Excellent thread!
I'm with Inverse, the UI is awful, full of unnecessary visual noise to make it look rugged and war weary, the only thing it has over vCoH great UI is the top right bar with all the squad icons and the reinforce button that reinforces all selected squads instead of having to TAB them as in vCoH (that's really useful).
My main gripe with CoH 2 is the awful optimization this game has. It's the best looking RTS, I salute that, but that's no excuse for subpar performance.
I've stated this before in the official forums, Relic has to work together with Nvidia/AMD on their next drivers, and also work on getting some Crossfire/SLI Profiles.
Another thing that really causes unnecessary performance issues is the all inclusive "Image quality" setting. This does not allow the players to tweak and fine tune the game. There should be separate settings for shadows/smoke & fog/ Shader & Lighting/Effects & Particles as those are the usual suspects for terrible performance drops.
For instance one could keep nice lighting & shaders, disable smoke and shadows and the game would run better and still look good, but if we want to disable smoke and shadows, we have to put Image quality on minimum and we lose the shaders and lighting. Go figure.
I have a gaming rig that is over 2 years old:
Windows 7 64-bit
Intel Core i7 2600k OC to 4.2 Ghz
EVGA GTX 580 OC to 900 Mhz
16GB DDR3 1600 Mhz RAM
128 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD.
These are my settings:
The game runs like crap on my system, I struggle to keep 60 FPS with these settings on 1v1s. I play mostly 3v3s and 4v4s and my average FPS is 30 frames... On top of that, I get frequent bugsplats every 3 to 4 games out of the blue. Apparently something to do with my Nvidia drivers hanging up. Well I have the latest Nvidia drivers and every other game I own does not crash. Again it's an issue between Relic and Nvidia not working together on the drivers, so It's Relics' fault not Nvidia's.
Then comes the frequent freezes, hangups and mini stutters to nail the coffin; that I guess have to do with the battle servers having issues or overloading.
Optimization must be a priority for Relic, otherwise they are going to start to lose players.
I play CoH 2 less and less because WFA armies aggravated the performance issues and I can't be bothered to play a game that runs like crap on a rig that runs BF3, Far Cry 3 and a Heavily modded Skyrim all on ULTRA at 60 FPS. I'm also tired of making my teammates lose games because Coh2 bugsplats on me so frequently.