At the same time however, this new MP system, combined with the new 'passive-capturing' of sectors makes the game much more fluid - i.e, faster paced and closer in terms of the point difference in the outcome.
It makes the game LESS fluid. Instead of giving effective players a quick win, it lets even bad players come back from behind and drag the game out because their MP income barely takes a hit from being cut off and in fact their MP income beats their opponent because they have less upkeep. The game doesn't flow: it just bumbles on for half an hour until the better player wins anyways but only after dealing with the multiple inevitable comebacks from the worse player. And when players are evenly matched it just evens out the highs and lows and makes big victories and defeats matter less because the other player can always come back. It's not faster paced, it's slower paced - you can't win quickly.
I think this is a good thing, perhaps it doesn't reward a well played early game as much as it should (perhaps the numbers could be tweaked as mentioned in other posts) but it also means the outcome of the game isn't decided in the early phases and makes the winning player work hard for their victory. (which would in turn improve the quality of their play)
What it mostly does is give the losing player a lot of opportunities to get lucky by decrewing a tank or getting a nice off-map artillery hit. If you think CoH 1 didn't already have enough opportunities for amazing comebacks you must have played a different game than me. The only thing the new resource system does for CoH 2 is drag the game down and make comebacks more of an automatic thing for every game rather than an amazing feat for the players that can pull them off and come out on top. The heroic climbs out of the depths of a bad early game are much less heroic and the excitement in watching to see whether a player can recover is much less exciting. Of course they can recover. Their manpower income didn't even dip, and they put a fuel OP on the strat point right outside their base so they're not even too far behind in teching (because it's not like anyone is doing anything other than teching up with their fuel).
The spectacle of a close game is also enthralling for the stream audiences.
I remember (I believe it was the second TFN beta cast) the 2v2 between Ami on one side and some other randoms coming down to literally a single VP, the winning side having sat on that single VP while draining 60 or so points from the opposition..
Now that shit was a watch and a half.
This happened in CoH too though, and it was much more exciting because both players had to work at it, instead of CoH 2 where even if you suck you can still force your opponent to slog through another few sets of your units and force your opponent to take more time rebuilding their force after your assault because their MP income was low for a while because they had to pay upkeep as the price for keeping their units alive.
I agree that the UI is pretty shit, (it looks ornate and stupid and the resource layout is way too small) but the other gripes such as the lack of visibility of the units, during blizzards and combat I don't agree with. I never had a problem seeing who was shooting at who and I could always clearly differentiate the units from each other. Hell, I even remember the OP saying during one of his streams the conditions (lack of visibility etc..) of the Blizzard added an additional tactical layer to the game by making ninja caps easier for instance.
I'm glad you've got great eyes but poor old people like Inverse and me and tons of others have a lot of trouble seeing what's going on. I also watched a TFN cast recently and both casters misidentified the source of suppression in one of the fights. Is it because they're blind? No, it's because it's super hard in CoH 2 to see where a machinegun is firing (for example).
In closing I think especially with the gripes over the look of the game it's important for us all to remember that this is a different game to coh1 and that we shouldn't want to revert this game to be more like the former (what would be the point of a sequel then?)just because we dont like some things as they are atm. The new MP system has as well introduced a faster paced and closer style of play than coh1 which isn't bad (I think it's great ^^) so don't just piss all over it just yet
- give Relic some time to sort some of this shit out.
It's different, I definitely agree. Is it better? Well...