Profile of Vuther

I'd rather that required T1 instead of the MG, who even makes the raketen as their first unit anyhow?

I once lost to a guy that build Raketen that early.

Death would be a mercy compared to living with that embarassment

I think we've all seen enough CEs get wiped on retreat to say that isn't the case.

At capiqua's request, I will begrudgingly end this source of recognition to RitaRush.

Thanks for the info. Have you played Men of War? That would seem to be even more similar, and I'm worried a lot of the problems I had with that title will apply to Steel Division as well.

Only a little, and I've definitely didn't manage to figure that one out yet. If your issue with it was the large-scale micro potential, that might not be the case with Wargame/Steel Division's style - it's definitely balanced around some degree of expendability for all the units you inevitably won't be able to keep alive (e.g. the basic American Main Battle Tank costs a bit over as much as 10 basic American infantry in European Escalation, compared to CoH2 having medium tanks cost comparatively as much manpower as elite infantry and requiring a different resource that infantry won't compete for to build), infantry are still put in squads to act uniformly to your orders, and you won't be having individual infantrymen micromanage throwing grenades. I still had trouble with it myself though (or maybe I just didn't like it...same thing?), so I'd really say to just try it yourself unless you can give an elaboration I can get.

Vehicle penetration was pretty simple in Wargame as well - you hit front, top, side or rear armor based off relative location and that's it, don't have to worry about your AT bouncing off their diagonals or anything. Most of the units' stats are generally either freely available within the game's deck builder or at least are reasonably easy to understand. A unit's accuracy against an currently-eligible target is also shown clearly on the cursor while mousing over for an attack in their latest entry of Wargame, which I figure is a feature that'll probably stay.

On paper I should love this but I wasn't very impressed by that video. What's the core gameplay? I have no idea.

You could try their early game Wargame: European Escalation and refunding it within two hours if it really doesn't click with you (though naturally, it lacks features their later games include...so you could try those too).

In general, it's a bit like CoH with no constructing buildings and on a larger-scale with the differences that implies.

Control the particular territories to win (any territory can only be held by having a "command" unit within them), and these territories give you the single resource used for buying units. Terrain (forests, town's blocks, elevations, and not-affecting-in-anyway everything else) and combat is largely more abrupt with infantry taking a particular defensive meatshield role (or ambush, given terrain and their line-of-sight implications largely serve to even up the disparities between infantry and vehicles) considering most vehicles heavily outranging, outrunning and outgunning them, and dice rolls are limited to accuracy and scattering missed shots that are total crapshoots to hit anything. Morale is modeled into combat a bit like the Total War series, with worsening morale nerfing units until they rout away from the fighting, though it mostly boils down to "Taking lots of suppression makes units worse" like CoH and avoids other considerations unlike Total War. There's a veterancy mechanic, but it's hardly like CoH where you can expect sufficient micro will give it to most, if not all, units - a larger-scale means a lot of stuff can die immediately or close to it. There's also a supply mechanic where supply units heal, fuel, and replenish ammo for the combat units. Unlike CoH's commanders, players make their entire unit list "deck" out of the options available to them (later games expanded the system with optional limitations for bonuses or new units in return).

The Wargame series (and from what I can tell, probably Steel Division: Normandy 44 as well) definitely has more in common with CoH than the typical RTS, but it's still fairly different from CoH too.

My opinion led me to not really like most of the differences myself, I much prefer CoH's "Band of Brothers AS AN RTS!" style. I can definitely say it's probably worth a try for any CoH fans, though.