First hands on Company of Heroes 2 - The Battle of Moscow

The second Pre-Alpha demo shown by Relic was a 2v2 Skirmish, where you control the Russian faction in the bottom right hand corner of a large snowy map, complete with blizzards and a wide frozen river. The objective of the demo is to show off the feel and tonality of Company of Heroes 2, with its new True Sight system, Cold Tech, and Essence 3.0 Engine. James McDermott, Associate Producer at Relic, made it clear that this is a very early test build of the game, and many aspects are subject to change. The resource system, for example, was something entirely new and still in an early testing phase.

Your Russian partner, as well as the German enemy team, is controlled by the AI. It’s a Victory Point contest, with one VP on your own side of the river, and two VPs on the other side of the river. You start with some builders, and must construct base buildings to create units. There are four tech structures for the Russians; Force Recon, Shooting Range, Factory, and Large Factory. The first two structures could be built right away, while the last two required significant fuel, and that one of the first two structures had already been built. I frantically tried to scribble down the tiers and units, but I surely missed a few. For example, I have read in other reviews that a Russian officer and conscripts were available, but I never built them. I was too busy trying to figure out how to tech to Katyusha!

Red Army Units in the demo

The units available to me, to the best of my recollection, were as follows:

HQ:

• Combat Engineers
  
• Conscripts

Force Recon:

• M3A1 Scout Vehicle
  
• Sniper Squad

Shooting Range:

• Mortar Squad
  
• Heavy Machine Gun Squad
  
• 53k AT Gun

Factory:

• T-70M Light Tank
  
• SU-76M Assault Tank
  
• M5 Halftrack (allows mobile reinforce point, very similar to American HT)
  
• Guards Troops Elite Infantry (Passive unlock from command tree)

Large Factory:

• T-34 Medium Tank (450 MP)
  
• KV-1 Heavy Tank (600 MP)
  
• Katyusha (Passive unlock from command tree)

I’m not quite sure which structure allows you to bring in Conscripts, but the wonderful new idea of these cheap and untrained buggers is that they can “merge” with other units on the field. So say you’ve got a Maxim MG-crew down to 1 or 2 men. You can send your conscripts to reinforce them without having to retreat. You merge the squads, and the extra guys form a new squad, similar to picking up an empty weapon from the field. What a clever way to express the notion that the Russians had volumes of untrained civilians contributing to the war effort.

Russian faction base building and tech

Russian tech structures in Company of Heroes 2 are designed to look like trenches at the front line. Your “engies” dig a hole in the earth, and support the walls and roof with wood slats. When you build a unit, any unit, a yellow progress bar begins on the tier structure. You also see the progress bar on the top right of your screen, near your control groups. When the build is finished, the unit enters from behind your base at your call-in point, as if you have made a radio request for reinforcements from the rear. This is true for all units from all tiers. Units can be rallied on to the battlefield with separate rally points for each structure.

I’m not quite sure why all units appear out of the call-in point. Perhaps their exit structure animation is not yet finished, or perhaps this method appears more realistic? It was a bit frustrating to wait for units to come out of the fog of war on the absolute rear edge of the map before I could select them and put them into control-groups. Most importantly, the possible tactical advantage, achieved by placing your buildings as far forward as possible, is no longer in play. And then there’s the possibility of camping your opponent’s call-in point or putting mines in front of it. A single spawn point is a bad idea in any type of game! Saving your base against a rush with this new system would be almost impossible.

In the demo, I was given three doctrinal abilities, from no particular doctrine. The command tree and tactical map were not yet implemented. Two of the doctrinal abilities were passive, in that they allowed me to call in special units from particular base buildings, in this case, elite infantry and the Katyusha. To call in the Katyusha, I had to have the required resources, as well as a completed Tier 4 (Large Factory). The last doctrinal ability was a strafing run, which had a single targeting reticule. When activated, an IL-2 enters the map to make multiple passes at targets in the area-of-effect (AOE). The IL-2 is a beast. I had seen it shred my enemies in multiple passes in the first mission, so I stayed away from it in the skirmish. The feeling of “oh no, another low blow strafing run” in my gut, from the original game, is not so easy to shake. Hopefully, the IL-2 strafe can be tuned into a balanced ability.

User Interface

The UI was very clean and well organized. Units could be grouped into control groups as normal. Your entire army is always displayed as icons on the top right of your screen, without the necessity of clicking on a shield to reveal them. The units in your control groups are displayed a second time, just below your whole army. By double-tapping a control group, you focus and follow the unit. A nice portrait of each unit is to the right of the minimap, and the resources have been moved to a more condensed space, horizontally displayed across the top-middle of the UI. The portraits are static in this build. Now that we’re spoiled by other games, we hope Relic has time to animate them in the future. The current Victory Point standing is represented not only by numbers, but also by 2 long, horizontal, green and orange colored progress bars on the top left of the screen. The top middle of the screen is un-used. Naturally, I’d love to see that space used for player names, faction flags, and VP counts in the replay mode, and, if there is one, the observer mode. Cross your fingers and hope!

Resources

In the skirmish, all map points are like simple manpower or “strat” points in the original Company of Heroes. New to COH2, they each have a small radius, and can be capped by simply standing within the circle, instead of actually touching the flag. And now for the big whopper: any resource point can be made into a fuel point or an ammo point by engineers. They build a small ammo or fuel structure in the flag radius, and the resources begin to flow. In the skirmish, a maximum of two resource structures could be built on each point (because it was a 2v2), including the possible combination of one of each — one ammo and one fuel.

This new format raised some knee-jerk red flags, which I commented upon immediately, to Mr. McDermott. If a player can build high resource points near his base, won’t it be easier to camp in a safe defensive area? What will incline players to rush to the center of the map to fight for fuel, as we do on Angoville, or Rails and Metal? This new system would remove a mapmaker’s ability to design specific strategic targets for each map, and would strip away the beautiful cut-off mechanic that is germane to competitive play in the original COH. The most competitive maps force players to engage each other at the frontline right from the start, to fight for precious resources, whilst also offering a way to cut those same resources off. James made it clear that this new format was still in a testing stage, and nothing was set in stone.

I think I understood that strat points that already have resource structures can be captured without destroying the structures, effectively stealing the resources that your opponent worked to build. This is a separate issue entirely, and I could see this working nicely. It would be like the original COH, except that you wouldn’t have to destroy an enemy Observation Post to cap a point, you could keep it there, cap the point, and steal the extra resources.

Cold Tech

Sending my units forward, towards the great frozen river (surely the Moskva River, or река Москва), came with a feeling of impending doom. Not only would my infantry have to break through the German lines to secure one of the distant Victory Points, but they would also have to outwit General Winter. Half way up the map, they would give alerts that they were freezing. To warm them up, I would garrison them, or spend precious Engineer time to build them a campfire. Fortunately, an empty Wehrmacht Sdkfz-251 Halftrack awaited me at the first strat point, which also actively warmed my units. Putting guys in yellow cover will stop their temperature bars from continuing to fall, but only houses, vehicles, or campfires could actively warm them up. And yes, some poor souls of mine, sent to cap a distant strat point, neglected by their commander (me), perished to hypothermia. I’m sorry guys, I still am!

The environment of Company of Heroes is wonderfully dynamic. Blizzards can roll in, lowering LOS and sending chills to the bones of your fighting forces. Men clamber through deep snow slowly and laboriously. Tanks cut grooves into the snow that persist for the entire contest. But it is the frozen river that is General Winter’s 1st Lieutenant, threatening to crack, break, and swallow your units whole. I got a real kick out of trying to drive the T-70M Light Tank across the river. His treads spin, he slides as he tries to turn, and he leaves little fissures in the ice. Mortars or tank rounds can bash holes around him, creating a dangerous obstacle course.

Grand Theft Tank and putting those babies in Reverse

Any, that’s right, any vehicle can be de-crewed and left abandoned, only to be captured and revived by the enemy. After I captured a nice Panzer IV, right up at the front, my engineers worked hard to bring it back to full health. When you “kill” an enemy vehicle, sometimes it will explode completely, and other times the crew will crawl out in agony, die in the snow, and leave the hulk of their vehicle for the nearest scavenger. Having the Random Number Generator (RNG) decide which tanks are destroyed and which tanks can be captured could be devastating to competitive play. When the stakes are so high, some kind of consistent solution needs to be found.

To assist you in your larceny, Relic has provided the new “reverse vehicle” button, a highly requested feature. Just select the “reverse gear” icon, or tap the hotkey, and your tank will reverse all the way to the location of your next right-click. If a balanced solution can be found, vehicle theft could make for some exciting captures and daring escapes.

The Battle of Moscow – The Map

This massive 2v2 skirmish map was great to show off the new COH2 tech, but it’s not the kind of map we want to see in competitive multiplayer. The frozen river is a huge kill zone with no cover, which could be easily “camped” by a defensive player. And due to the odd Victory Point placement with two VPs on one side and only one on the other, holding a defensive line at the river should be enough for the northern players to win. The new “where-ever you want” resource system and no cut-off points will make for static front lines, the exact opposite of the kind of dynamic and penetrating game-play that we’ve grown to love in competitive COH. Deep snow, ice, and cold tech, create challenging new opportunities for map makers. I hope that map-makers can use these new terrains in a subtle and integrated fashion, and still support fast and penetrating game-play.

The COH2 Experience

From the orchestral soundtrack, to the wonderful audio samples, to the beautifully rendered models and destructible environments, to the changing weather and dynamic lighting, Company of Heroes 2 delivers the player into a rich, visceral experience. The two demos at Gamescom had the “wow effect” that we’ve all been hoping for. The look and feel of the game is top notch. Now we must wait for the reveal of the rest of the goodies that we all hope to find:

• A fast and fair matching system
  
• An effective anti-cheat system
  
• A powerful replay system with a reverse feature and statistics tabs (production, units lost in manpower, etc.)
  
• An observer system for live casting
  
• Balanced Factions
  
• And most importantly of all: Maps, a resource system, and game mechanics that allow fast, fluid, penetrating and harassing game-play. Camping and blobbing? Bad! Flanking, harassing, and combined arms? Good!

We COH fans are not a demanding bunch, are we?