Where Company of Heroes went wrong.

What i hate about Relic is they innovate new army designs for the simple reason of innovating. For Relic its worth it if gameplay takes a backseat as along as new armies are radically different than the older armies. Relic could learn a thing or two from Blizzard when they say "GAMEPLAY FIRST".

Pretty much :/

It wasn't the original Company of Heroes team that made CoH: OF and CoH2. When they got into the CoH scene they bring in a lot of new ideas but it seems like they failed to realize what made CoH great.

I can't tell if CoH: OF was a success because it made sales but a lot of people left because of it. The faction design in CoH: OF were pretty bad when it came to skill level and balance, it's like the OF team purposely tried to make the factions cater to noobs, by encouraging blobbing and strong weapon emplacements and giving stupid one click abilities like buttoning.

What made CoH2 disappointing is that Relic put in what was bad in OF into CoH2 so it seems like the CoH2 team also failed to realize what made CoH great. The faction design in CoH2 is just as bad as the OF faction design, and Relic refused to make changes.

Despite all this, Relic did go with the other things that made CoH great. The graphics, the explosions, the dynamic battlefield that can be changed with bombs creating craters for units to take cover in and those kind of other stuff. It's really just the balance and bad faction design that Relic fucks up in CoH: OF and CoH2, but vCoH faction design was still not flawless with stupid abilities like Allied repair, and propaganda. I just wish someone would address all the previous issues without creating new ones.

What i hate about Relic is they innovate new army designs for the simple reason of innovating. For Relic its worth it if gameplay takes a backseat as along as new armies are radically different than the older armies. Relic could learn a thing or two from Blizzard when they say "GAMEPLAY FIRST".

Except in WC3 and SC they managed to create completely different armies.

The thing is, blizzard NEVER implemented new armies after initial release of their RTS.

Except in WC3 and SC they managed to create completely different armies.

The thing is, blizzard NEVER implemented new armies after initial release of their RTS.

Thing is all armies of wc3 and starcraft share the same basic core design of workers harvesting minerals/gold and everyone has a base at their starting location.

Brits in OF took a huge dump on every core mechanic of the game and from what i understand OKW nearly had the same fate happening.

That they design new armies with only specialists or good allaround generalist infantry/tanks is also bad since what makes coh into coh is the design of supression, flanking, cover and mines and relic just ignored all those mechanics for the design of the new armies in WesternFront Armies.

Except in WC3 and SC they managed to create completely different armies.

The thing is, blizzard NEVER implemented new armies after initial release of their RTS.

Starcraft's races are actually very similar in design even though they're very unique in how the design is implemented. You can boil down the core design of every Starcraft faction (going off of SC2 here) as having the following attributes:

Workers that harvest resources and build buildings.
Tech buildings that are required before certain units can be produced, and buildings to produce those units from.
Three levels of offensive and defensive upgrades for all fighting units.
A central method of boosting economy/production.
A mix of fighting units and harassing units.
A method of health regeneration for units and buildings.

All three SC2 races have that same design. How that design is implemented in the different races is very different, of course. Health regen, for instance, is passive over time for Zerg, limited to shield regen for Protoss, and achieved through healing and repairing units for Terran. Upgrades are separated into ground and air for Protoss, melee and ranged for Zerg, and bio and mech for Terran. Production boosting occurs with Chronoboost for Protoss, larva injection for Zerg, and mules for Terran.

Even though the Starcraft factions may seem vastly different from one another, they actually share a ton of core design details. A big problem with Company of Heroes factions through the life of the franchise is the lack of central design details guiding faction design.

For instance, look at Americans vs. Wehrmacht in CoH1. The core design details in that matchup are flanking, suppression, and drawn-out engagement. Now, CoH is an asymmetrical game, so you're not going to see the direct similarities that you see in a symmetrical game like Starcraft, but you can still draw some comparisons. Suppression encouraged flanking, and the soft-counter nature of vanilla units encouraged long, drawn-out engagements, both of which combined to make for an experience that people latched on to and really enjoyed.

Now try to find those same design details in the Opposing Fronts factions. All of a sudden flanking and suppression are pretty much thrown entirely out the window. PE doesn't have a reliable suppression unit, so there's not going to be any flanking in that matchup, and Brits have no reason to bother with flanking when they have a powerful, hardened long-range mortar structure, Heroic Charge, and infantry units that move slowly in enemy territory. Furthermore, you have units like Commandos and Armoured Cars that are able to get nearly anywhere on the map extremely quickly and wipe entire squads with little warning. Suddening the long, drawn-out engagements are a thing of the past as well.

This is what I mean when I say the OF factions were poorly designed. There were other things that they retained, like upgrades and veterancy, but ultimately it didn't really matter because the act of actually playing the new factions was so divorced from what made the vanilla factions so great. They completely neglect three of the core design details that made the original vanilla CoH1 matchup so iconic. The CoH2 factions suffer from the same problem, neglecting things like global upgrades that gave CoH1 its competitive longevity. Instead of sticking to the core formula that made the original factions so amazing and then iterating on them, Relic has historically attempted to create entirely new armies with little regard for what makes an army fun and interesting in the first place.

......................

Brits in OF took a huge dump on every core mechanic of the game and from what i understand OKW nearly had the same fate happening.

.............

Pretty much this -and there is a soundcast out there on the web (the link to which I have sadly lost)- where QD (iirc) admits the Commonwealth were designed to camp - hence their abysmal basic infantry speed. Let it never return.

The OKW trucks give you a clue as to the near disaster which almost repeated itself

the thing is, non of the basic design choices for the factions (bar soviets imo), are bad. you can make a core infantry unit work, as long as that unit has lots of choices (bars/bazookas is not a lot and is gated behind fuel/mp and mun) and interesting support options (the support options either suck, don't synergies well, and are highly gated and separated into two groups, only one of which you'll get).

same thing with OKW, albeit more difficult. if trucks were not integrated into the tier system you could choose whether or not to be mobile or focus on an area. forcing all of the trucks to either be in the base sector or a single other sector would reduce the amount of area they can cover and make them more vulnerable to globals.

there are options, relic just isn't good at making the right choice and seems to actively not make changes people think of.

The game would surely benefit from having combined arms be the rule instead of a costly risk. If they would give the factions better design in COH2 I might actually come back to the franchise.

I very much agree with the OP, but I would like to add this:


I strongly feel that the design of this game is flawed because of simple greed. I believe that they took very basic things out of the core mechanics of the game, only to put them in commanders that they can sell you. There is so much cheese and so much wrong with the entire commander system. I hate it, and it is a total step backwards from COH1.

You took a well thought out, well designed branching tree doctrine system and made it linear and have less abilities. This was a good idea in the game designer's eyes, how...?


As for "asymmetric balance", it can kiss my ass frankly. WW2 was interesting enough as it is, there is no need to go so far in this direction just to be "different." They are making things different for no good reason.

The problems this game has and its dwindling player base are all self-inflicted wounds, and it's a damned shame.

In reality German squad tactics all revolved around the MG42. If a MG42 crew member died, someone else had to replace him. The MG42 had to keep firing. The US squad tactics didn't rely very much on MG's at all. The game Brothers in Arms demonstrates very well how US squad tactics worked. You had a scout team (team Able) that would locate the enemy's position, a fire team (team Baker) which would supress the enemy, and an assault team (team Charlie) would get close to the supressed enemy and take them out with SMG's and grenades.
I think the whole relying on the MG42 thing is nicely represented with Ostheer.

Indeed, it's quite effective to base your army early game around MG42s and Grenadiers. That's why I'm liking Ostheer more and more.

I don't really like the gimmicky additional factions that Relic loves to add (where asymmetrical balancing is taken to its logical extreme and we get some wierd starcraft situation where two WW2 armies are facing each other down with totally different kinds of units and have serious gaps in their arsenals).

But for me, CoH went off the rails with the microtransaction model. I feel like "Theatre of War" should have been what the DLC was mostly. Some unit skins too, that's fine. And obviously expansion pack style content. But the core of the game, the competitive multiplayer, should never have had players locked out of accessing commanders without paying more money. I feel like we never would have had a commander system at all if not for the game being designed around substantial DLC throughput.

Heck, in an ideal world, the two new factions would have been freely available to all players - and "Ardennes Assault" would have been what we were paying for, not "Western Front Armies", followed by the WFA campaign a few months and 40 US dollars later. I am speculating that the nature of the game as it shipped was originally dictated heavily by THQs woeful financial stituation during early development. Then Sega wanting to get their money's worth after they purchased Relic.

What i hate about Relic is they innovate new army designs for the simple reason of innovating. For Relic its worth it if gameplay takes a backseat as along as new armies are radically different than the older armies. Relic could learn a thing or two from Blizzard when they say "GAMEPLAY FIRST".

You really got a point but I rather tend to disagree because I like the "innovation" even if it is a step back sometimes. Innovation can be really cool but you have to accept criticism and this is something Relic fails to do. The whole snowstorm thing could have been really cool if they had changed the things the community proposed but Relic mostly is like a 3-year-old child: "I made it! So like it how it is or hate it!!"

I fully agree with Marco's initial post.

I sincerely hope Relic takes notice, and goes back to combined arms as a common frame on which to base all armies for CoH 3. Suddenly the notion of a 1940-1942 CoH 3 is quite appealing, and would be quite balanced as most armies had mirrored arsenals during the early years of WW2. No more Tiger/Pershings/IS-2/ISU-152 supertanks, no panzerschrecks/fausts, no infrared STG 44's in broad daylight and all that silliness. Only MGs, rifles, mortars, AT guns, light vehicles, infantry support tanks/SPGs and lastly tank destroyers.

It's wishful thinking to expect them to redesign coh2 at this stage. You know the Red Army is doomed when Peter Qumsieh states that Soviets are not supposed to have combined arms ... Well can't really blame the balance team, they are just fixing a leak with a band-aid and hoping for the best, instead of calling a plumber (designers).

Lastly I'd prefer people stop starting threads about what new factions they could add to Coh 2. I'm concerned about a Sega employee lurking the forums, saying "Hey these fools want more factions, EXCELLENT, we want more money $£€ #Greed" and later shoving us 2 half-baked factions to screw up the balance and meta even more.

Very good thread.

I think the initial mistake was the attempt to make the game more appealing to a larger audience by sacrificing depth (global upgrades for example) and instead introducing a wealth of clickable abilities.
... to bring more action to the combat I suppose.

For me the original "ram" mechanic is the best (and certainly not the only) example how this backfired in a big way.
While it sounded really cool this allowed players to reliably trade a cheap tank for an expensive one.
This invalidated one of the core principles of any RTS game: Invest in Tech now - reap benefits later.

That "ram" was the only real purpose of the T34 at that time (stats were truly horrible) hardly helped to develop an interesting meta.




I'd also like to add my 2 cents regarding the DLC model and the "Greed" allegations.
First of all: I've never bought DLC commanders as a matter of principle. It's not like I couldn't afford it, I just refuse to have a real competitive advantage.

That being said, let's look at the environment prior to COH2 launch:
THQ went belly up - the game would have died then and there had not Sega snatched it up.

Some people have held Sega responsible for the DLC mess but that's not entirely true.
Sega certainly aimed to make money BUT the earliest preorder bonuses (published on steam - reward tier 3) already pretty much confirmed some kind of ingame currency.
Though preorder bonuses were changed later on, DLC would have been introduced even if THQ had survived. Perhaps the DLC wouldn't have been implemented as callously and as obvious pay2win (till the inevitable patch) but it would have happened.

An ingame currency would solve a lot of problems but it's also very hard to design (progression in an RTS?) and implement.

A note on that, before the SEGA purchase multiple Relic employees went on record saying purchasable downloadable content would have absolutely zero impact on actual gameplay and would be purely cosmetic or single-player content. Perhaps they were mislead by higher management, perhaps they straight-up lied, or perhaps they were given a mandate by SEGA after the purchase; it's really impossible to tell. Something definitely happened along the way that changed the company's stance on the matter though.

Yes, absolutely correct.

Then again there are 2 kinds of DLC.

• Content that is behind a pay wall and may only ever be accessed by paying real money.
  
• Shortcuts to unlock able content within the game. EXP boosters are a prime example.

An ingame currency was obviously planned and that made me (and some others) believe that there would be some sort of progression system. So adding new content (like commanders) would have encouraged people to play more thus increasing the community and the longevity of the game.
Believing COH2 to be a title with a AAA budget this would have made a lot of (business) sense.

If the devolopers were thinking of the first (admittedly narrow) DLC definition then this might not have been at odds with the developer comments at that time.
Then again maybe I am just nitpicking here and it was evil Sega after all.

I just want to toss in my $.02 and say that while I agree with the OP, to my mind where COH2 (specifically) went wrong was in the decision to set the popcap at a hard 100 regardless of map control. In vCOH you had to control strategic points--which didn't give you any fuel--in order to raise your popcap. This made fuel sectors way more important, and prevented you from just hunkering down after a series of losses; you had to stay aggressive to win.

I think it's pretty clear to everyone that COH2 was designed for maximum comeback-ability. For those of you who remember from the beta, early on you were essentially punished (even more than you are now) for unit preservation, to the point that you were almost forced to throw away units just to avoid the punitive upkeep penalties. The problem is, IMO, in the long run allowing crazy comebacks from a position of zero map control makes for a less fun game.

You really got a point but I rather tend to disagree because I like the "innovation" even if it is a step back sometimes. Innovation can be really cool but you have to accept criticism and this is something Relic fails to do. The whole snowstorm thing could have been really cool if they had changed the things the community proposed but Relic mostly is like a 3-year-old child: "I made it! So like it how it is or hate it!!"

Innovations in factions and balance are REALLY hard to pull off. And they aren't really necessary. However you make the rock-paper-scissors blance it will work so long as it is designed well though the more different the design the harder it is to pull off.

But you could keep the factions the same and still have a different game through innovation. Tru-sight is innovation, and a darned good one, with all sorts of strategic and tactical implications that are equal for both sides. Blizzards and cold-tech (and mud) are also innovations. Technically they are awesome. Who of us didn't watch the descriptions of snow/ice/blizzards in previews and not respond "Woooaaw, that is coll!". It's implementation was less popular, but it was certainly innovative and affects both side equally.

tl;dr You can have plenty of innovation without making different factions for difference's sake.

Well written. I started playing vCOH mp when I was serving in the army with some of the guys in my team, and what we really liked was how intuitive it was. You would basicly manouever and use your units as you would in real life, extremely simplified of course. Cangaroos and clowncars just dosent play that way.

There are so many great posts in this thread. I think OP has hit on a number of issues but I also think other people have raised some excellent additional points. I wish Relic could go back to the drawing board and produce a new COH game now, although I think it too late.

For me the interesting thing I would add is that after just 1.5 years I am getting extremely tired of this game. I tend to play one game at a time and have found myself less and less interested in playing. I never had this feeling with COH1.

Relic please take note, you should identify what was good about COH1 and build that. Please do not take each individual problem on and create a solution by building a new unit (e.g., shreks should be purchased one at a time but should also not dominate tanks, also tank killing squads are too small. Relic solution: make volks 5 man, cheap, and buy a single expensive shrek).