To be honest I've watched two streamers and three games total in a moment of unholy boredom. Again, why would I watch something so terrible, just to prove something to this rabble?
You should watch yourself though, all this talk about boring sex and little boys' asses and people are going to start drawing connections. |
I can hardly be called an idiot for not spending money on the game. |
I'm pretty explicit that I don't actually know that much about Company of Heroes 3. I consider this generally to be a good thing - if you leave garbage out in the summer sun for a while and smell its rank stench, your first reaction should not be to open the bin and scrounge around for exactly what's rotten. |
I never said Company of Heroes 3 lacks variety, I just said it was a shit game and that from the little I've watched of it on the newest patches, it's boring and I don't see people varying their strategies much or using certain units. |
Name few viable diverse strategies, without mentioning 0CP call-in units and "strategies" where difference is 1 unit. You can skip soviets tho, because they at least have some sort of different options with cons\penals\clowncar and so on. What about others?
Random goofs vs 4 digit rank wont cut it, for oblivious reasons.
Well just as an example, if I'm playing OKW I can go 2 Sturmpioneers and either a Volksgrenadier or a Kubelwagen instead of just spamming Volksgrenadiers, if I use Elite Armour I can supplement this with a 221 which is particularly useful against Maxim spam. From there I can feasibly focus on a strong mid-game by building the medic and repair trucks, relying on closing the game out with light vehicles (Puma + HVAP is a reliable medium tank killer) and support weapons (MG34, Raketen), or I can rush the flak truck and start pumping out Obersoldaten and saving for either a Panzer IV or Panther depending on the situation, which I then also have the luxury of supplementing with a Sturmtiger if I need a heavy breakthrough unit.
Or, if I play Brits, I could spam Infantry Sections and go for Bolster early (boring), or I could build Sappers and a Universal Carrier, supplement that with a Vickers or Sniper (more applicable to OKW), use the Assault Officer to fill any infantry gaps, mainline Commandos, and use the fuel savings to get an early AEC or Comet, again, depending on the situation.
So there's several branching paths I can take the game down in both cases. |
I'm just gonna jump in here and point out the obvious, with the exception of the polsten, all these units you mentioned, are viable and decent to strong. SSF,stosstruppen,paths are all meta viable picks that get used constantly, the Flak has superceeded the 8rad for a variety of reasons, footguards are crazy good with indian arty.
Now this is in the context of 1v1. But to claim coh2 has variety at the competitive level is kind of hilarious to me. Coh2 has always, for good or bad, been one of the least varied competitive games ever. You had one meta, one build 9/10 times, and then it's pure execution.
Maybe at the highest competitive level, yes, players tend to default to the strongest available options. But again, it's like that in any game, especially one that's been around as long as Company of Heroes 2. I wasn't talking about whether or not someone could win whatever tournament with whatever strategy they wanted, I don't watch those games and I frankly don't care about what they do. I was talking about whether or not I can start an automatched 1v1 and use a diverse array of strategies with a reasonable chance of victory. This is, indeed, possible.
As for Company of Heroes 3, I'm sure that down the line it would get to the same place Company of Heroes 2 is currently at in regards to the meta. Nobody fucking plays it though and we'll probably never know once Relic shuts down! |
If they were smart they would do something new with both loiters and off-map abilities. Plane-based strikes would ideally be tied to an actual plane unit you'd have to buy - it would be housed off-map, you wouldn't have direct control over it and you would still have to call in the ability the same way you do now but it would be less of a munitions cost and cooldown with the obvious risk of your plane getting shot down by AA and having to buy another. Add in plane veterancy and you can have it do things like reduce scatter or longer loiters. You could even have air superiority fighters as buildable units, they could do a basic strafing run or an air patrol to take out enemy planes.
If I were Relic and I had an ounce of ambition in me, I'd look to some of the few innovations the RTS genre has seen in the past few years and start thinking about how rote features of the game could be made more interesting or more controllable from the user. Ideally I was thinking a "home base", kind of like Age of Empires III's Home City, where you have pre-selected skills or upgrades in concert with the battlegroups/doctrines you pick, where all your off-maps come from. You'd need to buy planes/off-map strike capabilities each match, and your opponent could get the appropriate skills for counterplay, like counterbattery fire to shut down your off-map artillery or something like that. Of course, that's an half-formed idea, but I'd personally rather see Relic shoot for the moon than not. Alas, even if they did, judging from the current offerings it would be a mediocre moonshot regardless. |
Not like Iron Harvest in every aspect, like an amateur product in every aspect. |
I don't think it's necessarily just the different engine. I compared it to Iron Harvest because that was an RTS made by people who had never made an RTS before, imitating Company of Heroes. This game feels the same - in pretty much every aspect. |
So for Company of Heroes 3 units that I never see people using, there are Snipers (for both US Forces and Wehrmacht), Pathfinders, SSFs, Nebelwerfers, the Flakvierling Halftrack, the Polsten 20mm Truck, the Grant, Foot Guards, Stosstruppen... and that's just off the top of my head. Mind you, that's not exactly from the largest sample size since I don't spend a ton of time watching a game that I find to be extraordinarily boring.
For Company of Heroes 2 the only unit I don't see anyone using, ever, is probably the IR Halftrack, and that's pretty much it. I see basically every other unit in the game with fairly regular frequency. Yes, the meta is stale, that's what happens when the game hasn't been updated or balanced in a while. It's also, as I said, far from perfect. However, I find that I have a significant leeway in deviating from the "norm" without overly-compromising my chances of victory.
As for the point about dynamism, that's purely on Company of Heroes 3's infantry combat being flat and boring. Early-game lethality isn't a necessary component, but it's one of many little cuts that have bled it dry, along with the ill-conceived height differential, the prevalence of global upgrades and just a general lack of "feel" to the units. Something about the way infantry operate in this game feels closer to Iron Harvest than a Company of Heroes game. |