Relic's Poorest Design: Contrary To All Reasonable Thought

Problem is that Relic doesn't update the game on regular basis now we will probably have to wait half a year for another patch that changes RNG elements. I like your description of problem and ideas to fix this mess Jaedrik. Now CoH2 is really messy and the new patch didn't do nearly enough.

Excellent thread. Letting RNG incur such massive swings (a critical hit saving a tank or a plane crash wiping out an entire army) seems to reek of the game being designed by people that don't play it competitively and don't care to.

RNG is amazing feature. No doubt about it. If it was pure math it would be boring. Bouncing shells are fine until one point. If you have almost dead unit, you must have options to chance it and finish. Not all faction can do that.
Mortar with line of code that says it must hit something with every third shells - boring. That's why some kined of RNG is needed.

Plane crashes are fine. 1-2 per game. Chances to hit you? Very low but in you are playing agasit 2 OST with CAS and you have AA unit which in fact is helping your opponents - making every plane, after strafe, kamikaze is just horrbile. It leads to 20-30 crashes per game and 80% of them are on your side.

There is no consent for 10-30 crashes per game. Once I had 4v4 where I lost more units due to plane crashes than to my enemy.

(I havent noticed plane crashes for the first 1100h, until everyone starts to spam CAS so I would say it's CAS problem not the plane itself).

I defend RNG, i like it, but maybe need change some things like critical. And nice written, i translate it 40 min in google .

Thanks for the translation Romeo, much easier to read.

Good points all around, though I feel there is still a place for vehicle crits in certain instances. For example a frontal t34 ram breaking main weapons, and of course vehicle snares.

Perhaps a more logical approach to them could work, such as a sniper taking out a gunner on a HT or pintle mount.

When it comes to plane crashes I have nothing good to say about them. They are just too out of control and can result in some serious nonsense that neither side deserves.

T-34 ram is a perfect example of the ways we can keep crits in without them being frustrating and arbitrary. Player agency should decide.

So is trying to solo a King Tiger with one depleted Guards squad

Right, but nobody playing has the expectation that they could. Most would agree that one Guards squad, hurting at that, doesn't deserve to take out a King Tiger, therefore nobody reasonable gets frustrated at it.

More great posts all around.

If we really want to keep plane crashes for the cinematic effect, it should be easy-ish to make them decide to crash in places where nobody is, or where the chances of hitting are very small, but then we'd see some unfortunate moments in the "trending" box where they hit anyways. :|

This super impactful RNG's removal of player agency is too much, and the game can be just as interesting without it, and only less frustrating.

I'm sure we had this kind of thread before. Waiting for Relic+s reply.

Concise opinion: RNG is fine as long as it doesn't have such extreme results. Plane crashes, main gun destroy, heavy engine damage from snares, etc.

While agreeing with you I also feel there is another problem with the way Relic designed COH2: they say "Every battle tells a story", and they explain you that they want players to talk about the games they play with their friends and even after days remember what happened.

I know people hate when someone brings COH1 again and again, but in this specific case it is important imo to mention that game because Relic started designing COH2 from the work done on their first game.
In COH1 not every battle told a story and a lot, truly a lot of games, were just huge stomps from player/team A to player/team B and vice versa. And it was totally fine because they were just showing that a better player was beating a worse player, or that between two equally skilled players one of them was taking advantage of the windows of opportunity provided by the game better than his opponent. Those games telling a story tho, the so called "epic games", were truly amazing and since they were more rare to happen they were also bringing a huge entertainment factor with them, that us casters/events organizers were using to bring people excitement about the game and that also defined players skill level (top players were capable of interpreting the game in a way normal players were not even remotely capable of doing).

I'll dig in a bit more into this and bring the example of "comebacks": doing a comeback in COH1 was something complex to achieve and a lot of times it relied on a real effort from one player to change the game situation, since the resource system (as Quinn says too) was more "punishing" and less flexible because of the fact big resource points were way more important than simple strategic points, that manpower income and popcap were linked to map control, that cutoffs had a huge importance, to the point a top player knew when capping the cutoff was more important that capping a resource point (while in COH2 it's economically better to hold as many territories as possible despite what territories they are since they all provide resources)

The approach Relic decided to take in order to follow that design principle is what I think is one of the hard-coded wrong aspects in the game that also has to do with RNG: with the idea that every battle had to tell a story, they introduced/magnified the impact of two main elements: Rubber band effects to avoid snowballing effects (making a general match of COH2 more boring to watch/play but reducing the "skill gap" between top players and good players in order to make the game easier to approach/learn for newer players) and RNG effects (in attempt to raise the entertainment factor of a general match of COH2 by introducing more elements in the game not in players control, like squad wipes and plane crashes).

- Rubber band effects to avoid "snowballing" effects. (for those who do not know, snowballing your opponent means taking advantage of a certain situation to create a snowball effect and potentially even win the game in a matter of minutes, like the M8 + 4 riflemen push with infantry off-map artillery against Wehrmacht in COH1)
There are a lot of rubber band effects in the game and the main ones are all related to the economy system: from the way popcap and manpower works to how resources are spread over the map (less importance of cutoffs and resource points, more importance of normal strategic points), the result is that it is harder to close games entirely compared to COH1 because even if you take full advantage of an opponent mistake or on the other side you maximize the effect of a good action you do, your opponent can still field a 100/100 infantry based army that will be able to fight till VPs reach 0.
On the other side, due to the way Relic approached the economy design, if a player gets somehow back in the game he would still need to cap the majority of the map in order to stop the opponent's income (since every point matters more now). I believe the overall result of all this is still a balanced situation: comebacks happen more because of an opponent's mistake to fight the attempts of the opponent to comeback by throwing his infantry based army at him for 10 minutes (till VPs are 0), and at the same time they can be stopped more frequently because it takes more time to actually stop the income of the player who had an advantage, since resources are more spread over the map.
Be careful tho to think that this "balanced" situation is the same for both COH1 and COH2: the biggest difference I see here is in the way these comebacks are executed and in the entertainment factor that comes from them. The "every battle tells a story - at all costs" design principle is the reason because there is a reduced entertainment factor and by consequence a reduced skill gap between the top players and the good players. I can't express it in better words but having casted and played myself both the games I can really feel what I just said and I could go back watching tons and tons of games of both COH1 and COH2 and notice the exactly same difference.

- Increased RNG effects. In my opinion Relic decided to increase RNG effects, mainly squad wipes but to a certain extent also plane crashes and AOE damage in attempt to compensate for the decreased average entertainment factor of the game and the fact that matches felt generally more boring. (before the weapon profile changes RNG, in the form of criticals, flamethrowers, mortars, had a dominant role into turning those fights of grens vs conscripts shooting each other behind green cover for 10 minutes into something more..entertaining and in fact cheese strats were dominant at least till the end of SNF5).
What RNG should have brought, an increased entertainment factor, in reality turned into more frustration for both the players, to the point where RNG in the form of plane crashes and squad wipes caused by AOE weapons may still have a decisive factor into deciding the outcame of a match.
The argument that the players that win tourneys are still the same is partially flawed by the surely huge amount of top players that either stopped playing the game entirely or stopped playing it competitively (you know, there is not really a reason to spam COH2 games right now since there are not many tourneys, the problems/bugs are still the same and/or there is no incentive to keep playing competitively since there is still no league system or a proper ingame built ladder with levels - both things we hope will come soon!)
With all the respect for our current top players, they still play far from perfect games and this is true because there is no incentive in improving and pushing forward the skill level because of how small the competitive scene around the game currently is. (besides the fact that the rubber band effects built in COH2 are a real limit on what you can do in the game and the results you can obtain when you outplay your opponent)


What Quinn said is not false if you think FOR WHO this game was built: COH2 was built attempting to please everyone, from the comp stomper who might enjoy RNG more because it brings more variety in the games he plays daily against the AI to the mass of new players scared by how hard playing and learning an RTS like this can be, who can find these rubber band effects good in order to have more time to learn and adapt in the game (especially because the lack of easy to understand datas to determinate how strong units are against each other have the result of making the "ingame experience" far more important than all the rest), up to the small competitive community on the game, who has still a nice game to play with that still rewards good players for playing better than others (sadly not enough as I would like to see)

Finding the right compromise attempting to please everyone is no easy task, that's sure. And I understand a lot of the decisions made to design COH2 (even if not all of them), even some I disagree with, being myself very close with the competitive community of the game.
But the RNG issue in particular is something I believe Relic went too far into: RNG is a core element in COH2, but too much RNG is just a direct cause of frustration and leads players to a negative attitute towards the game and developers that doesn't bring anything good to anyone.

Ultimately I have my own idea on how I would personally adjust COH2: I strongly believe that a succesfull game has to be first of all as fun as balanced and have as few frustration/out of players controls elements as possible, while also being designed to always challenge (an element that imo is totally lacking from the game) players to find new strategies and solutions to approach certain problems presented in the game (like adapting to certain units) by offering them a lot of strategic options and variety (Inverse knows well what I'm talking about).
I don't pretend COH2 to be built to be an eSport, I want it to be as good as possible so that the CORE people around the game, like events organizers, casters, key figures which have a lot of weight in the community can promote the game with the help of a strong advertising campaign from Relic/SEGA aimed at producing/organizing big events around the game.
Something in the mid betweehn what happened with Heartstone, League of Legends and many other famous eSports

I think vehicle crits should only have a chance to occur when you make the "killshot" on a tank but damage has almost no overkill, lets say tank has 20 health left and the shot has 25 damage and thus the tank ends up with -5 health which could translate instead to a possible critical hit. If instead the tank has 20 health left and final shot does 120 damage meaning the tank ends up with -100 health and that means it will always gets destroyed with ZERO chance of critical hit because the overkill is much greater.

I think this would still keep the immersion but still get more power to the player to influence the RNG factor. Win win situation.

Myself i think fixing unit hugging when a squad is moving which results in mine squad wipe or tank shot squad wipes is more frustrating and more important to fix than crits or planecrashes.

+ 1000 to all points.

Coh is and will be coh and not lol or sc or what ever. A plane crashed once in 100 games, so fuc... What? Get over it. About the crits I agree, it need some tweeting!

Great post and great translation. Thanks for this. +1

Nice posts by Jaedrik and Marcus, good reading and i agree with both of you.

I remember those first interviews with Quinn when he was talking about how punishing the CoH1 ressource system in his point of view was and how much he enjoyed when things explode. That gave me a shock and i had a bad feeling from this point on regarding CoH2.

I guess the point is that CoH needs to be a game suitable for as many players as possible since the RTS market is declining regarding that typ of RTS CoH is. CoH2 trys to be attractive for competitive and fun oriented players as well and this is maybe the core issue. You can´t handle this different demands and and a game based on such ideas will most likly lagg what you call core people because someone who plays some games from time to time has no interessant in improving and doing something for a community.

here is my approach on vehicles from another thread:

-remove abandoning
-crits dont happen instead of death anymore, but if a tank is left with 5% or 10% of its health after a shot, it receives an !additional! crit based on the direction where the shot came from:
front: main gun destroyed?
side: light engine crit?
rear: heavy engine damage?
this would enable plays and counterplays and it would add another strategical layer

and plane crashes shouldnt kill aynthing at all, it wouldnt be too hard for the game to always crash the plane away from your troops. it would still look fantastic, but would not be so RNGheavy!

Abandoning would be cool if your crew only abandoned intelligently.

Tank gets hit max range by that LAST AT shot during a retreat. -"Boys, our tank is crippled but there are no enemies within X range. Lets bail, fight another day."

Tank gets crit while attempting to push through enemy lines- "Boys, we're surrounded. They don't take prisoners. Keep fighting until we explode."

Less free tanks, more interesting stories about the big plays you made to defend/capture your abandoned tank ehhh?

There is already a first layer of randomness on tanks thanks to the probability based armor system. The second layer is death criticals. What's annoying is that a tank losing it's gun isn't actually bad for the tank, it's good for the tank, because it can only happen in the place of dying.

An alternate system would be penetrating hits always have some probability of causing a critical, BUT there are no death crits and HP going to 0 always kills them.

Better? Worse? I don't know, but I would rather have no crits at all than death crits in their current state.

also pathing.

Clearly you haven't read Sun Tzu, it has plenty of footnotes.
Granted the original manuscript is not exactly legible to you or I, the modern translations however are quite readable.

or clearly you are going on with your random internet articles you found and never read the originals.
Typical you.

or clearly you are going on with your random internet articles you found and never read the originals.
Typical you.

unless u know chinese. none of us have read the original

unless u know chinese. none of us have read the original

I am Chinese ._. is that good enough to read the original?

and I can tell you that there is no footnote in there at all.

I am Chinese ._. is that good enough to read the original?

and I can tell you that there is no footnote in there at all.

That's what I said.

RNG is amazing feature. No doubt about it. If it was pure math it would be boring. Bouncing shells are fine until one point. If you have almost dead unit, you must have options to chance it and finish. Not all faction can do that.
Mortar with line of code that says it must hit something with every third shells - boring. That's why some kined of RNG is needed.

Plane crashes are fine. 1-2 per game. Chances to hit you? Very low but in you are playing agasit 2 OST with CAS and you have AA unit which in fact is helping your opponents - making every plane, after strafe, kamikaze is just horrbile. It leads to 20-30 crashes per game and 80% of them are on your side.

There is no consent for 10-30 crashes per game. Once I had 4v4 where I lost more units due to plane crashes than to my enemy.

(I havent noticed plane crashes for the first 1100h, until everyone starts to spam CAS so I would say it's CAS problem not the plane itself).

+1 totally agree

Having only pure math in the game wouldn't be as interesting IMO, although the percentages that RNG follows need to be carefully balanced.

Regarding planes crashing on the map, I agree it'd be better if they didn't wipe units out because it can unfairly backfire on players that build AA as a counter.

One of the best reads I ever had in this forum. Thanks!

I don't like these frustration elements (vehicle crits / plane crashs) neither.

I totally agree with the OPs arguments about there are more then enough elements creating drama. Besides the beautiful armor mechanic I would also like to emphasize the small arms battle: tense fire fights where you have to decide "do i retreat now or keep on fighting maybe winning this engagement but risking to loose this squad". That's drama and absolutly exciting. But you as a player can influence and control it (cover, supression, [soft] retrating, disenagaging behind a house/hedge, using abilities, etc.), this is what it makes such a great and fun to play core machanic.

For Quinn holding on to such, to call them like they have to be called, "lame" machanics after creating such wonderfully working ones like the smalls arms and armor system is out of all reason for me.

If Relic dont't want to get rid of tanks crits, fine but then tie them to more abilties, make em part of regular enagements (>40% health, like its works for infantry), but not a completely frustrating vehicle savior.

If you want to stick on the plane crashes, then programm them to crash at the outer margins of a map. I can't understand how Quinn can not see that it is NOT enjoyable to get wiped by planes truning into V1 rockts after you did the effort to get some functional AA. It's plain stupid.

The thread hits the Nail pretty neat. Relic would be well advised to listen to this.

regards
ace.

your opponent can still field a 100/100 infantry based army that will be able to fight till VPs reach 0.

Having pop cap tied to map control was easily one of the worst ideas in CoH, and I'm glad they removed it from CoH2. It was simply insanely frustrating to have resources left but be unable to use them. If you were cut off you were likely to be behind on VPs and resources too. It's simply not needed.

Now, comebacks are likely also easier in CoH2 because resource income is also tied less to map control, but whether it's a big problem, I'm not sure. Additionally, the veterancy system also works to punish comebacks.