well, my understanding is that Relic's team changed significantly post vCoH, and that OF had some different designers, which is probably why OF felt very out of touch with what made vCoH great. DoW2 also indicated a lack of understanding of what made vCoH great, since it somewhat haphazardly ported some of its core ideas and felt like softcore poor man's CoH.
Thanks for the responses, I have a few more questions:
1. Regarding p2w: are steam sales for the DLC good? And which factions have strong vanilla commanders? I usually play exclusively a single faction and dabble in the others from time to time to get a feel for their timings/style. If I could pick one of the 5 factions which has a good vanilla commander and be done with it I would be happy.
2. I played mostly PE/USF in vCoH, which factions are similar?
3. Is relic planning more factions/commanders in the future?
4. I just moved and haven't set up a gaming pc, I just have an ok laptop. I can run vCoH on medium settings at a pretty decent framerate but anything higher and it's over. Someone said it was poorly optimized, should I wait until I've bought a new rig?
Just my opinion,
1. All factions with the strongest being the USF.
2. Probably USF since they have quite a few light vehicles and riflemen that can do most things.
3. No idea, won't know until Relic announces something.
4. Optimisation is horrible. I've got 8GB RAM and I still get freezes from memory leaks. Btw, I'm running on pretty much everything low. Considering that your laptop can only run vCOH on med reliably, I don't think it will last with CoH2's optimisation. A new rig is recommended.