually downloaded a handful of replays from the official forums (You were in one, @TychoCelchuuu!) to watch a little 1v1 play as I usually only play when folks jump on vent and we'll 2v2-4v4. I was absolutely shocked by the 1v1 games because people were actually using infantry. Most games seemed like there was a previously agreed on "no tanks 15 mins" or something. My experience with team games was one of fast teching and a minimalist approach to tier 1. In fact, I usually skip tier 1 as Germans for a fast tier 2 (Panzer Grens are really good right now and scale with Panzerschreks). As Russians, I maintain field presence with snipers, flamer engineers and M3A1 scout cars while I hit CP 1 enough to get Guards Rifle Infantry who also scale well. Conscripts, most weapon teams, grenadiers, they're all just units you use to cap points with late game.
I do think the pacing of the game is screwed. I didn't really expect pacing issues like this though. I think back to Dawn of War 2: that team ran into the exact same problem that this game has. Tier 1 units scaled terribly. Teching costs were super low. In the end they changed the cost of tier 1 research from 35 to 125 power if I recall correctly. This feels like a similar mistake repeated again. I wrote up a page and a half for the official forums on the pacing, the need for unit scalability out of tier 1, and other things that have already been mentioned. I still can't post that post because it contains "Forbidden Text" somewhere in it. I tried to ask their webmaster and I've gotten no response. Maybe because my post to him was thrown out due to the same "Forbidden Text"? It's infuriating to not even be able to give feedback after typing up 1-2 pages of it.
I expected balance issues. Relic games always release balance issues. How long did it take for them to fix Tyranids in Dawn of War 2? Practically until Chaos Rising if I remember correctly.
I still have fun when I boot up CoH2. The musical score is excellent. I actually really like TrueSight. I don't know how to feel about the Blizzards and cold maps but I like the change of pace with them. Blizzards feel too arbitrary but sneaking infantry through blizzards or having one of your MGs suddenly outflanked by enemy movement in the storm is actually sort of fun and interesting. Then map freezes over and you don't entirely know what's happening. Obviously it pulls more strength to the units that can operate during the storm (surprise surprise, that's tanks and vehicles and anti-infantry like mortars and snipers). Most of these issues could be overcome! I'm not confident enough will be though.
As for the 1v1 replays you watched with fewer vehicles, part of that comes down to player preferences - in that replay I was in, for instance, I was floating 400+ fuel because I wanted to see whether it was viable to play without vehicles or not (answer: no, Tycho, you're a fucking idiot, build a tank).
What is the point of the German sniper? Every infantry unit that the Soviets have is 6 man squads except for the engineer squad. In CoH1 you wouldn't waste your sniper rounds on Riflemen but use him for eliminating weapon teams, knocking out elite infantry like Airborne and Rangers, and (perhaps most importantly) counter sniping. Well guess what! The Soviet sniper has two snipers in the squad, and they're going to build multiple because your squads are small and elite. The Russian weapons teams are mostly garbage and also have 6 people in them too. Units like this will continue to fall by the wayside until infantry fall into place for this game.
Thank you. I will edit it and send it over. Honestly, some of my opinions have changed since I wrote it a couple days ago...
Also, I'm pretty sure you won that game (although he refused to spend fuel too...)
What I wanted to see originally and still sort of want to see (tl;dr):
-Bulletins (the unit upgrade items) should have meaningful changes to your army.
-Tier 1 units become obsolete combined with tier 1 being too short makes early game units really awful.
-Russians have a punishing tech tree that could stand to have some better "backteching" power
-Most tier 1 infantry really need to be better/scale better.
My reasoning/post is below (it's not short). What do you guys think of these suggestions? I'm going to go get some lunch but any input would be wonderful.
I would also like to see more of these unlocked at the start. Give players a little room to play around with this mechanic. I assume the limited selection is probably because of the game's beta status.
I have some misgivings about tying Bulletins to achievement-like unlocks. I don't know if I'll ever build 50 T-70s. I'm not sure I want to play with someone whose goal is to build 50 T-70s in games ASAP.
Balance Feedback
I'm hesitant to post too much on Balance feedback because I still feel like I'm cutting my teeth on each unit's role and effectiveness. I love balance analysis though so I'll probably just throw some thoughts out.
The Early Game
In the alpha, I was really hesitant about the early game. I didn't even know if there was an early game. The fuel costs to tech up tanks and vehicles were insanely low and the 222 Scout Car for Wehrmacht was completely overpowered. Staying in Tier 1 for both sides for any amount of time seemed like a bad idea. Most of the units from tier 1 did not scale well so you wanted to move past that phase completely.
That was the Alpha. The scout car has been brought into a much better place damage and versatility wise. In fact, I feel like the whole early game improved in some ways. The amount of fuel needed to tech is still so low however that early game units become obsolete very quickly.
In light of this fact, I usually skip tier 1 as Wehrmacht. Skipping tier 1 as Wehrmacht is very viable still in my experience. It's what I do most games. There are a few reasons for this.
- Conscripts are terrible. They're pretty much the only infantry that can punish you early before your tier 2 is up. They don't scale well, they need upgrades like M. Cocktails to pose a considerable threat to units, they need munitions to do anything... I feel like this unit needs a good hard look at. Their window of usefulness (let alone dominance) feels so tiny that a german player can play fairly greedy and not get punished very easily. They don't scale like Riflemen with BARs (although you can get those nice SMGs with doctrine abilities), so they don't really come into anything but as a munitions sink on a pretty weak unit. This unit needs to be invested in to be good but I hardly see the point.
- Panzer Grenadiers are great. Being greedy and rushing these guys out is so much better than grenadiers. They have incredible anti-infantry power against the Russians. They're a close quarters troop that dominate everything with no gun upgrades and a great grenade. They scale well into the late game with a viable AT upgrade, the Panzerschrek.
- The biggest weaknesses of Panzer Grenadiers is countered by the other units that come from the tier 2 building. The scout car 222 can harry and eliminate threats to the grenadiers (such as flamethrowers and snipers) very effectively. With the upgraded gun it can kill the M3A1 Scout Car of the Russians in a matter of seconds. Speaking of the Scout Car 222 weapon upgrade, the tooltip should be changed. It says that it makes it more effective against vehicles and infantry. This is a lie. Since the changes from the Alpha the upgraded gun appears markedly worse against infantry. I think that's fine, but the tooltip is now inaccurate.
In general, I am pretty frustrated with Russian early game. The M1A3 Scout Car is demolished very quickly by early german munition investments in the form of a either an upgraded Scout Car 222 or a panzerfaust from Grenadiers. This unit seems very key to success as a Russian, but it's made of paper and requires a fuel investment. It makes every encounter very binary, if you understand my meaning. You win big or you lose it. Throwing a flamethrower inside makes a very deadly unit that kills snipers, MGs, and observation points very quickly and with little hope of retreat. It will die near instantaneously from a Panzerfaust or scout car though. A sniper creates a similar effect when inside of the M1A3. Tier 1 is so short however that the car has no point and no upgrades aside from that.Company of Heroes has always been a game about unit efficiency and survival. Reinforcing squads is cheaper and more effective than building a new one. Units are judged based on their roles and upgrades. The scout car does not become more durable or gets a line of sight upgrade or anything. It just becomes a rolling coffin that is very deadly for about 1-2 minutes at the start of the game. Even the Bren Carrier from the original game had an upgrade that took away the garrison-able trait for increased durability, suppression and some light anti-tank power. It was able to evolve into the later stages of the game if you kept it alive. The Wehrmacht scout car evolves like that as well in CoH2: With a single level of veterancy it gains a powerful scouting ability. Today, I killed two Russian Rocket Artillery trucks with an early game 222 Halftrack. The anti-vehicular power of it's upgrade is potent against Obseravation Points and light artillery units. The light scout car that the Russians get is not like this however. It does not evolve very well and requires passengers to be effective. I would take a look at that unit. Give it an option into the mid game.
In short, I feel like the early game could be improved. The crux of the issue is that the early game is very short and the units that emerge from tier 1 buildings do not scale well at all. The early game could be extended or the units could be made more versatile with upgrades or abilities to make them more valuable as you move up. The only units that tend to scale well out of tier 1 are mortars, snipers and AT guns.
The Late Game
There were a few points I wanted to touch on here.
First of all, I feel like Russian teching is very limiting. The high fuel cost of units from Tier 3 and Tier 4 combined with the high fuel costs of the buildings themselves creates a situation where Russians tend to be locked into two buildings for the entire game.
Let's look at Wehrmacht costs, by tier and building.
- Infantrie Kompanie: 80m, 10fuel
- Escalate to Battle Phase 2: 200m, 25fuel / Lechtie Mechanized Kompanie: 120m, 15fuel
- Escalate to Battle Phase 3: 200m, 35fuel / Support Armor Korps: 160m, 25 fuel
- Escalate to Battle Phase 4: 200m, 50fuel / Heavy Panzer Korps: 160m, 30 fuel
It takes a total of 190 fuel to access every unit as Wehrmacht.Now Russians:
- Special Rifle Command: 200m, 40 fuel
- Support Weapon Kampaneya: 240m, 50 fuel
- Tankoviy Battalion Command: 275m, 90 fuel
- Mechanized Armor Kampaneya: 275m, 90 fuel
It takes a total of 270 fuel to access every unit as Russians.Russians have a very marginal bonus to fast teching:
A rush from tier 1 to tier 4 as Russians and Germans? Russians: 40+90 = 130. Germans: 10+25+35+50+30 = 150.
I don't think that really offsets the high costs of teching as Russians though. I feel like backteching with the Russians is too prohibitive. You're trading more than an entire tank for the ability to build a different one. Russian AT needs are thinly stretched as is.
I would propose a discount for "backteching" for Russians. Russian buildings are divided into two tiers, tier 1+2, and tier 3+4. If you already have a building from tier 1+2, make the remaining building cheaper. As an example, if I build the Support Weapon Kampenya as my first building I would then get a discount on a Special Rifle Command if I wanted to build that afterwards.
This would not change the relative speed of when a T-34/76 can come out, but would allow you to switch over into SU-85s without spending the full 90 fuel.
I don't want to significantly "Homogenize" the two sides together with perfectly similar tech trees, but I do feel that Russians are limited too harshly now.
I'm not very informed on Relic's comings and goings, but did a significant number of the COH devs leave after it was released? Because DOW2's MP was pretty awful, and while the SP was pretty good, that game never really lived up to the hype. And now reading your all's opinion of COH2 it sounds like the current devs have no idea what made the first game enjoyable.
Hopefully Relic will take all the feedback into consideration and revamp the game before June. Otherwise, I'd prefer to wait for a STEAM sale.