Steppes is rough for cutting off. You either have to charge the middle hill from one of the sides or try to backcap in the negative cover river/next to their base... I have achieved cutting off the southern fuel but never for very long and it's natural island defenses make it hard to shake defenders out of it if they use the river.
The top is difficult to do good cutoffs for because of the hedgerows and you're probably only cutting off one munitions point anyways.
Does the VP count as owning that zone now? I suppose it does...
So wait are there now dedicated fuel and munitions points? Originally I don't remember those being there, just all generic points you could put depots on.
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
So wait are there now dedicated fuel and munitions points? Originally I don't remember those being there, just all generic points you could put depots on.
Yupp, there are fuel and munitions points. Then you can basically build caches on strategical points to make extra fuel or munition points.
Edit: It's like CoH except no high and low points, and you can build obs points on strategical and not mun/fuel. It weirdly spreads out the value of sectors instead of making focused objectives like CoH. Yet to see if I like it, although I don't like the doublecache:ing of opels.
Also unlike CoH, regular strategic points also give you fuel and munitions (but no manpower) and your base sector gives you all three (in CoH it gave no munis).
The system is pretty horrible for a few reasons. Probably the worst is that manpower income is flat - this removes one of the most interesting things about CoH (having the resources out on the field to fight over) and makes it annoying to win against a worse player, because even if you decap them 100% or cut them off from all their points, they're still going to build plenty of units, and in fact they'll build more units than you because as a bad player they'll lose squads and thus avoid the weird upkeep system that overly punishes competent players.
The next issue is that by removing the variegated worth attached to capture points and by giving normal strat points fuel and muni income, the game homogenizes the map and greatly reduces strategies that players can pursue and also reduces reasons to fight over anything except VPs. In CoH you could rush for the high fuels to fast tech or rush for the high munis and go for grenades or use lots of offmap artillery or strafing runs or spam flamers or mines or you could focus on just playing normally. At the same time you had to keep track of whether your opponent was doing any of this and decide how much effort you wanted to put in to stopping them. More generally, higher points were more important and thus provided good flashpoints for conflict, and where and when you decided to decap was dictated by, among tons of other variables, the worth of each point. That's all gone. The game gets much less strategically interesting with the new system.
The next problem is that to compensate for this, Relic changed it so that you build OPs on strategic points only, but these OPs are fuel or muni OPs which increase your income. In theory this brings back some (but nowhere near all) of the strategy because you could choose whether to fast tech or bank munis or whatever. (Although now fast teching is basically your only option because it's not like you have much else to spend fuel on.) This introduces much bigger problems, though: HQ sectors always have strat points close by, in fact they typically have a connected strat point or multiple strat points, meaning you can drop easy defensible OPs that are immune to cutoffs and which are much harder for your opponent to scout and to counter especially in the early game. This removes the interesting "resources contested on the field" mechanic and everything that flows from that (cutoffs, fights over things other than VPs and buildings, decaps as a main driving force behind infantry positioning and mines and other defenses) and reduces in importance the "figure out what your opponent is doing by reading their troop movements" mechanic.
Another problem is that because of the way the resources work now, there are fewer points on the map, reducing the map complexity in terms of interesting cutoffs that you can do and also leveling the field in terms of what points to fight over. In CoH you could trade a high for a high or a medium for a medium or a low for a low and maintain parity, but if your opponent went for, say, your high fuel, you'd have to grab their high fuel or protect yours if you want to stay even. In CoH 2 you can take any fucking fuel you want and maintain parity, meaning you take the safest fuel (or defend yours), meaning there's in principal no reason for players not to just avoid conflicts that they aren't happy to get into. You don't get interesting strategic outcomes where you can force your opponent to take an income hit, defend their point, or attack a specific point because your ability to drive their decisions by, for instance, decapping a fuel is limited just to making them find some sort of fuel somewhere else, wherever they can get it.
If you're asking yourself "why in the world would Relic do this," their stated reason is that the old system is "punitive," namely, if you are worse than the other player, they can use the system to win. This new system makes things much easier on people who suck. I think they have indeed accomplished this: even if you lose all your resource points, your income is going to be high enough to let you keep pumping out squads so you can feel like you still have a chance, even though you have no chance and would realize this if you didn't suck.
Also, update from Relic about some stuff, including a reveal of their single player/coop mode and a promise to periodically release free multiplayer maps. Although the exact wording is that "Relic will to continue its tradition of introducing new and free multiplayer maps at regular intervals" and I'm not so sure what they did for CoH counts as a "tradition" because we never really got new maps except when they added some community made maps.
CoH has upkeep as well though. I know the system is different and you can surely elaborate why you prefer the old system, but both games has a comeback mechanic where the underdog gets more manpower. It's only a question of how much or when this happens, and the mechanic at its base is sound because of how unit preservation works. Without a mechanic like this getting on the backfoot early would be disastrous because someone with only 1 unit more will inflict more casualties in any given firefight and snowball because there's not really anything you can do to increase your manpower income over your opponent who's ahead.
I agree with the new resources however, I don't like how there aren't more important areas of the map to fight about anymore and how you can sit cozy with your nearest strategical points with a lot of resources coming in (So stupid that 1v1 map in CoH with high fuel next to your base).
The game is still in its infancy though and no one has fleshed out much yet, in fact it hasn't even come out.
Edit: If you lose all your resource points your income isn't going to be shit. Unless you're only counting manpower, in which case it's exactly like CoH. You lose all your stuff your manpower is gonna shoot through the roof and it's probably not going to save you anyway...
Upkeep in CoH scales uniformly with population, so although having a larger army reduces your MP income, it does so gradually (it's actually more complicated - it's on a per unit basis - but that is the result). In CoH 2 there is a sharp cutoff at 25 pop and above that you start getting nailed with extreme MP upkeep, which is a problem not because it's so big (although it is kind of big) but because you can't alleviate it by capping points the way you could in CoH. So, a good player in CoH could get around upkeep by being good. A good player in CoH 2 is fucked. A player getting reamed will always be under the 25 pop cap break and thus feel zero upkeep effects (unlike a player getting reamed in CoH, who would feel appropriate upkeep effects) and the player doing the reaming will be paying out the ass for upkeep.
If you're getting reamed you're going to lose. And upkeep also scales uniformly with population in CoH2 between 25-75 pop. So you're getting free pop to 25 right, this has implications for early fights (if you're winning hard with only 3 squads you're still not feeling any upkeep at all even if you're ahead) but a guy with 50 pop vs someone with 20 it's pretty much like CoH. A linear scale of upkeep cost. Mind you if you're actually skilled and you're 30 pop up you're not going to lose because "the other guy gets 80 more manpower than you a minute", if you have twice the army you can smack him into the ground and pretty much win. Even in CoH2 with opels and caches.
You argue that it screws "good players" because someone with 20 pop doesn't get hit by upkeep. Well the thing is the guy with 50 isn't getting hit by upkeep for his first 20 pop either. The only difference from CoH is raw numbers, how much upkeep are we talking about, do we want more or less upkeep for the ahead/behind player relatively and to discuss this we need raw numbers...
Though you can't tell me a "great player" can offset big upkeep with strategical points, you need four of them to upkeep one rifle squad. A strategical point in CoH gives you one rifleman reinforce in what, seven minutes? So if you're up 4 strategical points from your enemy CoH1 would give you 120 manpower in a typical complete game, and that'd be if you held 4 above your opponent every second of a 20 minute game.
Of course if you're getting reamed your going to lose. CoH has never been great about translating this into an actual loss but at least in the first game if you shut someone down by capping everything, they'd be super fucked and the VPs would tick down. In CoH 2 they'll have enough income to periodically break out and mount insufficiently powerful offensives, dragging the game out needlessly. This is precisely why the resource/upkeep system was changed: so that people who lose would lose less badly.
Winning hard in early fights is never going to be the sort of ultimate win that should finish the game because in early fights with 3 squads, especially if you're actually fighting, there's no way you can ever cap the map. I'm talking about mid game when the fight is over for a worse player but the game drags on. The reason the linear scale in CoH 2 isn't like the linear scale in CoH is because it's far more punitive. Your MP drops precipitously and you can't fix that by capping the map. I never said this would make you lose, only that it makes the game worse (because the new system sucks) and that it helps shitty players by making them feel like they have a chance.
Rifle squads have pretty crazy upkeep, which make them an interesting example: the way to offset this in CoH wasn't just to cap points but also to build a supply yard and even to buy supply yard upgrades - that was a way to turn map dominance into game dominance. You of course can't do anything like this in CoH 2. The Wehrmacht had lower unit sizes and thus lower upkeep costs, plus a teching path that lowered squad sizes (5 man volks to 4 man grens/stormtroopers, even down to 3 man KCH if you wanted). In CoH 2 Russian squads are all six dudes basically and German squads are all 4 dudes.
Strategic point income wasn't big but it wasn't worthless - combined with the way upkeep worked, a great player had an easier time smashing the opponent in CoH than in CoH 2.
So the issue is the scale, not the actual mechanic. Because you'd run into the same thing in CoH, you're just saying the upkeep is higher in this game? Which I'm sure it is, I don't know the numbers except it caps at 200 in CoH2.
What Tycho is explaining is called "skill gap compression". CoH2 tries to compress the skill gap between elite, regular and bad players. CoD did the same (in a much bigger scale), and supposedly that's one of the reasons for its success.
Absolutely, I'm just discussing CoH2 versus CoH. What the upkeep system in 2 does is basically what the upkeep system in 1 does. It might be more of it though. In general CoH has always had big comebacks mostly because of how all your resources are on the field. Lose your army to an off-map and you're back on square one.
Also germans are ridiculous, fighting poor players who have a chance because of *better everything* is getting somewhat tedious. I hope they have balance changes coming up for release. They even have vastly superior doctrines with huge off-maps (stuka bombing wtf, doesn't even have to hit close to the squad to instagib and the designer making it so it's only a local sound is out of his mind).
Edit: I had a player rush 2 stugs into my waiting spread out 3 SU tank destroyers with conscript support. Given one of my SU's was badly hurt but I had the flanks and got at least 1 at grenade off. Guess who won.
What Tycho is explaining is called "skill gap compression". CoH2 tries to compress the skill gap between elite, regular and bad players. CoD did the same (in a much bigger scale), and supposedly that's one of the reasons for its success.
And also why CoD's never really had an e-sports presence on the same level of something like Starcraft or Counter-Strike (at least not as far as I remember seeing, maybe I'm just biased in my perspective here since I mainly game on PC).
Regardless, there's always going to be a balancing act going on between having enough high skill requirement mechanics in play to separate out the high tier players, and not making the game feel needlessly complicated to everyone else. This is basically one of the (if not the ) major reasons that I never got into Starcraft. They built it purely around e-sports, with mechanics put that could have easily been easily re-worked or automated, but then that would have had the hardcore community seriously complaining (and they were already complaining about Multiple Building Select and Smart Casting "killing the skill").
Not that I'm saying one way or the other on CoH 2 and its changes, I haven't played it.
Huh, this is weird. I'm attempting to play the game, but it's saying 'Failed to start game (missing executable)'
Verifying integrity of game cache doesn't resolve anything.
When I look at the directory in which the game should be, there's almost nothing there. Just a few text files and directories.
e: I tried Deleting Local Content. It seems like, for whatever reason, the servers are _actually_ serving around 98 MB of mostly junk. Just a bunch of folders with placeholder.txt in them.
What Tycho is explaining is called "skill gap compression". CoH2 tries to compress the skill gap between elite, regular and bad players. CoD did the same (in a much bigger scale), and supposedly that's one of the reasons for its success.
And also why CoD's never really had an e-sports presence on the same level of something like Starcraft or Counter-Strike (at least not as far as I remember seeing, maybe I'm just biased in my perspective here since I mainly game on PC).
Regardless, there's always going to be a balancing act going on between having enough high skill requirement mechanics in play to separate out the high tier players, and not making the game feel needlessly complicated to everyone else. This is basically one of the (if not the ) major reasons that I never got into Starcraft. They built it purely around e-sports, with mechanics put that could have easily been easily re-worked or automated, but then that would have had the hardcore community seriously complaining (and they were already complaining about Multiple Building Select and Smart Casting "killing the skill").
Not that I'm saying one way or the other on CoH 2 and its changes, I haven't played it.
Complexity, depth and skill ceilings are all different things though but maybe we shouldn't get too heavily into that. I get the gist of what you're saying.
Played some CoH1 New Steam Version today with the beta down.
Man.
CoH2 does feel worse. Today, I was using cover with my troops, their guns had lethality at multiple ranges and every fight wasn't based on who threw a grenade first...!
The skill inputs for CoH1 just feel higher. Skill inputs being measures of decision making, APM, etc: ways to get an advantage over your opponent. More choices, more tech options, more cover, more units...
I don't feel like CoH2 is lacking in skill inputs. I won ~99% of my games with Germans and 90% of my games with Russians. So I felt like I was in control of my games... and that the matchmaker was terrible... but there's a stark difference between the two. I knew this difference existed... but it's disappointing to feel such a difference in my first game back.
There are so many things that changed between CoH1 and CoH2 that I did like: Grid-based hotkeys for all units, the ability to reverse tanks with a button press rather than about 500 spam clicks, less cheesy bullshit (or perhaps less embraced), there were small things that I instantly started cursing (I must have wasted 200 munitions on having to relearn hotkeys alone).
Obviously the comparison is not fair in terms of scope. CoH1 has several expansions behind it and one would expect it never to have the same number of doctrine choices, units, tech choices...
Bleh. I never really disagreed with the differences but it was uncomfortable to see them in game. Hopefully they take some of these criticisms to heart. I don't know how they can change things like the visuals to be more distinct before release in ~55 days... but the feel of the game could and should change for the better.
None of the issues in Company of Heroes 2 seem fundamental to the game at all. I feel like that this is really a matter of tweaking: Creating more interesting maps, changing up the point capture system, adjusting the numbers on some units, that sort of thing.
One thing that surprised me in a CoH1 game -- I brought two Pioneer squads right up to an American Engineer and killed him within a few seconds. I was stunned: Pio squads in CoH2 would've taken ages to kill a Russian Combat Engineer squad.
What Tycho is explaining is called "skill gap compression". CoH2 tries to compress the skill gap between elite, regular and bad players. CoD did the same (in a much bigger scale), and supposedly that's one of the reasons for its success.
And also why CoD's never really had an e-sports presence on the same level of something like Starcraft or Counter-Strike (at least not as far as I remember seeing, maybe I'm just biased in my perspective here since I mainly game on PC).
Regardless, there's always going to be a balancing act going on between having enough high skill requirement mechanics in play to separate out the high tier players, and not making the game feel needlessly complicated to everyone else. This is basically one of the (if not the ) major reasons that I never got into Starcraft. They built it purely around e-sports, with mechanics put that could have easily been easily re-worked or automated, but then that would have had the hardcore community seriously complaining (and they were already complaining about Multiple Building Select and Smart Casting "killing the skill").
Not that I'm saying one way or the other on CoH 2 and its changes, I haven't played it.
Complexity, depth and skill ceilings are all different things though but maybe we shouldn't get too heavily into that. I get the gist of what you're saying.
Different, I agree (which is one of my major points of contention with Starcraft 2), but they can often be inter-related depending on how the designs work.
I had a weird 1v1 in CoH1 just a few minutes ago. Left a bad taste in my mouth.
So I was doing quite well for awhile, i had control of most of the map and held it and the vps for long enough to get him down to about 140 VPs. Each attack he made I thwarted and killed off atleast some of hits units, sometimes a squad kill ect. I took losses but not as bad as him, and no squad losses. Then after abit of this he suddenly seemed to have straight up more dudes than me at every turn. Then a tiger hit. Then like 3 squads of Knights Cross. The game dragged on for awhile, he knocked out some builds in my base, but I had ranger squads and was able ot knock out his first Tiger and kill of some MGs and regular gren squads with my rangers, a rifle squad, and my howie I had just setup. So it looked like I was going to be fine, started recapturing territory, and then he got another Tiger and even more knights cross. I somehow stayed alive by a thread for awhile but he just kept throwing tons of units into my base and that was that.
I don't quite get it - I had map control for the majority of the game, atleast I thought. It seemed quite even until suddenly it was like he had all the money in the world, and I had none. Wish I had saved the replay but I went right into another auto match and it overwrote it. Oh well.
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
You might've been winning because your opponent was floating resources for some reason, and then they spent the floated resources on the squads all at once.
Yeah that's how I felt - it was like he suddenly had TONS of manpower, like more than he should have. I'm very reluctant to say anyone is cheating, and I know I'm not that great of a player - but generally in CoH I can say "oh I lost because of this, let me work on that next game". Not really this game. Only thing I can figure is that I my poor ranger squads did start to take a beating once the knights cross hit and they are 45 mp each guy, so it was a huge drain on my manpower. Either way I'm not entirely sure how he got the first tiger and knights cross in the first place because it seemed like he was fielding a decent force of mg teams and grenadiers. I could be wrong though - i mean maybe I just got so out played it seemed like I was winning when I had no chance from the start? I'm sure that's what Tycho would say about my play, lol. Oh well - I'm just going to keep trying to improve. If it was cheating for some reason, it's not like it matters either way really.
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
Was this CoH 1 - New Steam Version of CoH 1 classic? If it was classic the other person may well have been cheating. That place is a miserable den of hacks right now (although I suspect maphacks are the popular ones).
As for "I'm sure that's what Tycho would say," I don't just assume everyone sucks at the game and that you got outplayed. If we had the replay we could figure it out but until then it's a mystery.
Yeah it was the new steam version of coh1. So there really are hacks out for that? Wow I thought steam's vac prevented stuff like that.
As to the other thing I was mostly joking - sorry if that rubbed you the wrong way, wasn't my intent. I do really wish I had the replay, but I felt kinda mad / robbed of victory after that match and sought out another automatch immediately to redeem myself lol. Won that one but it was boring, the guy couldnt break my position and never really tried a solid flank. I honestly enjoyed the other match much more until he suddenly seemed to have way more doods than me.
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
There's nothing that prevent all possible hacks, and the more client based it is the more hackable it is. However a manpower cheat sounds very overt, I've never even heard of that happening in any of these games. He probably floated a lot of manpower (poor players does this), and when he unlocked tigers he rushed you down and then came the german lategame. Cheats are more commonly map stuff...
Though I don't have the replay, and I didn't see the game! So obviously I can't tell you what happened.
Yeah the more I think about it the more I think thats what happened. After that I was "trapped" by my over reliance on rangers and their casualties drained my man power.
*Edit - Oh! I'm such a noob, ugh. He probably just used Resource Blitz, duh. I forgot it existed. Man I am no where near as good at this game as I was in 2008. Sigh.
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Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
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Does the VP count as owning that zone now? I suppose it does...
Yupp, there are fuel and munitions points. Then you can basically build caches on strategical points to make extra fuel or munition points.
Edit: It's like CoH except no high and low points, and you can build obs points on strategical and not mun/fuel. It weirdly spreads out the value of sectors instead of making focused objectives like CoH. Yet to see if I like it, although I don't like the doublecache:ing of opels.
The system is pretty horrible for a few reasons. Probably the worst is that manpower income is flat - this removes one of the most interesting things about CoH (having the resources out on the field to fight over) and makes it annoying to win against a worse player, because even if you decap them 100% or cut them off from all their points, they're still going to build plenty of units, and in fact they'll build more units than you because as a bad player they'll lose squads and thus avoid the weird upkeep system that overly punishes competent players.
The next issue is that by removing the variegated worth attached to capture points and by giving normal strat points fuel and muni income, the game homogenizes the map and greatly reduces strategies that players can pursue and also reduces reasons to fight over anything except VPs. In CoH you could rush for the high fuels to fast tech or rush for the high munis and go for grenades or use lots of offmap artillery or strafing runs or spam flamers or mines or you could focus on just playing normally. At the same time you had to keep track of whether your opponent was doing any of this and decide how much effort you wanted to put in to stopping them. More generally, higher points were more important and thus provided good flashpoints for conflict, and where and when you decided to decap was dictated by, among tons of other variables, the worth of each point. That's all gone. The game gets much less strategically interesting with the new system.
The next problem is that to compensate for this, Relic changed it so that you build OPs on strategic points only, but these OPs are fuel or muni OPs which increase your income. In theory this brings back some (but nowhere near all) of the strategy because you could choose whether to fast tech or bank munis or whatever. (Although now fast teching is basically your only option because it's not like you have much else to spend fuel on.) This introduces much bigger problems, though: HQ sectors always have strat points close by, in fact they typically have a connected strat point or multiple strat points, meaning you can drop easy defensible OPs that are immune to cutoffs and which are much harder for your opponent to scout and to counter especially in the early game. This removes the interesting "resources contested on the field" mechanic and everything that flows from that (cutoffs, fights over things other than VPs and buildings, decaps as a main driving force behind infantry positioning and mines and other defenses) and reduces in importance the "figure out what your opponent is doing by reading their troop movements" mechanic.
Another problem is that because of the way the resources work now, there are fewer points on the map, reducing the map complexity in terms of interesting cutoffs that you can do and also leveling the field in terms of what points to fight over. In CoH you could trade a high for a high or a medium for a medium or a low for a low and maintain parity, but if your opponent went for, say, your high fuel, you'd have to grab their high fuel or protect yours if you want to stay even. In CoH 2 you can take any fucking fuel you want and maintain parity, meaning you take the safest fuel (or defend yours), meaning there's in principal no reason for players not to just avoid conflicts that they aren't happy to get into. You don't get interesting strategic outcomes where you can force your opponent to take an income hit, defend their point, or attack a specific point because your ability to drive their decisions by, for instance, decapping a fuel is limited just to making them find some sort of fuel somewhere else, wherever they can get it.
If you're asking yourself "why in the world would Relic do this," their stated reason is that the old system is "punitive," namely, if you are worse than the other player, they can use the system to win. This new system makes things much easier on people who suck. I think they have indeed accomplished this: even if you lose all your resource points, your income is going to be high enough to let you keep pumping out squads so you can feel like you still have a chance, even though you have no chance and would realize this if you didn't suck.
I agree with the new resources however, I don't like how there aren't more important areas of the map to fight about anymore and how you can sit cozy with your nearest strategical points with a lot of resources coming in (So stupid that 1v1 map in CoH with high fuel next to your base).
The game is still in its infancy though and no one has fleshed out much yet, in fact it hasn't even come out.
Edit: If you lose all your resource points your income isn't going to be shit. Unless you're only counting manpower, in which case it's exactly like CoH. You lose all your stuff your manpower is gonna shoot through the roof and it's probably not going to save you anyway...
You argue that it screws "good players" because someone with 20 pop doesn't get hit by upkeep. Well the thing is the guy with 50 isn't getting hit by upkeep for his first 20 pop either. The only difference from CoH is raw numbers, how much upkeep are we talking about, do we want more or less upkeep for the ahead/behind player relatively and to discuss this we need raw numbers...
Though you can't tell me a "great player" can offset big upkeep with strategical points, you need four of them to upkeep one rifle squad. A strategical point in CoH gives you one rifleman reinforce in what, seven minutes? So if you're up 4 strategical points from your enemy CoH1 would give you 120 manpower in a typical complete game, and that'd be if you held 4 above your opponent every second of a 20 minute game.
Winning hard in early fights is never going to be the sort of ultimate win that should finish the game because in early fights with 3 squads, especially if you're actually fighting, there's no way you can ever cap the map. I'm talking about mid game when the fight is over for a worse player but the game drags on. The reason the linear scale in CoH 2 isn't like the linear scale in CoH is because it's far more punitive. Your MP drops precipitously and you can't fix that by capping the map. I never said this would make you lose, only that it makes the game worse (because the new system sucks) and that it helps shitty players by making them feel like they have a chance.
Rifle squads have pretty crazy upkeep, which make them an interesting example: the way to offset this in CoH wasn't just to cap points but also to build a supply yard and even to buy supply yard upgrades - that was a way to turn map dominance into game dominance. You of course can't do anything like this in CoH 2. The Wehrmacht had lower unit sizes and thus lower upkeep costs, plus a teching path that lowered squad sizes (5 man volks to 4 man grens/stormtroopers, even down to 3 man KCH if you wanted). In CoH 2 Russian squads are all six dudes basically and German squads are all 4 dudes.
Strategic point income wasn't big but it wasn't worthless - combined with the way upkeep worked, a great player had an easier time smashing the opponent in CoH than in CoH 2.
Also germans are ridiculous, fighting poor players who have a chance because of *better everything* is getting somewhat tedious. I hope they have balance changes coming up for release. They even have vastly superior doctrines with huge off-maps (stuka bombing wtf, doesn't even have to hit close to the squad to instagib and the designer making it so it's only a local sound is out of his mind).
Edit: I had a player rush 2 stugs into my waiting spread out 3 SU tank destroyers with conscript support. Given one of my SU's was badly hurt but I had the flanks and got at least 1 at grenade off. Guess who won.
And also why CoD's never really had an e-sports presence on the same level of something like Starcraft or Counter-Strike (at least not as far as I remember seeing, maybe I'm just biased in my perspective here since I mainly game on PC).
Regardless, there's always going to be a balancing act going on between having enough high skill requirement mechanics in play to separate out the high tier players, and not making the game feel needlessly complicated to everyone else. This is basically one of the (if not the ) major reasons that I never got into Starcraft. They built it purely around e-sports, with mechanics put that could have easily been easily re-worked or automated, but then that would have had the hardcore community seriously complaining (and they were already complaining about Multiple Building Select and Smart Casting "killing the skill").
Not that I'm saying one way or the other on CoH 2 and its changes, I haven't played it.
Verifying integrity of game cache doesn't resolve anything.
When I look at the directory in which the game should be, there's almost nothing there. Just a few text files and directories.
e: I tried Deleting Local Content. It seems like, for whatever reason, the servers are _actually_ serving around 98 MB of mostly junk. Just a bunch of folders with placeholder.txt in them.
Complexity, depth and skill ceilings are all different things though but maybe we shouldn't get too heavily into that. I get the gist of what you're saying.
Man.
CoH2 does feel worse. Today, I was using cover with my troops, their guns had lethality at multiple ranges and every fight wasn't based on who threw a grenade first...!
The skill inputs for CoH1 just feel higher. Skill inputs being measures of decision making, APM, etc: ways to get an advantage over your opponent. More choices, more tech options, more cover, more units...
I don't feel like CoH2 is lacking in skill inputs. I won ~99% of my games with Germans and 90% of my games with Russians. So I felt like I was in control of my games... and that the matchmaker was terrible... but there's a stark difference between the two. I knew this difference existed... but it's disappointing to feel such a difference in my first game back.
There are so many things that changed between CoH1 and CoH2 that I did like: Grid-based hotkeys for all units, the ability to reverse tanks with a button press rather than about 500 spam clicks, less cheesy bullshit (or perhaps less embraced), there were small things that I instantly started cursing (I must have wasted 200 munitions on having to relearn hotkeys alone).
Obviously the comparison is not fair in terms of scope. CoH1 has several expansions behind it and one would expect it never to have the same number of doctrine choices, units, tech choices...
Bleh. I never really disagreed with the differences but it was uncomfortable to see them in game. Hopefully they take some of these criticisms to heart. I don't know how they can change things like the visuals to be more distinct before release in ~55 days... but the feel of the game could and should change for the better.
One thing that surprised me in a CoH1 game -- I brought two Pioneer squads right up to an American Engineer and killed him within a few seconds. I was stunned: Pio squads in CoH2 would've taken ages to kill a Russian Combat Engineer squad.
Different, I agree (which is one of my major points of contention with Starcraft 2), but they can often be inter-related depending on how the designs work.
So I was doing quite well for awhile, i had control of most of the map and held it and the vps for long enough to get him down to about 140 VPs. Each attack he made I thwarted and killed off atleast some of hits units, sometimes a squad kill ect. I took losses but not as bad as him, and no squad losses. Then after abit of this he suddenly seemed to have straight up more dudes than me at every turn. Then a tiger hit. Then like 3 squads of Knights Cross. The game dragged on for awhile, he knocked out some builds in my base, but I had ranger squads and was able ot knock out his first Tiger and kill of some MGs and regular gren squads with my rangers, a rifle squad, and my howie I had just setup. So it looked like I was going to be fine, started recapturing territory, and then he got another Tiger and even more knights cross. I somehow stayed alive by a thread for awhile but he just kept throwing tons of units into my base and that was that.
I don't quite get it - I had map control for the majority of the game, atleast I thought. It seemed quite even until suddenly it was like he had all the money in the world, and I had none.
As for "I'm sure that's what Tycho would say," I don't just assume everyone sucks at the game and that you got outplayed. If we had the replay we could figure it out but until then it's a mystery.
As to the other thing I was mostly joking - sorry if that rubbed you the wrong way, wasn't my intent. I do really wish I had the replay, but I felt kinda mad / robbed of victory after that match and sought out another automatch immediately to redeem myself lol. Won that one but it was boring, the guy couldnt break my position and never really tried a solid flank. I honestly enjoyed the other match much more until he suddenly seemed to have way more doods than me.
Though I don't have the replay, and I didn't see the game! So obviously I can't tell you what happened.
*Edit - Oh! I'm such a noob, ugh. He probably just used Resource Blitz, duh. I forgot it existed. Man I am no where near as good at this game as I was in 2008. Sigh.
I hate you so much.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
http://www.greenmangaming.com/s/ca/en/pc/games/strategy/company-heroes-2/#description