|
Actually, I think the parser works fine. I might have to update the database with some new units and maps though. |
The problem isn't the applet itself.
www.cohdb.com gives me "502: Bad Gateway"
It's up now, server restarted and didn't come back online for some reason. The parsing is still broken though I think, I'm going to take a look this weekend. |
|
I haven't updated this in a long-ass time. I really should though... |
|
Tycho makes my nether regions quiver. |
|
#c0mpl3x1tyIsAWoman
Just ain't an anniversary without memories of the good old days. |
|
Reconnect isn't really technically feasible regardless, as you would realize if you actually read the earlier replies in this thread.
You would have to pause the game for all players the moment a disconnect happened, give the disconnected player a replay of the game up to that point, have then fast-forward through the entire game up to the moment of the disconnect, and then resume play. Spectator mode gives you a method for obtaining a replay, but you're lacking a pause feature and some way to transition from a replay to gameplay seamlessly. Add in the fact that the core of the CoH2 engine is over 10 years old and you can see why it's really not worth it or really even feasible for Relic to implement this feature. Hell, even SC2 doesn't have reconnecting in matchmaking, only reconnect-from-replay for tournaments and custom games. |
|
Pressing Escape will deselect whatever unit you have selected, so if you're in the middle of giving a directional move order it should cancel it. Otherwise, if you just ordered a setup and the squad is in the weird facing-to-setup-but-hasn't-begun-unpacking-yet phase, you can try spamming stop commands. I know that works in CoH1, not sure about CoH2. |
|
Not really, that's something that comes with time, practice, and experience really. I found a good way to avoid that sort of feeling is to choose one generally good build order for one faction and just practice the hell out of it. It eliminates the need to really think about your strategic choices, since you'll just be minorly altering things based on your opponent's play, which gives you more mental energy to focus on playing the rest of your game as perfectly as possible. |
Yeah, it'll take a little bit to get used to things. This video really informed my opinion on how to properly play an RTS from a mechanics perspective. There are a few Starcraft-specific things (camera location control groups, for example, aren't available in CoH and not really necessary, whereas Starcraft doesn't have a tactical map), but most of the advice is absolutely applicable to CoH. Things like which direction to draw your box when selecting units and boxing only as much as absolutely necessary, for instance, are invaluable tools when you're trying to micro multiple individual squads in a short period of time. It really just comes down to retraining your muscle memory. Once you're comfortable with it you'll find yourself playing a lot faster.
Another thing that helped me a lot personally was forcing myself to play excessively fast, even when it was unnecessary. It was really good for forcing myself to physically click and move faster. I spam a lot of useless clicks and actions early in games because once you have a few dozen units on the field and have to manage multiple engagements at once, I find it a lot easier to handle when I've already been playing fast enough to deal with things. |
Readability; the ability to quickly understand exactly what is happening in-game.
We could have smoke rounds that flood an entire control sector with smoke that's higher than the building, but it would be completely unreadable. Similarly, we could have rail-gun arty with explosions the size of several buildings, with massive amounts of lingering smoke - again, completely unreadable.
The thing CoH2 did so well (compared to CoH1) was making the game much easier to understand. We have a nice list of all our units in the top right, with their status (in combat, suppressed, etc.), we have a cleaner mini-map (less random lines), a cleaner UI (less blank space)... this carries over to gameplay as well.
Giant explosions, clouds of smoke, massive craters - they all look good, but they're bad for gameplay. When arty hits, you need to be able to see if you're units are in the area of fire, how close they are, and even exactly where the shell hit (so you can guess the target area). CoH1's massive clouds prevented that. In addition, by having the sizes, colors, etc. change significantly between what were historically very similar shells, it allows the player to understand what is actually being fired at them; quite important since historically similarly performing units have such drastically different stats.
Contrary to popular belief, the goal of a competitive game's graphics ISN'T to look visually stunning; it's to provide all the information the player needs in a quick and effective manner.
I don't really have an opinion on CoH1 vs. CoH2 visual effects (I don't think one style is necessarily better than the other), but this is a really strange argument to make. Showing suppression/moving/attacking icons on the tactical map and unit lists is really the only improvement Relic made to readability in CoH2. Always showing vehicle health bars is nice too, even though they really shrunk them for some strange reason, and I think they show infantry unit squad sizes regardless of selection, which is a nice minor addition as well. On the other hand, they made readability worse in much of the rest of the game:
- They removed tracers/contrails from AT gun shells, sniper rounds, and MG rounds. It is much more difficult in CoH2 to immediately ascertain the location of these units based on their attacks.
- They drastically reduced the length of most grenade throw animations and removed contrails from grenades (at least I'm pretty sure they had those in CoH1, I'll have to go back and check). I personally don't mind this change because it mades grenades stronger and more difficult to dodge, but it was still done by making them more difficult to read.
- They cluttered the tactical map with a lot of useless information. You can argue that the suppression/movement/attack icons on the tactical map are good (I personally dislike them but I understand the utility), but the multitude of resource values scattered everywhere is so distracting.
- They increased the density of trees and rubble on maps, making it a lot more difficult to spot squad locations at a glance.
- They added white winter maps without realizing that player-controlled squads have light blue shield icons with health bars that are semi-transparent when not selected. Unsurprisingly, it's pretty damn hard to see how much health your unselected squads have when the information is semi-transparent light blue on a white backdrop.
I agree with your sentiment, that an RTS game should prioritize readability over flashy graphics whenever possible. Unfortunately, CoH2 is a terrible example of a game that does this. When you go back and actually compare the two piece-for-piece, CoH1 as a whole gave the player far more information in a far clearer fashion. |
3
Canada
Inverse
Relic Entertainment
cblanco ★ 
보드카 중대 
VonManteuffel 
Heartless Jäger 
