Profile of Pip

If the recovery HT is intended to be primarily a repair vehicle, I wonder if giving it a "deployment" ability where it becomes immobilised and sends out repair pioneers to all vehicles around itself would be an interesting niche to fill.

And/Or consider giving it the ability to permanently deploy into a dedicated repair station that has no population cost, somewhat like the OKW mech truck.

After having some CoH 3 burnout, I got my friends to play Ancestor's Legacy with me. A fun 2018 RTS game that's a mixture of CoH and Age of Empires and currently free to play. It's dead as a doornail. Sad that the RTS genre is littered with the corpses of well-designed and fun games.

I hope CoH3 survives long enough to become one of them before its playerbase fully jumps ship, but I'm hopeful that it will.

Lelic are lucky that CoH has no real competition in its particular style of RTS. Iron Harvest is the only one I can really think of, and that game is terrible thanks to some baffling design decisions.

The Men of War series is the closest, but is a vastly different game, primarily sharing just the setting.

CoH3 can easily be a great game, they've just really dropped the ball with regards to polish (And balance, though that's more forgivable)

While I agree that they are overtuned af with deleting entire health bars of most vehicles in one pass, its far fetched to say you cant do anything about it.
You can see the enemie's battlegroup in the player list (not sure if intended, maybe for unranked matches it is) and as USF you have access to the hands-down best AA, which even shoots down strafes before they manage to shoot.

Although, it railroads you into certain tech buildings and battlegroups (UKF, AA truck sucks dog water) which is poopy game design.


Edit: Naturally the UKF Anti-tank loiter for 120 munis (lol) is also batshit crazy strong.

I'm told that the US AA does shoot down planes before they can do absolutely anything, true. This is, as you say, ridiculously bad design though. As US you either lose vehicles because you don't have AA, or DAK's AT loiter turns into a "Throw away munitions" button due to the loiter being unable to do literally anything.

UK's AA is unable to stop the loiter before it makes its attack runs though, to my knowledge.

Loiters should neither be instant-win buttons, nor should AA "turn them off". Ideally the UK and DAK loiters should instead act as area denial tools, preventing enemy armour from operating in a given area while the loiter is around (Through grinding damage, rather than being nuked immediately). AA should help counteract this, but only if it's in the loiter's area of effect (which would give the opportunity for the opponent to counter the counter)

I'd prefer the game didnt create situations where you're railroaded like that, too.

I feel like it's misguided to suggest that people not publish negative reviews for the game if they're having a negative experience. The game has seemingly released with a decent amount of content, and with a functional core... Though it is obvious that it is extremely unpolished in multiple areas. Examples include: Placeholder graphics, multitudes of small bugs (Such as odd unit behaviour and a strange lack of attention to detail in areas such as indirect units not pointing the barrels of their weaponry in the correct direction, clipping issues (the Brit AA truck in particular), and a regression in the quality of quite a few animations (The most obvious example here is in MG reloads, for some reason they've regressed from CoH1-2 where the gunner actually physically manipulates a magazine, and instead they just fiddle with a charging handle)).

There are also inexplicable graphical bugs such as plane graphics flying outside of the minimap and across the screen. Not really sure how that has managed to regress from 2.

Beyond that there are a multitude of balance problems (I'd call skillplanes and similar the most glaring), though honestly I'm personally more willing to look past balance issues as they're something that requires actual community testing, and are likely to be fixed.


Others have mentioned: The game has a good foundation, but there is a lot of work to do. The game doesnt deserve an overwhelmingly positive score until this work is done.

Given that Wehr have the mobile 20mm Flak 30/38 as a "standard" unit, the emplaced Flak 30/38 being a doctrinal buildable is kind of strange to begin with.

I think that emplacements ought to function more like CoH2 British emplacements, in that their crew are invulnerable, and have a singular shared healthbar. Having them act like immobile vehicles rather than immobile crew weapons is likely a better design space.

The DAK flak-36 seems to be a better implementation of "Emplacements" than any of the others (Despite apparent balance concerns), and it may be worth considering allowing all emplacements to be towed. This would remove the need to balance them around their immobility, which in a game like CoH is a major headache for balance.

I also agree with Gachi that it seems like Lelic have failed to come up with a solution to on-field howitzers. They may as well make them buildable in the base sector and balance them around the idea that they're effectively a base building, as they're unlikely to ever be killed, or even attacked directly if the game is going well. (The limited base-sector real estate is a concern here though.)


I havent picked up CoH3 yet, as I'm waiting for a sale (And for the rough edges to be sanded down). It seems promising, though it clearly needs a fair bit more work doing. I'm still in awe at the fact the game still has so many placeholder UI assets, that's genuinely ridiculous.