Help for a COH 2 newbie

Hello guys,

I'm new to the forums and i was hoping to get some advice from you for playing the OKW properly.
While there was an active community, I was a huge fan of Dawn of War 2 and played it quite a lot in 2vs2. In fact, my team mate and me were pretty successful as we made it under top 100 teams on the ladder and managed to stay there. After DOW 2 "died" more or less as THQ went down and the support was cut, I really missed having a demanding RTS online game with a huge focus on intense combat and not so much around base building and economy. So I jumped into COH 2, but it's pretty hard and there some huge differences to Dawn of War 2! So I have a bunch of really general and some more specific questions for you and I would really appreciate it if you read through my post and help with this or that problem. My ol' team mate doesn't want to join me, so I started with 1vs1.

General questions:

1. Does this game have a decent amount of new and/or inexperienced players? I played around 16 games in total now in ranked and most of them were pretty demanding while the rest of the matches I faced enemies who could barely do anything and felt like they just jumped in to the game without any RTS experience. So do I only face good players or total noobs, but nothing in between?
2. How do I micro a larger force properly? In DOW 2 I more or less exclusively played Space Marines and later on the Imperial Guard but no faction there fields as many troops as you have to get in COH 2. DOW 2 very much encouraged commanding every squad individually. Setting command groups for single squads is only viable for me till the mid-game ("not enough numbers") and when I put 3 squads of Volks in to the same command group, I'm just blobbing hard and tend to make mistake when I want to send one of them to cap a point.
3. Any advice on the "cap order" for the ressource points on the map?


OKW questions:

1. Sadly, there isn't a huge amount of OKW guides on COH2.org and I have problems coming up with a build order. Often I found myself unsure of what to buy next and just ended up saving on a Panzer IV.
2. Also, which commanders are viable? I have the 3 standard ones and I don't like any of them too much.. But the reason for this is really that I can't figure them out but also can't find guides. None of their abilities seems to be too handy for my problems.
3. A huge problem for me are especially blobs of US riflemen and also soviet infantry with Maxim support. Don't get me wrong: I don't get completely overrun. But I'm mostly the player who has to react and sooner or later, there comes a heavy tank and I'm in a even worse position. ISGs were really crucial for winning some of these hard games but they can't do the job alone and the MG-34s are suprisingly weak. In DOW 2 suppresion teams would eat any squad trying to close on them while even 2 MG-34s can't seem to stop the blob of crawling riflemen until they can use smoke or a grenade.
4. How do I use the Kübelwagen? I isn't strong enough to engage most infantry and apart from scouting and capping, it seems that it can't do anything else. When I bought it, I more or less just it as a dedicated capping unit and later on for decapping the enemies fuel during major engagements. But getting a Volksquad instead always seemed better.

I'm always looking forward to learn and getting better so please excuse my noob questions. And sorry for my English btw, no native speaker.

Okw? Play with me and I'll convert you to the next big thing in team games. Top 60 guaranteed.

In regards to your very first question, the game takes 10 matches per faction before it assigns you a rank. You also get separate ranks for each game mode (1v1, 2v2, etc).

In those 10 initial games you will often get matched against a wide range of skills while it determines what your skill level is. After that, it should be more consistent (depending on what other players are online).

If you would like to see the ranks of your opponents, I recommend using CELO: https://www.coh2.org/topic/18454/celo-company-of-elo

Thank you for your answers! Looking forward to maybe some additional answers as well. So you guys think that OKW is an ok faction to start with?

Okw? Play with me and I'll convert you to the next big thing in team games. Top 60 guaranteed.

Why not, though I don't really play a lot in general anymore if you can live with that.. Also I personally only like 1vs1 or 2vs2, even back in the DOW2 days larger team games were basically just a huge spamfest and that's not so fun.