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Register Time: 19 Nov 2012, 00:40 AM
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Nullist, cold doesn't really matter right now. Nobody ever needs to really lose units to the cold. It's very easy to keep them warm. The decision procedure in terms of "do I let my men freeze to death" is basically "no." That's not an interesting decision.
I guess you disagree - this means you sometimes lose units when they freeze to death, right? I think you're just bad at the game or making very bad decisions. It rarely, if ever, makes sense to let a unit die from the cold in a blizzard. If you make decisions that let your men die from the cold, you're probably making obviously incorrect decisions.
That's what we want to change. Getting rid of dying in cold would make it sensible to let your units freeze. It would also allow Relic to remove sources of heat/protection from the cold (they could make it so that cover doesn't stop heat loss for instance). This would make it harder to avoid the cold (right now it's super easy to keep anyone from freezing to death) and it would make it more sensible to sometimes allow your units to freeze (right now the penalty is too high to make freezing ever worth it).
Let me put it like this: dying from blizzards reduces the amount of interesting decisions that blizzards force players to make. Dying is so bad that it's almost never going to be worth it to let a squad freeze to death. Dying is also so bad that right now the game has to make sure there are tons of ways to keep from freezing, fairly easily, as long as you pay the pointless micro tax.
This is not good. Forcing interesting decisions makes the game good. Right now, freezing forces the following decision: "do I want to let my units get cold enough to start dying?" The answer to that decision is almost always no, which means it's not an interesting decision. If cold was changed so that freezing didn't kill, the decision that freezing forces would be different, and the answer wouldn't have to be so obvious. It might make more sense to avoid paying the warm up micro tax, or it might make more sense to forgo transports, or it might make more sense not to bother making campfires or to destroy campfires that would otherwise warm you while capping behind enemy lines, or it might make more sense to keep a squad maneuvering instead of parking it in cover, and so on.
-A unit can oftentimes move to an adjacemt sector without model attrition or modifiers if there is a fire pit, a building or a vehicle to support the deployment in that sector.
-A unit can oftentimes move to an adjacent sector and survive without attrition, but with cold modifiers applied, if it moves into cover in that sector.
-A transport enables unrestricted infantry mobility during blizzards, enabling a player to continue his actions regardless of the blizzard, which is likewise impairing his opponents deployments. Meaning he can continue action under the cover of the blizzard without halting for the duration of it
There is therefore, categorically, both a strategic and tactical onus centrally involving warmth.
Yes, you can use transport vehicles to bypass the decision procedure I outlined in my post, and that does add another layer, but of course you wouldn't lose that layer if you took out death from cold, and you would add more decision making to the process because transports wouldn't be the binary "do I need them to avoid death or not" choice that they are now. They would be a scalar "how much added benefit will I get from utilizing a transport." This is a much harder decision to make, players will split on it more often and at more varied intervals than they will on the "do I use the transport to keep my squad from dying," and I think it would play out better. Changing things form "these are the clear, obvious choices if you want to do X" to "well, you could do this or that, and there are tradeoffs either way" is more interesting. Removing death from cold would move us from the first situation to the second.
There is absolutely no reason to force retreat your infantry during a blizzard to "avoid deaths", as you said. There is,however, a central consideration of warmth to consider.
If you use your brain and the map to your advantage, there is no reason to retreat.
Units can survive blizzards without impairment or attrition if near fires, in buildings, or have a transport available.
Units can survive blizzards without attrition, but with modifiers, if only cover is available.
Only players that are stupid enough to leave/deploy their nfantry without either of the above will suffer both modifiers, and more failingly, attrition.
I talked about this in my post. Either there are sources of warmth available to allow your infantry to accomplish the objective without freezing or there aren't.
The means to counteract cold are diverse, readily available and plenty.
There is no sensible reason to lose even q single model to cold, unless you are prepared to take that loss for some more crucial strategic advantage.
I fully agree. You never have to lose someone to cold if you don't want to. And in fact it's a very easy choice to make. It's almost never worth it to lose someone to the cold. It would be much more interesting if instead of saying "well duh obviously I don't want my squad to die," players could choose instead to allow squads to freeze in certain situations. But freezing is so bad right now that almost nobody is ever going to let it happen, and it functions just as needless micro, because as you point out, there are many ways to avoid cold short of retreating, they just take a bit of micro.
That's a really good point, I might have to change my mind about the freezing mechanic. The reason I'm not convinced is because I don't see heat management as a micro tax as much as I see it as decision making: do I take the shortest route to my objective or do I warm my troops up along the way? But making freezing simply a negative modifier to damage/acc/speed might allow for more interesting decisions...
There's no decision making in the example you suggest: the answer is "if they can accomplish their objective without freezing to death, take the shorter route, otherwise warm up along the way" because there is practically no time when it's worth it to let a squad freeze to death just to get somewhere faster. The maps are not big enough or cold enough for them to freeze to death en route to a place with something to warm them up, and there is almost never anything important enough to be worth letting them freeze to death once they get there + on the retreat.
Or, to put it another way: either the destination has a source of warmth (or it has cover they can get to before they hit the "die from freezing" stage) or it doesn't. If the destination has a source of warmth, then you take the fastest route, because the destination is never going to be so far away that anyone will die en route from cold. If the destination doesn't have a source of warmth, then you ask yourself "can they make it there and back without freezing to death?" If the answer is yes, you take the fastest route. If the answer is no, you pretty much always warm up along the way, because there's almost never a time when it's worth losing most of a squad to cold to accomplish something. They won't win any fights, and the manpower cost you pay is only worth it to desperately cap a VP or something to keep from losing.
So there aren't any interesting choices or tradeoffs except in the edge case where a VP is on the line as a game ending thing. Change cold so that it doesn't kill, or so that it's much harder for units to die, and now it will be worth it to risk freezing in a lot of cases, because the tradeoff will make more sense. This is a more interesting strategic decision because it doesn't have obvious right answers all the time.
It's actually harder to make the decision, I think, because given the seriousness of freezing to death it's almost always a better option to keep them from freezing to death than it is to let them freeze but still have them do whatever it is you want them to do. And like Basilone pointed out in the OP, the bigger issue is that the penalty for freezing is so big that it always makes sense to pay the micro tax to keep people from freezing. This means there's never much of a tradeoff in terms of "do I let my men get to the 'freeze to death' stage" except for players with bad APM or during really frantic times. It would be much more interesting if you had to make the "do I let them freeze" choice constantly instead of saying "well dying sucks so I'd better not let anyone freeze."
With all due respect, treating these forums like a debate arena where you score points against CombatMuffin by asking him questions that you think he can't answer, instead of treating these forums like a place to discuss the nuances of Company of Heroes 2, is childish and unproductive.
If I or anyone else has an idea about the strategic depth of blizzards then CombatMuffin is free to agree or disagree with us, and if I respond on CombatMuffin's behalf with a perfectly good answer about blizzards then instead of getting snippy with me because you wanted to win some sort of Internet fight and show everyone how huge your e-penis is, maybe you should either respond to my specific points or shut up and leave the conversation to the people who want to talk about the game rather than insult each other.
There are a number of interesting things I can imagine blizzards adding to the game - right now they add almost none of those. I enjoy the reduced sight range (I think - I haven't had much time to play CoH 2 of course) but the whole "freezing = units dying" thing just doesn't work as it's currently implemented.
Because then there would be a legitimate reason to move around even when frozen instead of just hunkering down in cover or finding a heat source, and players would face interesting strategic tradeoffs (do I use my cold unit to fight, when it will be less effective, or do I warm it up? do I spend the extra micro to keep people warm, or is that attention better spent elsewhere? do I bother rebuilding destroyed fires to warm up, or just accept that in a blizzard my units will freeze? do I focus fire the frozen enemy unit that I want to kill more, even though because it's frozen it's not doing as much damage in this specific fight?) instead of what they currently face (well, my unit's freezing, better retreat it or get it to cover because basically no other option is viable).
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