Profile of Diogenes5

Relic is overambitious if anything. They keep announcing all these big things only there's no manpower behind their announcements so they always end up disappointing. They supported it for about 18 months and they should've winded down afterwards.

Almost everything they did after their big 200 ms input lag decrease patch was a patchwork of terrible especially with regards to balance.

Advanced Cancer was really the last straw. What the hell were they thinking? And they left that crap broken for months. I don't think the gamebase has recovered from that nonsense.

They tried to make amends with a beta for once and then ignored the beta and rushed changes that weren't tested like USF super mortars. Seriously?

They not only rushed that change, they changed OKW in a huge way ... a design change which takes many patches to tune and fix properly. But we've heard nothing since they released the last big tuning patch.

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I just wish Relic would stop leading us on with the next big thing. Have small, achievable goals. Stuff like optimization and slightly tweaked weapon tables. Release commanders that won't break the game (basically remixes of current commanders).

TBH, I don't even think there's a lead game designer left on the game. All the patches seems like stuff a staff engineer thinks about all of a sudden on a Friday rushes to completion. They should give balance to the community or at least get a guy that knows what he's doing and make small changes. We know that it's not profitable for them to support an old game anymore so they should do their best just to leave the game in a playable state.

I've played around with quite a few different hardware configurations with COH2. The best thing I've done was upgrade to the i7 from an i5-6600K @ 4.6GHz. While the benchmarks were mostly the same, the maximum FPS went up by about 15-20 FPS. The biggest difference was that with the i7 I almost never experience stuttering during gameplay while I would encounter stuttering with the i5. I'm not sure what causes the difference. It may be attributed to the extra available threads from hyperthreading or possibly the extra 2MB of L3 cache on the i7.

I would take an older generation i7 over a modern i5 despite the lower FPS since the average was more stable and minimized stuttering. Perceptually it feels smoother. Faster CAS latency RAM increases minimum FPS by a few FPS. I also had a Radeon 390 for a short time but my minimum FPS dropped by around 8-10 FPS for COH2. From what I understand Radeon drivers have a higher CPU overhead which might explain it.

I have also have compared different generations of Intel CPUs. My benchmarks for these are from December 2015 so they may have different drivers and are on an older version of COH2.

AMD cards take up more cpu power I believe. In benchmarks that test only the gpu, amd cards tend to use a little bit more cpu power even though it's not required. I had all the microstutter issues you had with a 290 and then a 480 (owned for a month). Then I upgraded to a 1060 and then a 980 TI. All microstutter and freezing went completely away. Nvidia cards tend to require less compute on the cpu side I think, which normally doesn't make much difference but it does from COH2 because the optimization is so bad. Even with a 980 TI and a 4670k, I still get spikes downward when I leave physics and effects on and there's a lot happening on screen.

Game has never been in a good place. It gets a lot of new players during periodic steam sales and then loses them again.

Non-withstanding the rampant balance issues (why did they do such a huge design change to OKW and then not follow up at all? ... typical relic), the game is just fundamentally broken on a technical level.

It has incredibly high input lag and slowdown in all end-game situations even on high-end computers.

So multiplayer keeps a game alive, but if it's broken ... nobody will care.

It died when Brit Cancer commander was released and then took months to semi-fix. Then they beat the dead corpse with the USF Mortar combined with wrecking OKW as a whole. I don't see it reviving any time soon.

Harsh but 100% true.

Sometimes trying things that may be imbalanced is ok to keep the game changing and growing but the british change was literally the dumbest f*cking thing I've ever seen done to destroy an RTS game in my lifetime. They created an overpowered cancer commander that made games go insanely long, had no good counters, and rewarded incredibly inferior players.

And then they ninja-buffed a mortar which was fine in beta testing. And mind you, they don't beta anymore; I think they only did it because the complaints with the Advanced Emplacement commander were so loud they were like, "Ok, let's not have that happen again." And they did let it happen again. I guess we should feel mildly grateful it only took them like a month to patch (and even now it's not perfect) versus the multiple-month monstrosity of OP advanced commander.

So yeah ... this game took a big hit.

OKW could work as is. It's just that Relic is still making design-changes this late into the game's release cycle and it's important to constantly tweak for balance if you make such drastic changes. It's clear OKW is underpowered right now. They made daring design decisions; they just need to follow up and balance the faction.