Interview with qduffy about CoH, OF, and CoH 2

I haven't listened to it yet (I will soon) but here is a Three Moves Ahead episode where they interview Quinn Duffy about the CoH series. Three Moves Ahead is a strategy game podcast and they usually sort of know what they are talking about, and Quinn Duffy has worked as a designer on all three CoH games so he definitely knows what he's talking about.

Listening to all the talk about the Brit faction is quite painful. Shane Neville: "We wanted a faction that could turtle and make what they call a 'simcity'." At least Quinn recognizes what was wrong about the faction.

The thing that annoys me about the Brits, from a design perspective, is the way they failed the feel of the faction. Amis and Wehr capture, *conceptually* , the archetypes of the armies in R/L WW2 (Amis: bigger, faster but less experienced / Wehr: smaller, high quality units, more seasoned). Even the PE was a clever take on the low-armour late WW2 kampfgruppe.

OTOH in CoH the British army was plodding and dependent on static defences. This is the British army that, after it broke out of Caen, motored to the German border in record time, mastered armoured recce doctrines and had a solid cadre of NCOs (and, in the 8th Army, veteran units).

As a Brit myself the most damning thing I can say about my favourite RTS is that *I hate Brits*

:/

A little late to the party here, but I found this to be a fascinating podcast. It gives a high level overview of the design objectives of both COH and COH2. Some quick impressions:

* TOV was intended to be a three-part DLC, not a boxed expansion.

* Eastern Front was considered, and work started, but the THC/COHO situation put it on the back-burner, and the idea ultimately became COH2. Also, huge technical challenges in doing Eastern Front environment in original Essence Engine.

* Big discussion on faction philosophies. Brits intended to be turtle faction. (My own take: emplacements were a huge part of their design, things broke badly when they became obsolete in the metagame. This was probably hugely unintended by original design.)

* Interesting discussion about balancing design for casual player vs. design for skilled players. Brits, to some extent, were meant to bridge this gap.

* Some good discussion about the tone of the factions, both vanilla and OF. It really gets hammered home with the types of chatter the units have.

* A really interesting point about how the map after a game is a record of the events that transpired on it. It's almost unique to COH.

Nicely done Quinn and Shane Neville!