Profile of Hannibal

I found the blizzard idea really cool, but it just does not fit CoH. The blizzard gives you special phases of preparation and pushing. You can move your army to a prepared bonfire spot during the blizzard and don't be spotted and then attack from an unexpected direction later. It also made transports more useful.

The game overall is just too fast for these additions. Armies also became a bit smaller overall as far as I can tell. These huge preparation phases just don't work since there is not logistics, and unit positioning is non-existant if all units are hurdled across a small bonfire. There is just nothing to prepare. The CoH concept is basically to continuously throw units at the enemy and outmaneuver and outmicro him in the meantime. The resource territories and strategic points also force you to constantly attack. Not doing anything valuable for a minute or two during the blizzard can just cost you the game, especially if it happens multiple times.

Other concepts like the deep snow and mud also fell short. The maps are just not big enough to allow for that many different areas of slow movements but potentially high impact after flanking. There is just too much pressure to actually make use of the units on the front line instead.

They worked great for bot matches though. I actually liked them very much in this context.

A more general point:
I hoped Relic would redesign the whole plane system. More like a 'buy once, use for free' approach. There is currently no downside to losing a plane, therefore defending against strafes does not make sense, unless your AA is so potent that the plane gets shot down before it can do anything, at which point literally every plane will become utterly useless. Therefore, balance always had to thread the needle but rarely hit the right spot.
I also find Aerafields suggestion to make paratrooper transport planes invulberable a very bad idea. There should be a trade off between dropping to a safe spot on your side or dropping potentially in the back lines. Being able to drop them next a AA does not make sense.

At the very least, there should be a refund system. A strafe balanced around 90 mun should e.g. cost 120, but refund 60 if the planes makes it home. Suddenly AA becomes useful against strafes.
Also, Relic should think if it makes sense to always spawn planes from the direction of the players base. Being able to choose the spawn point by selecting the direction of the strafe makes it difficult to balance. You can always select the direction with less AA (closer to the edge of the map). In CoH2, there were additional issues regarding the time until the attack dropped.

And finally, the damage that a plane has taken should affect the cooldown timer.


Suddenly, planes and AA are easier to balance and there is no binary outcome anymore.

Probably a slightly crazy take but I actually think the loiters can stay exactly as powerful & impactful as they are right now IF all factions get an AA unit that is exactly as effective vs loiters as the USF M16 Quad.

If the opponent has one M16, the axis loiters won't even make it until their first strafe. Feel free to test yourself in cheat mod

You should be able to dodge heavy offmap damage. Keeping it just leads to everyone being forced to build AA. That's exactly the opposite of varied builds and gameplay.

Steam has grown a lot, I am looking a the headlines "Steam Tops 7 million users online" in 2013, and today it is 33m online.

The 10-20k concurrent playerbase game was a smashing success in the 2013, and now it might not even be the top 100.

Yes, this is definitely a good point. But you also cannot expect linear growth. Both Steam and the gaming market have changed drastically since then. In 2013 Steam had roughly 2500 games on the store. Last year alone they released almost 11000 (mostly trash games I guess) spreading the overall players over more games, and strategy games have generally fallen behind in public favor. It's hard to conclude that a game has failed in some way because it only surpassed its predecessor by X%.

CoH3 surely does not have the impact on the gaming market that the first two games had. It also does not have to to be financially viable.
If we take AoE4 as a rough benchmark (highly advertised, and despite not much novelty it got favourable reviews both by critics as well as on steam and metacritic), CoH3 seems to be roughly half of that. Probably not great, but not bad either for competing with what is probably the largest strategy franchise. CoH2's numbers are surpassed a lot. If Relic managed to financially survive on CoH2, they might manage to survive on CoH3 as well unless they heavily increased their spending (which I do not have any insight about).

The game started at a peak of around 30k players. Now it is down to around 14k on the weekend. 12k during the week. By this coming Wednesday we could be seeing below 10k players.

I hoped for a much better start. And at a minimum have the numbers keep going up, not down.

As Aerafield said, maybe the single player people played it and left. Maybe the numbers will gradually increase as players become used to the game and venture into MP. Or maybe when the price drops, people will try it out and stay. Hopefully Relic has the bugs worked out by then.

All I know is, if I was a manager at Relic and saw this I would not be happy. Crap reviews even by people who love the series and never have anything bad to say, player base starting small and dying fast... I would be sending out resumes fast because my dismissal is right around the corner.

I am starting to see longtime Coh2 MP players saying they uninstalled Coh3 already.

Streamers are sticking to Coh3 still. So that is a positive sign. It is the future of the game for sure, so that makes sense they would.

What you fail to show is that this is an all in all pretty normal chart. Almost every game has most players at release and retains only a quarter or a third within 1-2 months.
Steamdb is down for me and steamcharts does not have the resolution at the respective releases. But from what I remember, CoH2 was down to about a third of the players at release after a good month or so, AoE4 as well iirc. Look at all the Total war games, that are much more focused on replayability and SP campaigns. They all drop the same.

If you compare the peaks of CoH3 from a day to day basis, there's not a huge efflux anymore. Numbers still go down, but not that I'd expect the game to be dead soon. We'll see what happens after this weekend, usually people play a lot on the weekend and then drop a game because they start finding it boring or move on, so let's see what happens for the next two or three days.

I don't get the talk about player numbers at the moment.
CoH3 is doing fine in that regard. Player numbers at release almost doubled compared to CoH2, and the community is rather one that sticks around and revisits the game, especially since there is not much competition in the CoH niche.
Losing most of the players in the first month is normal. CoH3's player loss is nothing exceptional. CoH2 went down to a third within a month and that level kept lingering for the next 10 years.
It is quite interesting that CoH3 does not seem to have taken many players from CoH2. Relic seems to have achieved their goal of opening up to a larger audience rather than only catering to the current one. One thing that is interesting, but will be impossible to find out is how the players distribute between SP and MP. CoH3's SP is vastly improved, so a higher proportion will play SP only. I guess we therefore can't fully compare CoH2's current player count with CoH3's current player count and make a solid conclusion of the healthiness of the MP.

I also don't see anymore that CoH2 will die. Player numbers here have taken only a minor dent. Yes, players will transition if CoH3 improves over the next months, but I don't see CoH2 being a dead game anytime soon. It will keep its own base, probably even a larger one than CoH1.