What is this target table and simplified damage calculations? What did you mean by they removed it? What do they do actually?
In CoH1, there were tables that mapped weapon types to armour types to determine things like damage, accuracy, penetration, etc. Every weapon a unit could use had a weapon type (for example M8 gun, Sherman gun, Garand, Carbine, Kar98, different grenades, and so on) and an armour type (a few different types for infantry and mostly unique ones for all vehicles).
When one unit shot at another, the correct entry in the table was accessed and used to calculate things like damage, accuracy, penetration, and a few other variables. For example, flamers had a 1.5x damage modifier against elite armour, which is why flamers are good against vet 2 Grenadiers. Also, snipers had an accuracy modifier against elite armour that gave them 100% accuracy even when shooting at retreating units, which is why a sniper will never miss a vet 2 Grenadier.
With a system like this, you can fine-tune your tweaks on the per-unit level. For instance, you can give the M8 10% more damage against just the Puma, while keeping his stats against every other unit in the game the same. You have near-infinite options when it comes to making tweaks.
The downside is, every time you go to add a new unit, you have to fill in the target tables for every single other unit in the game, and you have to test each of those interactions in order to make sure nothing unexpected is happening. It's very time-consuming, and makes adding anything new extremely difficult.
That's why in CoH2, they got rid of that system and went to straight health, armour, damage, and penetration values. It makes adding new units a breeze, since all you have to do is assign them values for those four variables (there are some others, I'm sure, but those are the most important). The downside is, if you give a unit 10% more damage, it means that unit will do 10% more damage against everything, and you have to tweak health, armour, and penetration to compensate.
Ultimately, it makes adding new stuff easier, and balancing the existing stuff harder.
I didn't know that - but unless you know 100% sure (ie its been confirmed somehow) then I don't really believe it for many reasons.
THe way damage happens to terrain, the way effects look in the game, they way all map artifacts look in game ( fences, trees, bushes ect) it looks like the DOW2 engine to me and not the vcoh one.
I can understand them removing the damage tables ect to make the game simple and the make the DLC stuff easier to implement but why would they remove the physics effects from the game? why would the camera angle change ect if it was the same engine.
Look how infantry moved in coh, bigger distance between men, they would expand and contract with distancing as they moved, soldiers would slow down and speed up relative to their squad, it was fluid, responsive and worked beautifully.
Tanks responded instantly to commands, vehicles maneuvered terrain better and all micro input was rewarded.
How arty and all mortar type weapons had accuracy that was inversely proportional to distance to target, that is gone too.
All that is gone from the game.
I really think they used a different engine with pretty graphics cos the thought players would not notice all the substance removed from the game.
I cant imagine them taking the same game engine as vcoh and then removing nearly every single feature out of the game.
It's very obviously the same engine, though it's been heavily modified of course. It uses the same file structure for game data, has extremely similar squad management, and handles cover and buildings pretty much exactly how it did in CoH1. It also uses, with slight modifications, the exact same structure for replay files and the replay system. In CoH1, there was a bug where sometimes if the members of an AT gun team were killed while the AT gun was moving, the gun would continue to move to its destination without the crew. This bug was present in CoH2 during alpha. It would be an amazing coincidence if that bug happened to be present in its exact same form in a brand-new engine. It's much more logical to assume, when taking into consideration the other similarities I mentioned above, that the core engine was taken from CoH1.