Main Reason CoH2 Less Competitive than Original

So aside from more prominent RNG, the current lack of maps, less teching options (global unit upgrades), and some unit imbalances, there is just a huge design flaw that I haven't really seen anyone talk about and is really keeping the game back: lack of control. I'm not talking about the command input lag, I'm talking about the incredibly slow pace of every engagement involving vehicle micro and the infantry model's "do whatever the hell I want" attitude.

I'll start off with the Assault Guns. In CoH1 they had decent range, maybe slightly longer than your average tank, and they had really good front armor. The rear armor was vulnerable to flanking, but if you reacted with a bit of urgency they still had enough speed and a fast enough rotation speed that you could prevent a single tank from getting behind you in most situations. In this game it feels like Men of War or WoT. Ridiculous semi realistic range and turtle speed rotation. Some are faster than others, but at least half of the AG's you can see a vehicle coming and even if you have 100apm its not going to help at all because there is a ludicrous bottleneck on reaction speed from the vehicle rather than your actual ability. No matter how fast you are, a new comer to the franchise will most likely be able to control it as well as you can. Skill cap just fell through the floor. All emphasis is put on camping them in the right position, like Plants vs Zombies.

Similar concept with the German 222 Scout Car. They aren't used so defensively because of the nature of the unit, but you are really bottlenecked by the vehicles handling instead of your level of micro. They look like they move half speed compared to CoH1, with a zoom level about 20% greater.

Another huge problem is the infantry control. They don't suffer from the slow syndrome as badly as the vehicles do, but you can only command them to a certain extent. Their AI is terrible for competitive play. Yes a Anti Tank round went off nearby and its scary, I understand that, I really do. But I don't give a shit about watching my pixel guys jumping and dodging all over the place in a multiplayer game I'm trying to play competitively, save that for the campaign. I was playing in the Wifi tourney the other day and I dodged a molotov early in the game, then my guys just decided the explosion they barely missed was so traumatic they were going to prone crawl in to it. Probably would have won that engagement otherwise, but nope I got completely pushed off my side of the map because of something completely out of my control. If a tank or arty shell exploding nearby causes a slight dive/daze effect, that is tolerable. But it seems like almost everything in this game causes them to have some autonomous reaction. Its almost feels like The Sims Eastern Front edition- the point isn't for me to control but to enjoy watching them as they interact with the world. Also just get rid of the auto cover seeking, they do a bad job.

In this game you have time to go make a cofee between an engagement of gren and conscript (without nade being used or red cover) vrs vcoh where you had to watch all your unit everywhere because they would die so fast wich make the skill lvl higher since you had less time to react.

Agree with your post.

Funny you should mention this, because I think this is one of the thing COH2 did correctly.

Their main objective with units that are slow to respond is to force you to commit to a certain strategy. Your assault gun is slow to turn yes, and as a result you need to be careful where you place it. An unsound strategy gets punished harder in that respect and thus strategic players are more valued in competitive matches. The slower pace engagement is another way to try and reward players who carefully plan moves over the twitch micro gamers who value their APM scores. I'm not saying it is all perfect, but I agree with their overall design aims in doing it. If you want a competitive twitch micro RTS, there are plenty to choose from.

I won't defend infantry AI because honestly I don't understand it all the time and sometimes they do things which are quite silly. No severe complaints though.

As a side note, what do you think is a realistic range for a vehicle? If you are talking about Elephants, Tigers and the like consider that the real range of these tanks is enough to shoot over an entire COH2 map and then some.

You think all the stupid shit that happens in this game is done right.

this is eastern front, i don't understand why soviet units size are only 6, and why germans only 4 and not 5 for example? why doctrines are very badly designed right now? why maps are small and sectore are so big? And last, why the hell patches are fixing nearly nothing when there is so many issues that needs to be fixed right now?

these are main reasons IMO why CoH1 is still more competitive than CoH2 atm

Funny you should mention this, because I think this is one of the thing COH2 did correctly.

Their main objective with units that are slow to respond is to force you to commit to a certain strategy. Your assault gun is slow to turn yes, and as a result you need to be careful where you place it. An unsound strategy gets punished harder in that respect and thus strategic players are more valued in competitive matches. The slower pace engagement is another way to try and reward players who carefully plan moves over the twitch micro gamers who value their APM scores. I'm not saying it is all perfect, but I agree with their overall design aims in doing it. If you want a competitive twitch micro RTS, there are plenty to choose from.

Positioning should be important, but the handling is so bad that even if you are positioning them in a conservative location you are still vulnerable to a flank to just one tank.

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This is a scenario that happened recently. Even though it was just one tank and I saw it coming three or four seconds in advance, the rotation was so bad that it couldn't even rotate less than 90 degress fast enough to get one shot off before it was behind me. If I had started reversing while turning that probably would have worked since the SU85 has a decent reverse speed, but any other Assault Gun wouldn't even be able to do that. Its not like the SU was in a bad spot, putting any more emphasis on positioning would just lead to a very campy game if I can't even safely park a tank like that.

Its not that I want to win every game just by clicking faster. The more things you can do better than your opponent does (micro, strategy, coordination, positioning, etc.) the higher your chances of beating him. The new doctrine system and lack of global upgrades already removed a substantial amount of strategy from the game, so I don't see how reducing a players ability to out micro the opponent on top of that increases the chance of the better player winning.

As a side note, what do you think is a realistic range for a vehicle? If you are talking about Elephants, Tigers and the like consider that the real range of these tanks is enough to shoot over an entire COH2 map and then some.

I said "semi realistic" because they are still shorter ranges than in reality, but the changes that were made seem to be done in the name of realism rather than improving gameplay.

Agreed 100%. Anyone who says "the vehicles are less responsive because they want to make the battles more about thinking and less about micro" is wrong because the damage overall is higher than in vCoH - if you look away for a moment or two, one or two penetrating shots can take your tank down to half health or even less. Right now the game rewards caution and camping over bold moves and mobility, because the ranges are so huge, the vehicles are unresponsive, and the damage is high.

And don't even get me started on the infantry. People jumping out of cover and so forth is always going to be a problem for a game like CoH but right now a lot of infantry combat comes down to the random number generator, either in terms of getting crits with your small arms or in terms of getting a quick crit with your Molotov or a hit with your rifle grenade that kills people rather than just making a little puff of smoke.

Positioning should be important, but the handling is so bad that even if you are positioning them in a conservative location you are still vulnerable to a flank to just one tank.

That's also the reason Paks are so bad in this game. The only thing that has a workable turnspeed are the HMGs.

The infantry behaviour (auto cover seek, lack of squad cohesion in moving, too many environmental effects triggering the squad to go catatonic for a few moments) is the most frustrating of the two. The vehicle stuff is easier to adapt to and at least behaves predictably. The German 222 is actually one of the better handling vehicles in the game. Assault Gun rotation is painfully slow though. It's strange because the auto cover seek was originally in DoW2 but got removed because so many people complained it took away their control of the unit in a negative way. The memo must not've been passed on to the CoH2 team that most MP players do not want it.

Infantry dance too much

I understand exactly what you are talking about Basilone.

I understand exactly what you are talking about Basilone.

+1

The lack of control makes the game frustrating and the really slow pace makes it boring to me.

I agree that the vehicle path finding and the infantry AI is just terrible. Save that shit for the single player campaign.

We should all be very happy to give up a bit of artificial realism for more responsive and accurate controls.

Almost all the other RTS games have smoother vehicle path finding because they allow for a bit of "cheating" such as clipping through obstacles and power-sliding to the side. This is a good thing because it makes everything feel fast and smooth.

The infantry behavior in DOW2 was very accurate and good, as someone mentioned above, and should be implemented in COH2 as well.

I think the longer infantry battles are a good thing. People seem to always complain about RNG but these longer battles are exactly the thing that negates the affect of RNG. The longer battles and more "dice rolls" result in battles that conform more to the basic unit stats. You can get lucky in a handful of dice rolls but if you do it enough times statistically it will balance out.

I'm still new the series as a whole but does anybody know exactly how Relic does the random number generator? Is it always based on uniform random number generation or do they have other statistical distributions as well?

Yeah but the thing is the early game RNG engagements seem much more impacting in comparison to CoH1 early game.

CoH1 = Faster engagements, more engagements, slower teching.
CoH2 = Slow engagements, fewer engagements, faster teching.

These RNG impacts in the early game can be sometimes be quite pivotal in conjunction with the teching speed of CoH2.

Infantry dance too much

agreed. its one of the main coh-issues. cant this be fixed or isnt it possible to fix the dancing on this engine?

Its not that I want to win every game just by clicking faster. The more things you can do better than your opponent does (micro, strategy, coordination, positioning, etc.) the higher your chances of beating him. The new doctrine system and lack of global upgrades already removed a substantial amount of strategy from the game, so I don't see how reducing a players ability to out micro the opponent on top of that increases the chance of the better player winning.

You make your case well. All I can say is that "better player" all depends on what sort of skills you want to reward. In chess for example, there is no micro whatsoever. Thus, a skilled player depends on seeing what their opponent is capable of doing and counteracting it ahead of time. I think that COH2 is a game that tried to reward certain skills over others. The implementation of this new system has caused issues, such as flanking of machine guns, but I can see the underlying idea behind them.

I think the longer infantry battles are a good thing. People seem to always complain about RNG but these longer battles are exactly the thing that negates the affect of RNG. The longer battles and more "dice rolls" result in battles that conform more to the basic unit stats. You can get lucky in a handful of dice rolls but if you do it enough times statistically it will balance out.

I think that's a good point. RNG would decide engagements in COH1 as well, they were just shorter so you spent less time praying to the RNG gods for a favorable outcome. I think the RNG factor is more a question of the difference between being lucky and being unlucky more so than the length of an engagement.

Edit: I think I understand what stephen is saying. Fewer engagements before a tech upgrade means that a game is decided on those few engagements alone and gives a player less of an opportunity to formulate a strategy before it's over. I don't see how RNG factors into that though given what I mentioned above.

You think all the stupid shit that happens in this game is done right.

Yes, that is clearly what I said.

I think most of the points brought up are right on. Vehicle and infantry behavior is bad and uncontrollable some times. The only good thing I see in all of this is that longer infantry battles reduces the micro intensity. That's good for helping players think instead of just click.

I think that's a good point. RNG would decide engagements in COH1 as well, they were just shorter so you spent less time praying to the RNG gods for a favorable outcome. I think the RNG factor is more a question of the difference between being lucky and being unlucky more so than the length of an engagement.

Edit: I think I understand what stephen is saying. Fewer engagements before a tech upgrade means that a game is decided on those few engagements alone and gives a player less of an opportunity to formulate a strategy before it's over. I don't see how RNG factors into that though given what I mentioned above.



I can see which angle you are aiming from. Tactical, well thought out and executed assaults, positioning of troops and vehicle in anticipation of enemy most likely advance, creating ambushes and killing fields. Basically using your units like you would use in chess. Everything is planned and nothing happens by accident.
Exactly my type of game, I like to play that way.

However, I must agree with OP on this one. What you are describing is all good and well in theory, but as OP said its hard to destroy lets say Piv with Assault gun, or AT gun for that matter in the hands of a unskilled player. Why, well all he needs to do is click near tank destroyer or at gun, get little bit lucky with line of sight and it negates skill. Its difficult to manouver fixed gun vehicles to fight of noob. Even if the tank is seen from far away. You couldn't accidentally flank Marder in the hands of skilled player.
As MagpiesFlight said somewhere: "it takes enormous effort to defeat spamming noob" Because infantry isn't punished in the hands of unskilled player enough. Basically, he can cross roads, stand in open and come up close to infantry in cover with minimal loses.
I wont go into MG in the house supported by mortar, being a lot more viable option than using snipers, micro-ing your way to the house to drop molotov or nade that has very little effect.

Everyone has the right to their opinion, but I am sorry buddy. This game in its current state punishes skill, creativity and pro-activeness. In VCOH if someone was much more skillful, you got wiped of the map in 5 min. It takes me 10 min to clear mg42 from the building while losing bunch of MP to someone who hasnt got a clue (ok maybe I took a bit of literally freedom there

+1 OP

CoH1 = Faster engagements, more engagements, slower teching.
CoH2 = Slow engagements, fewer engagements, faster teching.

Do others see it this way? Because I want to play the first game, I don't want to play the second as much. And my micro isn't the best.