First let me ask all of you: Why are any of us playing COH (Or COH2) in the first place? I can think of several *extremely* popular RTS games that are more refined and much more balanced than COH. Starcraft 2 comes to mind. Hell Starcraft 1 comes to mind, too. Ultimately, I expect there is a myriad of great answers out there as to why we're all attracted to COH, and all of them are valid. Perhaps it was the game mechanics. Perhaps it was the amazing sound and graphics. For some it's the unique retreat and cover systems. But the one thing that I think we can all agree on is that COH is NOT perfectly balanced. Especially the OF factions. So I don't think that anyone can say that they're drawn to COH for the "amazing balance." But there is one thing that we all have in common as COH players. Every. Single. One. Of. Us. And that's that when we play COH, we're all playing a World War 2 real time strategy game.
The thing that draws me to CoH is the low skill cap/APM requirements and the unique game mechanics like suppression, cutoff points, and retreating. I know it's not balanced and I hate the OF factions and ToV units because of it. CoH was a much better game before that crap and it would be a much better game without that crap. If CoH had better balance I'd like it more and if it had worse balance I'd like it even less. Everything Relic does to CoH and its sequel should be in service of making a fun, innovative, balanced RTS game. Letting people keep up their fantasy of reenacting World War 2 with their little digital toy soldiers is best left to single player, custom games, and other video games. When it comes to the competitive environment in which an RTS lives or dies in the later months and years of its life, balance trumps all.
And that leads me to Tychocelchuu's point. Is COH a very realistic WW2 game? Absolutely not. Is COH a very realistic war game in ANY way? Not really at all. The combat and physics system lend themselves more to an arcade game than any kind of actual real combat simulator. But while COH may not be realistic at all, it IS *authentic*. Every single unit modeled in COH was used in World War 2. The King Tiger didn't see much combat until the end of the war, but it existed, and the thing was a beast. The 101st Airborne dropped into Normandy, and some of them were armed with recoilless rifles. And the Wehrmacht was one of the first armies in the world to use a true assault rifle, the Sturmgewehr 44. Do ANY of these things behave in real life like they do in COH? No. But they existed. And they're included in the game in the *exact same context as they were used in real life*.
Well, not everything in CoH existed in real life. American sticky bombs, fake commando artillery, squads of Knight's Cross Holders, canister shot for Tetrarchs, the Bergetiger as depicted in CoH's model, Sherman Calliopes without a main gun... not to mention stuff like Ostwinds that, although they technically existed, barely even saw combat. And more importantly, almost none of the things in Company of Heroes are used in anything like the context they were used in real life. No M8 was ever used to circle strafe a Puma long enough for Riflemen to stickybomb it to death. No Fallschirmjagers ever cloaked next to a VP to take out engineers that were sent around the back to cap it.
You can't use the King Tiger as the Americans and the German's aren't driving Shermans in COH. The game functions under a very strict set of CONTEXTUAL RULES.
Can you explain these contextual rules? I don't think they exist in any form other than "whatever allows the stuff that happens in CoH." And in that form, they don't seem like rules that make any sense or that we should conserve for the sequel.
When you allow mirror matches, you destroy any authenticity that the game hopes to achieve. You also destroy any context in which to play the game. For the sake of trying to make a game more balanced, you have actually destroyed any possibility of the game being seen as World War 2 experience. For me, the setting in which this game takes place is *extremely* important. I'm attracted to this game, in great part, to the fact that it's authentically World War 2. Playing a game on Angoville reminds me that an actual World War 2 battle took place on the Angoville farms in France. Did it look anything like the game I'm playing right now? No, but it's couched in historical authenticity. When I shoutcast a game, I shoutcast it using the historical knowledge that 70 years ago, these two armies actually did fight, and the units involved actually went head to head in some way in France and Germany.
Look, a lot of these units didn't go head to head in France and Germany, and they especially didn't do it together. Pretty much the closest CoH ever gets to reality is that most of these things existed and were on the various sides of the war that the game says they were on. Anything beyond that, CoH doesn't model at all. It jumbles together units from all years of the war and all theaters of the war with no regard to how or when they were used together or who they fought and where they fought against them. If you need Company of Heroes to remind you that a battle took place on the farms of Angoville, then fine, whatever, but I think it can remind you just as well even if both sides are German or American. I mean it's not like when you're shoutcasting a Wehr vs Wehr game, you instantly forget all of your historical knowledge.
Why is any of this important, you might ask? Well ask yourself this question: Are you playing this game because you simply love the mechanics, or are you playing this game because of something more? If Relic kept the exact same engine, the exact same unit types, and the exact same mechanics, but made it a game about Kittens vs Puppies, would you still play it? Every single unit on the Kitten team behaves exactly like an American unit, and every single unit on the Puppy team behaves exactly like a Wehrmacht unit. The mechanics are all the same. If this is true for you, then you don't really love COH...you just love the rules system that Relic built. And let me tell you, you'll be even happier with other RTS games out there. Because there are better ones. Heck, you can even Sci-Fi it up with DOW2.
Of course I'd play this game even if all the units were sci-fi units. I played Dawn of War II for a while, but it was missing most of the MECHANICS I loved about CoH, like a bigger emphasis on suppression and flanking, especially in the early game, cutoff points, and different types and values of capture points for resources. It was still fun though. It's not like I only play World War II games.
Telling me I don't love CoH because I don't love non-mirror matches to the exclusion of mirror matches is ridiculous. You're pretending like CoH is ONLY what you say it is (some sort of silly historical contextual simulation) when in reality CoH is many things to many people.
How does it make sense for you to tell ME that I don't love CoH because I don't love this weird historical stuff? Why doesn't it make sense for me to tell YOU that YOU don't love CoH because you don't love the competitive balance that makes for interesting matches and a thriving competitive scene? Why do YOU get to decide what the CORE of CoH is? Why aren't the mechanics the core of the game? Because you could swap the units out and keep the same mechanics? But you could do the same thing for the mechanics! We could keep the EXACT SAME units and historical context from CoH and swap it out with completely different mechanics. Would that still be CoH? No, of course not. That would be a different game. But you'd still love that game, because it has the same context, right? So really, YOU don't love CoH!
This is stupid, of course. We both love CoH, but for different reasons. If you want to argue against mirror matches, making up ridiculous arguments about how anyone who disagrees with you actually doesn't like CoH is not the way to do it.
If you allow the Russians to fight the Russians and the Germans to fight the Germans in COH2, what's to stop us from really changing *anything* about the game for the sake of balance? It becomes trivial to introduce totally non-authentic concepts and powers to either side, since you've thrown any sort of historical authenticity out the window. If we get mirror matches, I hope someday in future DLC we'll be seeing the Japanese vs the Germans, the Americans vs the Brits, and the Italians vs the Chinese. Maybe we'll throw in an alternate universe DLC pack that includes a Martian invasion of the Third Reich, because it doesn't matter anyway, we're not actually dealing with World War 2 anymore.
Well, yeah, sure.
The bottom line is that when you allow mirror matches in *any* way, you are destroying the very spirit of the game in the hope of achieving balance and fame. I personally don't want to play a game that's not couched in a World War 2 setting. And when I choose the Russians and end up fighting more Russians, I realize I'm just playing a set of mechanics and rules. There is no longer any immersion, there is no longer any perspective.
I don't know who made you the captain of the CoH Spirit Police, but I think you're doing a bad job and you should be fired. Here's what the CoH spirit is to ME: cutoffs, suppression, retreat and reinforcement, combined arms, capture points, victory points, minimal base building, veterancy, low APM requirements, flanking, small unit numbers. I think any time you change THIS STUFF you destroy the spirit of CoH. I don't think you destroy the spirit of CoH by screwing with the World War II stuff.
If you honestly think the spirit of CoH is just a bunch of World War II fantasizing, then I have a lot of video games you'll like much more than CoH because they do a much better job of capturing World War II. Games like Close Combat, Men of War, and Combat Mission do World War II WAAAAAAY better than CoH could ever hope to do it. You should go play them - I personally think they're even better games than CoH so you'll probably enjoy them much more. But you should leave CoH and let us have our mirror matches, at least those of us who care about CoH as an RTS rather than a World War II make believe program.
And finally, I think it's insulting to think that players wouldn't care or notice that a group of developers would travel all the way to Eastern Europe, visit the sites of battles, interview historians there, and even record the actual sounds of weapons being used in this great conflict, only to try and pass off to these same players that mirror matches somehow makes the game a more fulfilling experience. Why on Earth would you go to such great lengths to achieve this level of historical immersion only to throw it away with a fantastical voyage into bizarre army matchups?
The reason you'd do all this is because you don't understand what makes your game fun and appealing to competitive players, or you don't care about competitive players enough to spend resources making them happy, or (the real answer) the art/audio team isn't the design team and they have two different jobs.
TL;DR If developers are going to make a WW2 game, it's incumbent upon them to keep it historically *authentic*. Otherwise, just make a game about puppies and kittens.
TL;DR If developers are going to make an RTS game with a focus on multiplayer competition, it's incumbent upon them to keep that multiplayer balanced and interesting for competitive players. Otherwise, just make a game about recreating World War II perfectly.
Yoink, everything you say is right. About the single player. It's wrong when it comes to multiplayer because there are people who have different desires than you who play MP. People like me, who care about balance and competition, want different things from our RTS games than you, and instead of fucking us over by taking away our mirror match, just go play Close Combat or Combat Mission, which recreate World War II extremely well.
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Relic Entertainment
cblanco ★ 
보드카 중대 
VonManteuffel 
Heartless Jäger 
TychoCelchuuu
