Relic wants your vote about blizzards

Sure, that's why international poker is played exclusively by hippies with flowers in their hair who hold hands and sing kumbaya when the other side wins their money.

Much respect for you, son.

Interesting mixed response. Not what I was expecting at all.

Some of us enjoy the weather elements. I hope more weather elements such as rain storms get added in the future.

Blizzard:
-Remove 50mp cost to bonfires. Add a 2-3min cooldown to them.
-Remove damage/killing done to troops, just reduce performance of units suffering from cold or even increasing RA.
-Make it so it modifies in certain way deep snow and ice.
---Heavy snow: cloaks all units inside them. Useful for tanks/paks.
---Increase resilience of ice. Harder to destroy.

Heavy snow:
-Remove or severely nerf the penalties regarding movement.
-You could always make it an inbetween default cover and red cover regarding RA.

+1

I'd like to see blizzards stay in automatch, but reworked.

Some ideas to balance and change the Lethality of the Blizzards.

- Cheap upgrade for all infantry. Winter combat gear, visual upgrade

- Maybe income penaly on blizzards?

- Accuracy decrease for all units on blizzards?

I really like the blizzards as it adds more of an epic story to the battle(and disables cas). I still don't fully understand why slow troop movement through water was removed, it was part of the map and you had to strategize and take risks when you would move through certain parts of the map. If blizzards are taken away it just seems like all the maps are going to play out the same. Then one day we'll vote on ice breaking and that'll be gone, then deep snow, then negative cover in rivers. One of my favorite parts of this game is how the maps stand out from other RTS games, they impact the battlefield in various ways and you have to learn the flow of the map. Please revert water movement and make more blizzard maps!

Yeah I found that change where water movement no longer slowed units down both surprising and disappointing. Do people really want to play a game like this on a flat and featureless landscape, or one in which terrain is largely cosmetic?

Units dying in blizzards drive me crazy, it feels like a silly micro tax, as if it's not enough to be playing a live opponent. I'd be okay with it only limiting vision.

A bit off topic, but imo deep snow isn't obvious enough at a glance, and creates an added challenge to map balance.

Take the north side of Semoisky for example. The north side has the extremely important house overlooking the cutoff, and a series of green cover stone walls around the house. Logically, the northern player wants to defend his cutoff using these, but the deep snow around them makes squads extremely vulnerable to grenades and wipes on retreat. This doesn't effect the southern cutoff nearly as much, and players that are used to playing on Semoisky summer can feel burned when they lose squads to this mechanic.

That's just one example of deep snow being frustrating, but I have never once walked through a patch of deep snow and felt anything other than "ffs this is annoying". It ends up feeling like the game is trolling you.

When I first started playing COH2 I hated the weather bit. Now I love it. Adds a lot of depth to the game. More than once I've prematurely overtaken a german bunker on Rzhev winter due to its limited visibility during a blizzard.

I also agree I don;t like that they removed the slow effects for water. It added structure to your defense.

I would really like to see fog/rain added to the game.

We need more tactical options, not less.

Blizzards add variety but currently decrease the amount of tactical options on hand because reduced sight is more than offset by the way the cold affects infantry. Blizzards are currently an opportunity to entrench and heal and turtle, to get your squads from the base sector back onto front lines.

DO NOT PUNISH PLAYERS WHO WANT TO USE THE BLIZZARD offensively. Promote dynamic playstyles.

Just tweak a few numbers.

Lots of excellent ideas how to do that, in this very thread.

Make blizzards a commander ability for NKVD

Balance wise, presumably the idea is that OKW are balanced on a normal weather map vs every other faction (whether they are or not is another story, the intent is that they are).

So on a winter map, they get cold weather clothing that no other faction can get. So they are stronger.

With only one faction getting this option it is fundamentally impossible to balance the factions for both types of weather.

Same with mud.

Lol. I've spent more than 20 years in game design.

Then you should know better.

Then you should know better.

Your argument makes no sense:

Dota 2 has a multi-million pound tournament on at the moment, its unarguably "competitive" yet it has plenty of RNG:
- uphill attacks 50% chance miss
- evasion, bash, crit strike, maim - all random
- countless proc abilities
- auto attack min/max

It also has plenty of players fighting the environment in the creeps. The neutral creeps have min/max damage and will randomly target enemies with abilities when criteria are met (3 units within aoe of their spawn).

All of these are obviously in the game on purpose and I could make the same arguments with practically any sport or competitive game with the possible exception of chess (it is described as the "pure strategy" game after all)

You mention lol as your example of a good strategy game, again it has countless random components.


I agree that there are aspects of Coh that go way overboard with randomness.. plane crashes springs to mind, but your assertions that reducing randomness always makes things more competitive or is good "game design" is objectively wrong.

The correct way to think about RNG in games IMO, is whether or not player skill can mitigate said RNG. For example, rear armor hits increase the likelihood of successful penetration, but is mitigated through good micro.

It is when RNG is unmitigated and punishes players needlessly that it gets silly. For example: old flamer explosions could happen at any time. This led to flamers being very awkward investments. Sometimes you spent 60 munitions on molotoving yourself, sometimes you spent it on a scaling upgrade that helped you throughout the game.

RNG has a place in COH 2. It is one of the most important factors in the game. However, steps should be taken to mitigate uncounterable RNG, so that players don't get punished "just 'cause.'

It is also for this reason that I think blizzards have a place in this game. They just need a rework.

Your argument makes no sense:

Dota 2 has a multi-million pound tournament on at the moment, its unarguably "competitive" yet it has plenty of RNG:
- uphill attacks 50% chance miss
- evasion, bash, crit strike, maim - all random
- countless proc abilities
- auto attack min/max

It also has plenty of players fighting the environment in the creeps. The neutral creeps have min/max damage and will randomly target enemies with abilities when criteria are met (3 units within aoe of their spawn).

All of these are obviously in the game on purpose and I could make the same arguments with practically any sport or competitive game with the possible exception of chess (it is described as the "pure strategy" game after all)

You mention lol as your example of a good strategy game, again it has countless random components.


I agree that there are aspects of Coh that go way overboard with randomness.. plane crashes springs to mind, but your assertions that reducing randomness always makes things more competitive or is good "game design" is objectively wrong.

You fail see the difference that these are all either player choice or are not an environmental effect out of player control.

The player can choose to fight on the hill, the player can choose to engage a unit with higher crit chance or with higher proc chance.

A units stats are always going influence play and there will always be some amount of risk/reward in MP games, however an environmental effect the outcome of a match is bad design in an RTS

You fail see the difference that these are all either player choice or are not an environmental effect.

A units stats are always going influence play and there will always be some amount of risk/reward in MP games, however an environmental effect the outcome of a match is bad design in an RTS

Except the environment of blizzards doesn't affect the outcome of a match, it may at best give an opening for a player to break the defensive line of opponent in a single skirmish.
It won't make you win a lost game, unless opponent will suffer a brain fart and let all his infantry and weapon teams freeze to death, but you still have the control over your units freezing via building campfires or correct positioning in cover.

Except the environment of blizzards doesn't affect the outcome of a match, it may at best give an opening for a player to break the defensive line of opponent in a single skirmish.
It won't make you win a lost game, unless opponent will suffer a brain fart and let all his infantry and weapon teams freeze to death, but you still have the control over your units freezing via building campfires or correct positioning in cover.

Of course it can affect the outcome of a match.

Any environmental effect that damages the player isn't good design.

Of course it can affect the outcome of a match.

Any environmental effect that damages the player isn't good design.

Haven't you said it yourself, that its not that bad if player have control over mitigating the effect?

You can build campfires and put infantry in cover to mitigate blizzard effects.
Only the attacking player exposes himself to them by the need of advancing during the blizzard.

Haven't you said it yourself, that its not that bad if player have control over mitigating the effect?

You can build campfires and put infantry in cover to mitigate blizzard effects.
Only the attacking player exposes himself to them by the need of advancing during the blizzard.

Camp fires cost munis, building camp fires anywhere isn't ideal.

When it comes to a change in a global effect that will change the game for all players you need a holistic view.

I've found from experience that such changes cause feature creep, and when that happens things get messy.

I spent 4 years as competitive game designer on a triple AAA project, the one element that frustrated players more than anything during our playtests was being punished by the game itself, outside random elements are not appreciated.

I think I've spent enough time on this.

Peace