To start with, I'll list a few major things (off the top of my head) that were designed to be different from the first game:
- There is an experience system with ranks independent of the automatch ladder rank and hidden "player skill ranking".
- You can see the enemy "experience level", but have no indication of their ladder rank / true skill level without the use of an external service.
- Instead of a choice of three doctrines per faction (each with two sub-trees to go down), there are six or more doctrines per faction, which are unlocked in a linear fashion within a game. You choose three to take into a battle with you.
- Extra commanders beyond the "basic" level can be purchased as DLC, or unlocked either through the experience system (previously) or war spoils system (more recently)
- Population cap is fixed (100), rather than associated with map control.
- Strategic points now yield both fuel and munitions income, and can have this income doubled with a "cache". However, dedicated Munitions and Fuel points can no-longer be secured / enhanced with an observation post.
- Units now capture by being inside of a "capture area", rather than needing to undertake a dedicated "capture action" which exposed them to extra damage from enemies (as in coh1). This also implies that weapon teams can capture while setup and firing.
- There is a weather system that allows for Blizzards on some winter maps.
- There is a water/ice system on some winter maps that can result in some kinds of units falling into the water when an explosion goes off near them. Water re-freezes over time.
- Infantry can vault over obstacles.
- Vehicles now have a "reverse" movement option. This gives you more control over the movement of vehicles.
- Vehicles can now be abandoned / decrewed, allowing them to be captured by the enemy.
Conceptually, the faction designs for CoH2 have both similarities and differences from the first game. But in the "vanilla" matchup between the USSR and Germans, Both factions have good tools to use at every stage of the game. With the WFA, USA and OKW had a more "time asymetric" design, the OKW designed to have super powerful late game units and the USF having no heavies. However this has been moderated a bit with patches, and arguably in the current patch the OKW are underpowered (in 1v1, at least; they still dominate team games).
Not core design principles, but CoH2 does differ in the following ways "generally":
- Lethality versus infantry is increased, both from enemy infantry and enemy armour.
- There are now units that are capable of supressing on the move / vehicles that suppress.
- There are far more mechanisms to convert different types of resources than there used to be.
- Call-ins cost fuel instead of just manpower, but the heavy vehicles are no-longer limited except in one case.
- Not actually a deliberate design decision, but it subjectively seems that in CoH2 it's harder to notice when units are in major trouble, the alert sounds seem to blend into the background more. Not sure exactly how to describe this or what causes it, but this was also pointed out recently by HelpingHans on a stream. Units accidentally getting wrecked when you look away without even noticing seems to happen way more often.
There are problems in the current state of the game. Everybody will have their own opinions, and not all of them are "new" to CoH2. I will try to encapsulate what I think Relic should take away from their experience in the first two games:
- The "experience level" concept is useless and should not exist. If you want to have one for some reason, tied to unlocks, I certainly don't need to know what my enemies experience level is, since it has no meaning. It's actively misleading to new players who don't know what it all means, so it's actually worse than giving no information about the enemy.
- While having many commanders added versatility to the game, in reality only a few of them are competitively viable for each faction. It's a tough call, but I think focussing on having fewer, but more rounded and interesting commanders would be preferred, or a return to the old doctrine system.
- The design of strategic points giving resources created implicit game mode imbalances. Whereas previously it was viable to have large team games with only a few resource points and mostly made of empty strat points, now you will inevitably have huge resource inflation in large team games with many strategic points. Since you can plop caches on everything, it means that you always end up with these stupidly large heavy tank spam games.
- When designing factions, more attention should be paid to how concepts scale to larger team games. For example, it's not a secret that 3v3 and 4v4 are *extremely* axis favoured. It's ok if large team games are not quite as balanced as 1v1, but they should not be left to rot in the wind just to satisfy the core competitive ranked players. There are a LOT of people who play it and it should enter into the equation at some point, even if it is not considered "priority #1".
- Factions should never ever ever ever ever be designed to have advantages in some stages of the games but not others. I mean, precise timings can be different, that's understandable, the idea of "early game faction" and "late game faction" are implicitly problematic and as above, cause innate imbalances across game modes. Large team games will always go longer and be more likely to reach late game, while in 1v1s its viable to shut somebody down completely with an early game faction. Either way, it means that you are forced to baalance some game modes at the expense of others. This is BAD.
- Randomness has a place, but it is "too strong" in CoH2 currently. Plane crashes are a particularly bad offender, but the desire to include more and more "big" units with huge explosions has also been an ongoing balance issue that has caused a lot of grief.
- Blizzards are shit and I hate them
- Some engine limitations need to be overcome. There is NO side armour on tanks, and forward/backward speeds are currently unable to be separated. A tank can reverse as fast as it can drive forwards. By de-coupling these variables, and making forward/backward movement different, we add interesting balance possibilities to the game. Additionally, by including side armour, medium tanks will become more viable as 'flankers' since you will no-longer need to get BEHIND an enemy tank in order to get a benefit from positioning.
- Please spend more time on optimizing the game. The first game was a resource hog to some extent, but it was also cutting edge graphically. CoH1 holds up surprisingly well against CoH2 (although 2 is clearly superior), yet 2 runs like shit on every computer ever made. I suspect part of this was development problems caused by the THQ financial situation, but when making a new game, starting from scratch, please pay more attention to this stuff.
- Please include custom games/ lobbies from the start. Thanks for adding them, but there was no reason why CoH2 on day 1 had less features than CoH1 and every other RTS had.
Sorry for the big wall of text, but I hope we can get some good discussion going.