vCoh vs Coh2 explosions

Casulties of WW1: about 11.000.000 (11-15 mio estimated, without further casualties)
Casulties of WW2: about 60.000.000 (60-90 mio estimated, without further casualties)

Considering numbers, WW2 was more of a slaughter war. WW1 is still considered by historians that altered the lifes of many countries to come.

There is indeed risk involved taking topics which have not been fully explored to gameify real-life stories and events to fit the mold of intended game-play of a video-game. One never thought WW1 would be an interesting topic for a FPS, yet a popular company managed to adapt it, albeit a bit artistically, whilst being rather fun. WW1 also had quite a few war changing mechanics, e.g. the introduction of the Lincolnshire boiling water on wheels tank.

And it seems to pay off for that company, considering the pre-ordering numbers being rather high and other companies intending to explore the WW1 theme.

Some offtopic, sorry.

Er... Slaughter war... I meant not by casulties, but by... maybe "style" of war itself. Don't know, how to explain it better. That was some kind of "transitory" type of war - in-between of old "wall-to-wall" war (last of them was murican civil) and modern war.

My point about it was, that CoH series strategies are mostly about "unit (micro)control & saving" in game. But... WWI wasn't that war, where sides of conflict cared about losses too much. We could say same about WWII, but... it's more "modern", so - saving manpower was actually important. + in WWI there wasn't such big number of combat vehicles, different type weapons... It will be pretty "poor" strategy, if they will do it, I suppouse. But, that's my sight on it... maybe Im wrong.

P.S. Battlefield 1 hype is not that understandable for me... It will be just another "battlefield 3" in other decorations. Or maybe "Battlefront" in WWI, which is worse. Whoever expects it - it won't be great, I can say it right now for sure. Don't pay to EA and their enslaved DICE anymore, they don't deserve it.

P.P.S. If CoH 3 will be about WWI - Im 100% sure, that they will add there some "gas mechanics", cos in WWI different chems and gases used pretty often in combats. It will be innovation, like Cold Tech in CoH 2. And my forsight - people will whine, that "it makes game more difficult, for no reason, remove it pls, we are reatards!", like they did with Cold Tech...

explosions and graphics in coh2 are much better

vCoH feels like a good girl that was good in school, excelled in the volleyball team and later became a doctor. She made her parents very proud.
CoH2 is more like her sister that is 5-6 years younger, can't stand the pressure of the high bar her sister has put and thus is just disappointing everyone with the wrong decisions she takes.

Like my ex.

vCoH feels like a good girl that was good in school, excelled in the volleyball team and later became a doctor. She made her parents very proud.
CoH2 is more like her sister that is 5-6 years younger, can't stand the pressure of the high bar her sister has put and thus is just disappointing everyone with the wrong decisions she takes.

Like my ex.

I got more playtime with the younger one, especially in team games, despite, as the topics suggests, explosions being smaller, rrrrr.

Explosions are fucking weird in this game. On one hand you have artillery with the big visual effects and they really only damage people at very close proximity to the center of the blast. Then you have the Scott/Lieg/75mm with a tiny explosion sometimes one shotting an entire squad. Its like the visual effects in COH2 don't correspond very well with the actual damage radius from many explosions, not so much the case with vcoh.

Readability; the ability to quickly understand exactly what is happening in-game.

We could have smoke rounds that flood an entire control sector with smoke that's higher than the building, but it would be completely unreadable. Similarly, we could have rail-gun arty with explosions the size of several buildings, with massive amounts of lingering smoke - again, completely unreadable.

The thing CoH2 did so well (compared to CoH1) was making the game much easier to understand. We have a nice list of all our units in the top right, with their status (in combat, suppressed, etc.), we have a cleaner mini-map (less random lines), a cleaner UI (less blank space)... this carries over to gameplay as well.

Giant explosions, clouds of smoke, massive craters - they all look good, but they're bad for gameplay. When arty hits, you need to be able to see if you're units are in the area of fire, how close they are, and even exactly where the shell hit (so you can guess the target area). CoH1's massive clouds prevented that. In addition, by having the sizes, colors, etc. change significantly between what were historically very similar shells, it allows the player to understand what is actually being fired at them; quite important since historically similarly performing units have such drastically different stats.

Contrary to popular belief, the goal of a competitive game's graphics ISN'T to look visually stunning; it's to provide all the information the player needs in a quick and effective manner.

Er... Slaughter war... I meant not by casulties, but by... maybe "style" of war itself. Don't know, how to explain it better.

WW1 was the first war with machine guns and the last world war without counters to the machine gun (tanks). ground taken was minimal, casualties were maximal. do you mean that?

Readability; the ability to quickly understand exactly what is happening in-game.

We could have smoke rounds that flood an entire control sector with smoke that's higher than the building, but it would be completely unreadable. Similarly, we could have rail-gun arty with explosions the size of several buildings, with massive amounts of lingering smoke - again, completely unreadable.

The thing CoH2 did so well (compared to CoH1) was making the game much easier to understand. We have a nice list of all our units in the top right, with their status (in combat, suppressed, etc.), we have a cleaner mini-map (less random lines), a cleaner UI (less blank space)... this carries over to gameplay as well.

Giant explosions, clouds of smoke, massive craters - they all look good, but they're bad for gameplay. When arty hits, you need to be able to see if you're units are in the area of fire, how close they are, and even exactly where the shell hit (so you can guess the target area). CoH1's massive clouds prevented that. In addition, by having the sizes, colors, etc. change significantly between what were historically very similar shells, it allows the player to understand what is actually being fired at them; quite important since historically similarly performing units have such drastically different stats.

Contrary to popular belief, the goal of a competitive game's graphics ISN'T to look visually stunning; it's to provide all the information the player needs in a quick and effective manner.

Aside from the units list, I think a lot of people would completely disagree on the rest of those points. COH2 minimap tactical map and UI is a mess by comparison (I think we've all gotten used to it by now but its still meh). VCOH effects were less obtrusive. Yes the artillery might have a bigger dust could, but it settled out very quickly. In COH2 the explosion is smaller, but this brown dust cloud just lingers for several seconds which not only ruins the clarity but chokes down weaker PCs. The Ostwind and 20mm AC make this frag explosion effect that was not in the previous game. Tracers and vapor trails, the one visual effect that actually helps the player, was more distinct in COH1. I remember when the game was in beta people were complaining because there was no tracers (or they were extremely dim) and they were added in. If Relic made the game more "readable" in any way, it was purely on accident not intentional.

That was some kind of "transitory" type of war - in-between of old "wall-to-wall" war (last of them was murican civil) and modern war.

All wars are transitional, now; tech advances so fast we never fight the same war twice any more.

Good one, I remember the sensational massive barrages that could be had in CoH1. It hasn't felt as impressive in CoH2 and I haven't been able to put my finger on it. But here it is, right there. It's so much weaker. This game at its best is massivly immersive or used to be but these kind of things make it less good.

- Audiofiles seem less, troops used to talk about things, baseball and stuff, when running about outside of a fight
- HMG bursts used to be awesome
- Explosions used to be awesome
- Panzer 4 used to be awesome

I want that back. Please keep all the good stuff and build from there. I want Cold Tech back too. I don't understand how any sane person loving the game would be ok with this less feeling.

Please Relic!

Readability; the ability to quickly understand exactly what is happening in-game.

We could have smoke rounds that flood an entire control sector with smoke that's higher than the building, but it would be completely unreadable. Similarly, we could have rail-gun arty with explosions the size of several buildings, with massive amounts of lingering smoke - again, completely unreadable.

The thing CoH2 did so well (compared to CoH1) was making the game much easier to understand. We have a nice list of all our units in the top right, with their status (in combat, suppressed, etc.), we have a cleaner mini-map (less random lines), a cleaner UI (less blank space)... this carries over to gameplay as well.

Giant explosions, clouds of smoke, massive craters - they all look good, but they're bad for gameplay. When arty hits, you need to be able to see if you're units are in the area of fire, how close they are, and even exactly where the shell hit (so you can guess the target area). CoH1's massive clouds prevented that. In addition, by having the sizes, colors, etc. change significantly between what were historically very similar shells, it allows the player to understand what is actually being fired at them; quite important since historically similarly performing units have such drastically different stats.

Contrary to popular belief, the goal of a competitive game's graphics ISN'T to look visually stunning; it's to provide all the information the player needs in a quick and effective manner.

I don't really have an opinion on CoH1 vs. CoH2 visual effects (I don't think one style is necessarily better than the other), but this is a really strange argument to make. Showing suppression/moving/attacking icons on the tactical map and unit lists is really the only improvement Relic made to readability in CoH2. Always showing vehicle health bars is nice too, even though they really shrunk them for some strange reason, and I think they show infantry unit squad sizes regardless of selection, which is a nice minor addition as well. On the other hand, they made readability worse in much of the rest of the game:

• They removed tracers/contrails from AT gun shells, sniper rounds, and MG rounds. It is much more difficult in CoH2 to immediately ascertain the location of these units based on their attacks.
  
• They drastically reduced the length of most grenade throw animations and removed contrails from grenades (at least I'm pretty sure they had those in CoH1, I'll have to go back and check). I personally don't mind this change because it mades grenades stronger and more difficult to dodge, but it was still done by making them more difficult to read.
  
• They cluttered the tactical map with a lot of useless information. You can argue that the suppression/movement/attack icons on the tactical map are good (I personally dislike them but I understand the utility), but the multitude of resource values scattered everywhere is so distracting.
  
• They increased the density of trees and rubble on maps, making it a lot more difficult to spot squad locations at a glance.
  
• They added white winter maps without realizing that player-controlled squads have light blue shield icons with health bars that are semi-transparent when not selected. Unsurprisingly, it's pretty damn hard to see how much health your unselected squads have when the information is semi-transparent light blue on a white backdrop.
  

I agree with your sentiment, that an RTS game should prioritize readability over flashy graphics whenever possible. Unfortunately, CoH2 is a terrible example of a game that does this. When you go back and actually compare the two piece-for-piece, CoH1 as a whole gave the player far more information in a far clearer fashion.