Why does the game need loiters?

I think the coh franchise as a whole would be way better without them

They are completely unnecessary abilities. First of all, air support can clearly be strong without auto-targeting. The strafes in this game show that

Having abilities that do the work for you is stupid imo. If im gonna get wiped by an off-map, i at least want my opponenet to do some placing of the damage themselves, and i want a chance to dodge. Loiters ignore both of those

AA counters them well, but I think the setup of "You have AA, you're fine, you don't, large chunks of your entire army can die to 1 ability that requires zero skill to use" is really really stupid

I think off-maps in general are too strong in coh3, but loiters piss me off the most (leftover hatred from coh2). Thoughts?

I think at this point it's just Relic insisting on keeping loiters and treating them like they are a part of CoH as much as things like cover & true sight system. Which is fine I guess.

People hated facing the CoH1 PE loiter, and they made an even bigger return in CoH2.
People hated facing the CoH2 loiters and they made a return in CoH3. Ain't no way they will ever patch it out

You are right, the game doesn't need loiters.

They are antithetical to the entire nature of careful positioning, control, and tactics that CoH represents.

IIRC some of the team design guys actually promised in interviews that there WOULD NOT be any loiters in CoH3.

Obviously they were overruled by someone who thought they could get more casual players with loiters in the game.

I think at this point it's just Relic insisting on keeping loiters and treating them like they are a part of CoH as much as things like cover & true sight system.

This sentence is somewhat depressing lol

IIRC some of the team design guys actually promised in interviews that there WOULD NOT be any loiters in CoH3.

Obviously they were overruled by someone who thought they could get more casual players with loiters in the game.

That sounds like the decision making Relic is known for

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.

but I'd personally rather see Relic shoot for the moon than not.

That is the super depressing thing about Coh3s launch. It killed the playerbase, streaming, etc. Some of that may come back.

But imagine if Coh3 was actually done when it released. Now they could be focusing on really cool stuff like you are describing. I have a bunch of small dumb ideas that would make the game fun as hell to play for casuals and streams, buts its like 2 years from just being playable. And work on it will probably die after that. Those little things will never be even thought about before it dies.

So coh3 went from "This could be amazing" to "I hope it just gets playable before they drop it".

I seriously just dont get why you would kill your own IP like this.

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.

Men of War 2 is pretty neat in that its plane callins are all tied to airplane units that you put into your army before the game begins.

As long as the plane isn't shot down, you can keep using it (although planes have a 5 minute cooldown to be used again, if you have multiple planes, you can use them sooner). There are also no loiters.

No plane vet though.

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.

This sounds fantastic to me. Kind of like Steel-Division.

So coh3 went from "This could be amazing" to "I hope it just gets playable before they drop it".

I seriously just dont get why you would kill your own IP like this.

IMHO it's what happens when people who don't care about / love the game get involved in development decisions.

But, to be honest the last patch gave me a lot of hope. It was huge, there were literally hundreds of bugfixes & tweaks to the core game, that showed that there are still a lot of people working for Relic that really care about the core game, and not just selling cosmetics and console ports.