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I'll be starting at noon EST on Saturday, not sure about Sunday yet. Going fishing in the morning so I'll start early afternoon when I get back. |
Hey guys!
On September 21st, I'm going to be running 10km of the Oakville Half Marathon in support of SOAAR (Successful Options for Adults with Autism Re-envisioned), an Oakville, Ontario organization that provides specialized day programs for adults with autism who cannot function independently. This upcoming Saturday and Sunday (September 13th/14th) I will be marathon streaming Company of Heroes and Company of Heroes 2 in order to raise awareness for this cause, and in order to hopefully raise some money as well.
SOAAR is a registered charity that was founded by my aunt, Francine Landry, and is supported by fundraising to make it affordable for families who desperately need its services. The Oakville Half Marathon is one of its major fundraisers and the goal is to raise $50,000+ from this event. This is a cause close to me as my cousin, Scott, is autistic and a SOAAR participant. Please take a moment to read his story:
Hi, I’m Scott.
I’m 23 years old.
With lots of help from my family, teachers, doctors and therapists,
I went to high school.
My brother and sister went too. They graduated, went to university and got jobs. They moved out on their own.
Not me. I still live at home with my Mom and Dad.
I can't do it on my own.
I have Autism.
After high school, there were no programs for people like me until SOAAR for Autism came along.
SOAAR for Autism gives me a full schedule of activities and helps me build life skills, interact with other people like me and participate in the community in my own unique way.
SOAAR for Autism makes me feel happy and understood. Now I belong.
I bet you know someone like me because my doctor says that 1 in 94 have Autism - More than all other developmental disabilities combined.
Won't you help us SOAAR?
Simply tuning in to my stream this weekend is more than enough to show your support. But if you feel inclined to support my effort financially, I would be eternally grateful. You can find my pledge form here. Minus a small processing fee, all of the proceeds go directly to SOAAR, and any Canadian citizens who pledge over $20 will receive a tax receipt.
Again, thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope to see you this weekend! |
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League still doesn't have replays officially, just a third-party mod that's pretty buggy. They've had live observing for a while, but no replays. |
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It's not really all that difficult to do technically, you just save old attribute files and load the correct ones for whatever version the replay you're trying to watch is in. The problem is, the game itself wasn't designed and developed to have this feature, and to add it now would mean a ton of work testing and modifying existing aspects of the code that work totally fine right now. In a project with a massive codebase like CoH2, that ends up being a ridiculous amount of work.
It's really quite similar to the observer mode from a technical perspective. Adding an observer mode if you build it into your core game is, theoretically, extremely easy. But we all know how long it's taking Relic to add, mainly because seemingly unrelated parts of code have to be touched in order to add the desired functionality since so much of the engine code comes from vCoH with no thought toward observing. |
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I really don't see them making commander-specific units less cost-effective than base faction units. It completely goes against their business model and the fact that their design philosophy revolves around adding variety through commanders. In vCoH doctrines/companies were supplementary to base units because the base factions had a lot more variety than they do in CoH2. In CoH2, it's the commanders providing that variety, so it makes sense that they want commander-specific units to be more attractive than their base counterparts. You can like it or hate it, but it's not going to change. |
Tying popcap to sectors contributed to the snowball effect, which Relic wanted to avoid this time. Sure, many old fans still think if you lose your fuel and cutoff, you should automatically lose the game. But that's not the philosophy in this game, they wanted you to have the option of fighting back.
It didn't though. As a person who played and watched a whole lot of vCoH over 5 years, the only time popcap was ever an issue was super-late-game when you had a whole ton of units and your opponent managed to cut you off from a large chunk of your territory. It never let one player just roll the other because the other player couldn't build units. That actually never happened. The "snowball" effect came from the fact that resource sectors were more valuable in vCoH than they are in CoH2, which brings us to your second point...
If you lose an important resource, you should be punished for it. The benefit of vCoH's resource system was it focused the action around key points on the map. In CoH2 each resource point is less important on its own, so action is far less focused. Not necessarily a bad thing, just different, though I'd argue it makes interesting map design a lot more difficult to achieve because you are less able to control how your map will be played.
Going back to the whole popcap debate, in CoH2 it's more an issue of the upkeep system being totally wonky, since as I mentioned above, the vCoH popcap system never actually prevented you from building units except in rare, outlying circumstances. |
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When CoH2 was in alpha/early beta, all commander-specific units had to be built from tech structures. The main problem back then was these commander-specific units replaced existing units instead of simply adding to the number of units you could create. For instance, Guards and Shocks replaced Penals, the upgunned T34 replaced the stock T34, etc. That was an imperfect solution because it ended up limiting your options; if you didn't have enough fuel for the upgunned T34, you were essentially screwed, since you couldn't produce the cheaper, weaker variant at all.
The problem with call-ins in general is they're extremely boring when they're used as a core strategy rather than simply a supplement to base units. They're a lowest-common-denominator means of adding diversity to the game, but they're core to the commander model. If they want less people to rely on call-ins and commander-specific units, they're going to have to make the base factions more interesting. I'm sure they'd rather just release more commanders. |
Well actually you are alerted of the area in which the sniper or AT gun fired at you. If you look at the mini-map or circular map in the lower left hand corner of your screen, when an enemy fires on you the map shows a little circle of red indicating where an enemy vehicle or infantry unit fired on your inf unit or vehicle. And it continually shows you where on both maps by blinking slowly for about 2-3 seconds.
You're right, but that's not immediately visible. Unless you're looking at your minimap at the time of the shot, you don't get any immediate feedback. In vCoH, the moment you got shot by a sniper, an AT gun, or an MG, you instantly knew from which direction the damage was coming from because of the tracers, and you could immediately adjust your unit's positioning accordingly. In CoH2, if you're looking at the minimap when the shot happens, you get the immediate feedback but you can't easy tell which unit is being targeted; if you're looking at the playing field, you get nearly no information at all, since you can barely tell which unit is being targeted and are given no information on where the damage originated.
The addition of a minimap alert is nice, but removing the immediate visual feedback from the shot itself is a major step back. I'd rather have that information right in front of me immediately instead of tucked away in the corner of the screen. |
I really think all the complaints about the CoH2 UI are unfair. If you compare the CoH1 and CoH2 AI CoH2 comes out ahead actually. Inverse why aren't you mentioning the lack of a health bar for tanks that are not selected in CoH1 ? Or the extremely useful unit list in the top right that relic implemented with CoH2 ? I think these aspects are way more significant than the problems that you brought up. I do agree on the tac map issue btw. Never experienced the visibility problem on snow maps so I can't comment on that one.
Because interface issues are subjective. When I play CoH2, I don't see a single interface change that provides more useful information in CoH2 than it did in vCoH. Vehicle health bars being always viewable is irrelevant to me because vehicle health is far less granular than infantry health; it always takes the same number of shots to kill a vehicle using a specific weapon or collection of weapons, so after a while you don't need health bars to know how much HP a vehicle has because you can just count the number of hits it's taken from different damage sources. Would it have been nice to have? Of course! But I never felt like I was being deprived of vital information in vCoH because vehicles didn't have always-visible health bars. Infantry engagements, on the other hand, have a lot more variables in play, and are much closer in terms of outcome. I value quickly accessible HP information a lot more in those fights, and in CoH2 it just isn't easy to see because icons and HP bars are semi-transparent.
As far as my play and priorities are concerned, CoH2's UI is larger, displays less useful information, and is cluttered with more useless information than vCoH's. I don't, for instance, think the unit icons in the top right are an improvement over the unit shields in vCoH. CoH is a small-scale RTS, and the top-right icons in CoH2 take up a lot of space and display more information that I would ever care about because I want to be monitoring and adjusting my units on the field at all times anyways. Furthermore, they aren't easily collapsible and expandable because you have to click the arrows instead of simply hovering over a shield. They also don't clearly separate into control groups (instead the icon just gets a number indicating the control group), making control group usage more difficult.
And this is all ignoring the huge problem of visibility in CoH2, which I intentionally left out because it's been discussed to death and it's obvious that Relic either disagrees or doesn't care. In vCoH, you always knew when two units were fighting because 90% of weapons had very visible tracers. Things like snipers and AT guns left noticeable contrails behind their shots that let a player know at a glance where these units were stationed and where the damage was coming from. CoH2 removed these for the sake of realism, but in doing so made it extremely frustrating to locate the source of any off-screen damage. Add to this the clutter on the tactical map and the previously-mentioned contrast issues on winter maps and you end up with an extremely frustrating gameplay experience.
It's true that Relic has, in general, exposed more information to players in CoH2 than they did in vCoH. I just know that for me personally, the information they added is irrelevant to my gameplay, while the information they obscured is information I want to have instantly and effortlessly accessible so that I can make intelligent decisions in a split second. |
Yep, COH2 does not perform so well.
But: Your CPU is definitely bottlenecked very much by that 6870.
Not at completely minimum settings it's not. My CPU hits 100%, which is ridiculous for a 2500k at 4.4GHz. Not to mention I can play Dota 2 maxed, CSGO maxed, vCoH maxed, Skyrim nearly maxed, Crysis at medium-high, Bioshock Infinite maxed...I can play pretty much any recent PC game maxed and get better framerates than I get playing CoH2 at 100% minimum settings. My hardware is perfectly adequate. |
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VonManteuffel 
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