Coh1 and Coh2 - The good, the bad and the ugly

As it has become clear that Relic is thinking about COH3, i wanted to have a discussion about the good and the bad in both vcoh and coh2. It should not be about which game is better or about the details in balance, but about the broader picture. So please keep it civilized and don't derail it

The list is as follows:

Coh1 did better:
-pacing
-strategic diversity
-vet only from kills
-more variety in vet (bought, shared, only on officer,…)
-ressource/territory system (small/middle/large mun and fuel, territory points not giving ressources)
-no abandoning
-sound of explosions & arty
-commander system (although a higher number (like 6 or 7) would be good)
-many global upgrades
-better house-counters
-input lag
-performance&optimization (although this is partly explained by worse graphics)
-no buyable commanders (im fine with buyable skins)
-visibility of your troops
-grenades ("sharper" feel)
-ressources below each other instead of next to each other
edit:
-multiple faction search
-dedicated 2v2 AT
-more refined animations
-Suppression mechanics




Coh2 did better:
-graphics
-vaulting
-vision (true sight, smoke)
-target ehicles button
-quality of life stuff like: multiple squad reinforcing, units in top right corner, timer, reverse!!
-capping system (although paks and mgs shouldnt be able to cap when setup)
edit:
-menus
-spectator mode
-snipers (invisibility in general, except OKW)

debated:
-offmap units only costing manpower (makes it less ressource efficient, therefore balanced)

what both didnt do good:
-campy playstyle for brits
-no rebindable hotkeys (even if you would need to change everything in a file it would be a great addition)
-state of balance at release
-no reload button for MGs
-AI quality
-overgimmicky DLC factions
-gamebreaking bugs
-too much RNG at times
-no reconnection feature

what both did do good:
-fluent gamestlye, right balance of makro and micro required
-emphasis on positioning
-voicelines & music (although slight edge for vcoh possibly)
-long support by relic




Possible additions from DOW3 to coh3:
-nothing, for the love of god

While we're at abandon I must say I like it much more than for example coh1 style crit system that required additional shot, or two, to kill a vehicle. It was supper annoying.

I would also say that coh2 done callins better. Coh1 callins that require no fuel are just pure cancer.

You also forgot sniper mechanics. Coh2 snipers are much, much better designed.

From the point of view of casters I would also add the whole spectactor mode.

I also think that design wise coh2 menus are much better. Coh1 menu is hard to use and it hides automatch function.

As for coh1 goodies, please add multiple faction search.

Btw did coh1 really have side armour? I have always thought there was no side armour in coh1.

While we're at abandon I must say I like it much more than for example coh1 style crit system that required additional shot, or two, to kill a vehicle. It was supper annoying.

indeed, although that was part of coh2 for a long time aswell, wasn't it? kübels surviving ISU shots and such things

I would also say that coh2 done callins better. Coh1 callins that require no fuel are just pure cancer.

i strongly disagree. Callins costing no fuel basically meant that you were not using your fuel,
and starving for manpower, which meant that relying on callins only was less effective. in coh2 on the other hand spamming kv1s, shermans, etc was a huge problem

You also forgot sniper mechanics. Coh2 snipers are much, much better designed.

From the point of view of casters I would also add the whole spectactor mode.

I also think that design wise coh2 menus are much better. Coh1 menu is hard to use and it hides automatch function.

As for coh1 goodies, please add multiple faction search.

good points, added

Btw did coh1 really have side armour? I have always thought there was no side armour in coh1.

i`m pretty sure it had a system for that

i`m pretty sure it had a system for that

AFAIK CoH never had a side armor system, only rear and front from vCoH to CoH2.
Would have been way better, but nah.

I think I'm gonna take some minutes to think about good list points and add them later :-)

But having fuel-free callins completely removes the point of holding territories.

Well, I played like a potato in the early game and lost every bit of ground. So what, I can still make an epic comeback with fuel free call ins.


It's even bigger cancer than coh2 call ins, which at least cost fuel, yet didn't need teching at first.


And it was not like vcoh call in tanks were duper manpower expensive. If I remember it right, Tiger cost 800an power which is only 170 mp more than the current tiger, yet it was completely fuel-free (not 230 fuel price)

Callins costing no fuel basically meant that you were not using your fuel,
and starving for manpower, which meant that relying on callins only was less effective. in coh2 on the other hand spamming kv1s, shermans, etc was a huge problemgood points, added
i`m pretty sure it had a system for that

From what I've heard, the manpower-only costs in coh were considered balanced only because controlling territory added to your popcap, and without any territory, your popcap was too small to get much. In coh2, if you're on the back foot fuel and territory wise, you can use callins to get tanks anyway. In coh, if you were on the back foot fuel and territory wise, you couldnt use callins to get tanks anyway because you wouldnt have the pop cap to get them.

AFAIK CoH never had a side armor system, only rear and front from vCoH to CoH2.
Would have been way better, but nah.

Just played a game and tested and and yes, i stand corrected. However i still think that coh2 simplified something with armor, but that might be wrong

Well, I played like a potato in the early game and lost every bit of ground. So what, I can still make an epic comeback with fuel free call ins.

there is one point i want to make besides Jaes excellent answer: in coh2 you can play like a potato aswell, still you will always have the fuel for puma for example

And it was not like vcoh call in tanks were duper manpower expensive. If I remember it right, Tiger cost 800an power which is only 170 mp more than the current tiger, yet it was completely fuel-free (not 230 fuel price)

manpower starvation was in my experience much more prominent in vcoh, therefore that half minute of income really hurt.

Without the coh popcap system the manpower cost would probably need to go up, but i believe it to be the better system ultimatively. Spamming those tanks doesnt work, so you have them if you want to close a game without teching or as a one-try option if you got outteched ( and if you manage to get a breathing room you have to play with the disadvantage of having significantly less manpower). this is a prime example of strategic diversity

If you think so...


You will not convince me and I will not convince you, so lets not waste this thread into our own personal bias

Armourwise, I think the only difference is that in coh1 the border between front and rear was always in the middle, while in coh2 some vehicles have more frontal armour than rear one.

As for the callin thing, why don't we just put it in the "both game did it wrong" category instead of arguing which implementation was the worst one?

I would also add AI to that category. It's absolutely awful in both games and I say that knowing how hard it is to implement it well.

alright, i made a category "debated", where i put call-ins in

added AI and no dedicated 2v2AT for coh2 aswell

These people talking about "spamming call ins" have clearly never actually played CoH1 at any reasonable level. Hurts me to see people be so ignorant and dogmatic about a game they know so little about. You should leave the constructive discussion to those who actually played both games and keep your biased CoH2 fanboyism to yourselves.

Hector just gets unbanned and immediately starts with his pompous elitism once again. I guess it's not a surprise you were banned in the first place.

I was really hopeful for this thread until Nosliw posted FeelsBadMan

If you could break it down to just a few points:

What CoH1 did well:

Vanilla balance was...well it was ok, if it wasn't for the broken stuff.

Commanders were far, far better. Less is more in this situation.

What CoH1 did poorly:

Every major patch up to 2.301 had a completely game-breaking bug or ability. Literally every patch had a gamebreaking bug, from paks that could oneshot any unit in the game to artillery with no cooldown.

What CoH2 did well:

Truesight

What CoH2 did wrong:

Balance overall isn't terrible, but it consists of a lot of ridiculous unbalanced things all equaling out.

What they both did right:

Infantry combat/cover is still great

What they both did wrong:

RNG is still such a crazy determining factor

The Brits.

Regarding callins,

Tanks in coh1 weren't wipe machines like in coh2. In coh1 it seems fairly common to not rely on tanks and many builds may not include vehicles altogether.(Moreso for US and Brits) Lategame there is often fuel float.

In coh2 you need tanks to win games. They are just more manueverable and potent.

So vehicles costing only manpower is ok if they aren't game ending death machines like the old tiger ace as the most egregious example.

When they make coh3, they need to make sure they design the resources understanding - how important manpower, fuel, and munitions will be. Should you win if you have more fuel and munitions from map control? or is manpower ultimately more important?

What should the costs and benefits of teching (to vehicles for example) be and what sort of time delay or investnment should there be to reap these rewards(Map control, vp lead, mp bleed, ect).

Either system can work, so long as they go through the process and ask all the pertinant questions and flush out whatever system they choose to implement. In coh2 they said "well it was like this in coh1 lets just copy pasta" even though the economy is different and units have different levels of effectiveness.

TLDR- If they have a comprehensive and well thought out and tested design and review process for the economy, tech and unit timings they will suceed, if not you will have nonsense and imbalanced units, tech choices or strats

Regarding callins,

TLDR- If they have a comprehensive and well thought out and tested design and review process for the economy, tech and unit timings they will suceed, if not you will have nonsense and imbalanced units, tech choices or strats

This is the most important part, no matter what design choices they make. Ultimately it doesn't matter what feature/mechanic came from where, just as long as we acknowledge that it is good/bad and can say why.

I wasn't there during the time, but as far as I can tell, many design decisions during beta and also in later stages were half asses, not thought out properly, (as people said before me) copy pasted from coh1 when they shouldn't have been and some things weren't, even though they should have been.

Was this due to lack of care? I doubt that.
Lack of funding and staff? This probably contributed difficulties to the situation.
Does any of this matter any more? No.

The whole package just needs to make sense and it doesn't, in both games.

I'm gonna tell you what both games did wrong: There's a tremendously jarring line between vanilla and DLC factions. PE and Brits are as far away as USF, OKW and Brits are from their respective vanilla games. And that is due to power creepy "new/fun/interesting ways to play" which means some sort of gimmicky bullshit and new mechanics that would have been impossible to account/adjust for, concerning the vanilla factions.

Why was OST on life support™ for so long and why is the Panther in a good spot™? Because you can't have a vanilla and bread and butter faction that isn't slightly lacking, without making the gimmicky factions completely obsolete. They couldn't replicate that beautiful equilibrium in vcoh (excluding all the abuse bs), just see how Soviet meta has changed so much, so radically and so often. Hell, I'm only playing since the major OKW rework and I am very happy to not have been part of what the game was before then. It sounds like a major shitshow.

just my 2 pennies as usual.

TLDR: Who cares about coh1 vs. coh2, I just want a properly/well designed/thought out game with polish and all the quality of life goodies.

But having fuel-free callins completely removes the point of holding territories.

Well, I played like a potato in the early game and lost every bit of ground. So what, I can still make an epic comeback with fuel free call ins.


It's even bigger cancer than coh2 call ins, which at least cost fuel, yet didn't need teching at first.


And it was not like vcoh call in tanks were duper manpower expensive. If I remember it right, Tiger cost 800an power which is only 170 mp more than the current tiger, yet it was completely fuel-free (not 230 fuel price)

You forgot purchased Vet from COH1 (Panzer Elite?) and call-in Vet (early Rifle Company from COH2).

I wish someone at Relic would look at the Wikinger mod, especially the version with the high zoom. It seems a little more realistic while keeping COH's playability (better than either Men of War or Steel Division).

These people talking about "spamming call ins" have clearly never actually played CoH1 at any reasonable level. Hurts me to see people be so ignorant and dogmatic about a game they know so little about. You should leave the constructive discussion to those who actually played both games and keep your biased CoH2 fanboyism to yourselves.

Hector just gets unbanned and immediately starts with his pompous elitism once again. I guess it's not a surprise you were banned in the first place.

I tried to point out that in current coh2 mode fuel-free call-ins wouldn't work at all.

In vcoh it worked because of reasons like pop tied to territory (which I didn't like because it made some maps - semosky - pure cancer. You lost the cut off and you can just call it GG because you cannot reinforce your army to make a counter-attack anymore) and because tanks weren't so potent.

I do not think relic is going from a coh2 mode to vcoh mode when it comes to resource distributions because pop tied to territory sucked.

And with current mode fuel-free call-ins would be blatantly OP - just look at the tiger ace how it can swing the battlefield into your favour because it can kill 2-3 tanks before it dies so you end up trading 800 MP for 600-700 MP and 200-300 fuel. Then you just finish your enemy off with your normal tank army because he just lost most of his tanks and AT sources.


Next time put the money where your mouth is and create something constructive before you start hypocritically accusing everyone left and right.

guys, calm your tits regarding the "call-in" thing, its just a minor part of why the games were good or bad

added strategic diversity for vcoh, overgimmicky DLC factions, gamebreaking bugs for both (coh 2 had its fair share aswell, the vehicle crew bug comes to my mind, good times ) and RNG aswell

- Coh1 had great economical layers in each tiers. All of those layers were making sense and part of the strategical decisions players had to take.

Whermarch layers were bound to the veterancy system and USF had different teching choices to improve their basic units at the cost of slowing the teching to the next tier.
Relic should definitively go back to this deep but really easy to understand economical management for each faction. Coh2 economical model just don't work, Ostheer tiering is half done, BPs should have been made in a form of various layers unlocking units or abilities from the previous tier so the player could decide to have an extensive play with its T1 by unlocking BP2 (unlocking new abilities and/or special units) but at the cost of delaying its T2 etc...

- Coh2 map resource design is better to manage than Coh1. Finally I find it better to have a multitude of point providing any resource in few quantity and a couple of points on the map dedicated to a unique resource. But what is definitively missing is the Coh1 Popcap system, popcap should be a ressource to be managed as much as fuel, amo and manpower.

- Coh1 doctrine system is much better. To me Coh2 doctrines management is a kind of failure or an unfinished asset of the game due to THQ bankrut. I only hope Relic take inspiration from Coh1 than Coh2 on this topic.

- Cut the british design, it was a failure in Coh1, and is still a failure in Coh2.

- More design around units synergy and stop designing factions around gaps. One of the biggest issue with Coh2 is that half of factions have been design around gaps. Soviet lack of big tanks, USF lack of support unit, OKW lack of suppression unit and medium tanks etc.. This design method doesn't work because in order to fullfil the gap artificially created you need to make other units stronger than they are supposed to be ,bringing the game to a lot of unbalance aspects.