Thread: RNG10 Oct 2014, 08:03 AM
The small random events of COH was one of my favorite things about it - as war is an activity which is very heavily influenced by Sods's/murphys law.
In coh2 the "RNG" simply ruins the game - this game has been around long enough that by now I should know the answer to "who is going to win this firefight" "should I retreat now?" ect
But I don't and the top players don't know either - I often see them getting squad wiped due to the ridiculous nature of RNG ( and just how bad retreating works in this game) you can have a full health squad get wiped on retreat, even when retreated perfectly, all because of some crazy crits.
If you think im being an idiot tell me exactly how these match ups work. ( grens without MGs*)
Grens vs. Engineer = who wins and with how many casualties.
Grens vs Cons = as above
Tiger vs IS2
M4 vs P4
Pio squad vs. mortar crew.
Basically the overall outcome might be easy to guess, the way it plays out is completely random.
You expect to know your units performance, what you should do not just sit back and watch completely random events - in game its always different, thats not how a good game works.
In fact that is actually the exact opposite of how a good game works, when I watched pro players in COH its so easy to see they are excellent at the game, they control units with such finess, choose such good tactics and strats and just by watching you can tell how much better they are than you.
In COH2 I can see a world champ play and the game looks hardly different to a normal chump with some skill from automatch.
The worst thing is a lot of these factors are 100% completely out of the players hand. No advanced micro, no advanced knowledge of strategy or the map can eliminate these critical and broken RNG moments
Either get it under control or just get rid of the randomness.
Its implemented so poorly that Id rather have my favourite part of the COH mechanic removed from the game rather then have it included and keep ruining the game.
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Just wondering if you know of any good videos that illustrate the physics? Admittedly I was never much of a Coh1 fan, but coming back to it now I find it so hard to see many of the things that people continue to praise. On the other hand, physics in Coh2 is one of the things that impressed me the most.... still I definitely try to keep an open mind to new information, and the history of the franchise is really interesting to me.
I think you're dismissing a few things unfairly: indirect fire accuracy is definitely still a thing; unit reactions are also a thing but IIRC this was put on a timer in a patch last year because there was too much loss of infantry responsiveness under heavy fire; not sure what you mean by individual vehicle components as the same front/rear armour thing is still used.
its late here so wont go into details but look at this http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g2TTDkrSYqQ
This http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zht5zJaOIH0 and look up frontline network any cast from season 2 and ull see what an awesome game coh is and many other physics effects
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Reading up some more and both my calculations are probably a little wrong. The only thing we really know for sure is total latency involves your ping to server, the server's processing time, and any built-in latency values used for smoothing. Can't really say for sure how they all interact.
But this has gotten kinda off-topic, my apologies to the poster.
All good its interesting - I feel my little mystery will never be solved anyway. |
The performance issues can be blamed on the massive visual overhaul they gave the game. There's a whole lot more going on in CoH2, and though I find it very cluttered when playing, there's no doubt that it looks extremely pretty to a casual observer.
I can't really comment on the unit control aspects because I just haven't played enough, but it could be a combination of poor performance and the new battle servers. Lower FPS obviously means units are going to feel less responsive, and the addition of the battle servers means your ping will now be more consistent but possibly higher.
In true peer-to-peer games, if you connect to a guy sitting right next to you, you're going to have great ping because you're connecting right to his machine and the data barely has to travel anywhere. The battle servers, on the other hand, are pseudo-client-server, meaning if you play against that same guy in CoH2, you both have to connect to the battle servers instead of to each other. Therefore your ping is determined by your distance to the battle servers, and since that distance is unlikely to change, your ping is also going to be fairly constant.
This is great if you're right beside the server, of course, but most people aren't that lucky. In CoH1, if you were matched against someone on the other side of the world, your ping would be terrible and your units would be terribly unresponsive. At the same time, if you matched with someone beside you, everything would be great. If you aren't close to a battle server in CoH2, your experience is going to be consistently shitty, relatively speaking. Might not be the entire issue, but it's probably a contributing factor. If the response issues are present in offline games as well, of course, then this doesn't apply at all.
IF you have any spare time and want to see for yorself fire up coh2 play for 15 mins then go straight to vcoh and see for yourself.
In SP there is less lag but the units are still terribly unresponsive when compared to COH. Its not a lag issue that I am talking about, lag is different to the thing I am describing.
There is no doubt there has been a overhaul in the looks department that is meant to impress the casual player - but I just cant belive not a single effect, texture, animation ect has not made it from coh to coh2 if its the same game engine.
Everything from tracer rounds, how mortar rounds fly, tanks shoots, mgs pack unpack, at guns rotate, infantry moving ect is different from one game to another. Basically i cant spot a single feature in coh2 that was in the original, every infantry animation is radically different, vehicles dont behave in the same way, even the green little numbers are completely different from both games.
Even the speed that infantry move around the map is different, as is retreat speed.
Its obvious some people don't care at all.. but im super curious and its driving me crazy as to why
EDIT: even incidental features like spotting at guns in fog of war via green cover that shouldn't be there doesnt work in coh2 - its just ridiculous that someone would go in the game and remove all these sort of things. |
In CoH1, there were tables that mapped weapon types to armour types to determine things like damage, accuracy, penetration, etc. Every weapon a unit could use had a weapon type (for example M8 gun, Sherman gun, Garand, Carbine, Kar98, different grenades, and so on) and an armour type (a few different types for infantry and mostly unique ones for all vehicles).
When one unit shot at another, the correct entry in the table was accessed and used to calculate things like damage, accuracy, penetration, and a few other variables. For example, flamers had a 1.5x damage modifier against elite armour, which is why flamers are good against vet 2 Grenadiers. Also, snipers had an accuracy modifier against elite armour that gave them 100% accuracy even when shooting at retreating units, which is why a sniper will never miss a vet 2 Grenadier.
With a system like this, you can fine-tune your tweaks on the per-unit level. For instance, you can give the M8 10% more damage against just the Puma, while keeping his stats against every other unit in the game the same. You have near-infinite options when it comes to making tweaks.
The downside is, every time you go to add a new unit, you have to fill in the target tables for every single other unit in the game, and you have to test each of those interactions in order to make sure nothing unexpected is happening. It's very time-consuming, and makes adding anything new extremely difficult.
That's why in CoH2, they got rid of that system and went to straight health, armour, damage, and penetration values. It makes adding new units a breeze, since all you have to do is assign them values for those four variables (there are some others, I'm sure, but those are the most important). The downside is, if you give a unit 10% more damage, it means that unit will do 10% more damage against everything, and you have to tweak health, armour, and penetration to compensate.
Ultimately, it makes adding new stuff easier, and balancing the existing stuff harder.
It's very obviously the same engine, though it's been heavily modified of course. It uses the same file structure for game data, has extremely similar squad management, and handles cover and buildings pretty much exactly how it did in CoH1. It also uses, with slight modifications, the exact same structure for replay files and the replay system. In CoH1, there was a bug where sometimes if the members of an AT gun team were killed while the AT gun was moving, the gun would continue to move to its destination without the crew. This bug was present in CoH2 during alpha. It would be an amazing coincidence if that bug happened to be present in its exact same form in a brand-new engine. It's much more logical to assume, when taking into consideration the other similarities I mentioned above, that the core engine was taken from CoH1.
Hmm ok that is strange and I believe you - but at the same time I cant imagine they would go in and change pretty much every single feature of the game, to make it more simple and not only that remove all physics ect and make it run worse than the original game which is 9 years old and should easily run wwell on all machines.
Not only that they increase the size of all map features, make units slower to respond, remove all reactions from infantry * ducking down when huge explosions happen, change they way they swivel and engage infantry that aren't directly in front of them, change vehicles from units made for multiple components which are effected by physics to a solid "block" unit that seems to be unaffected by physics in game. Changed how deformable terrain is - its only about 40% compared to what it use to be ( you could create some truly deep craters in game with multiple heavey explosions to the same ares)
I duno man its always been so perplexing to me and Id love to know exactly what happened because it sounds like so much work to go into the game and changes everything for no real reason. |
Wait wut
The physics looked ridiculous in CoH1, I do not want the days where characters would fly 1000+ metres into the air back.
Honestly I'm pretty sure everything you're talking about here is just nostalgia, only remembering the good parts. Afaik imput lag always existed, even in vCoH. Vehicle pathing wasn't any better, I remember having massive problems with it. Afaik the camera angle wasn't changed much at all.
Mate I just played both games back to back 2 days ago - have a try you will see what I mean. Pathing maybe wasnt perfect but vehicle response was, they reacted instantly to your clicks just not always in the way you wanted.
Seriously go play some coh and see what I mean - as for the physics they were phenomenal. Maybe the men flying was exaggerated but everything in that game was destructible and effected by physics - it is a masterpiece.
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Seeing as CoH2 is built on the same engine as CoH1 (hell, there were even some of the same bugs from CoH1 in the CoH2 alpha and beta), Relic could've made CoH2 as similar to the first one as they wanted to. The fact that they didn't was a conscious design decision, and like it or not, it's probably not going to change.
The simplification of the game systems (removal of target tables, simplified damage calculations, etc.) was done so that they could more easily add new units and abilities to the game. There were quotes by developers in alpha/beta that the CoH1 system made it very difficult to add new units and modify existing ones, even though it also gave them a whole lot more flexibility when balancing. But when you consider that their entire business model is built around adding new units and abilities to commanders and then selling them, it's obvious why they chose the system that makes adding new stuff easier over the system that gives them greater control over the stuff that's already there.
I didn't know that - but unless you know 100% sure (ie its been confirmed somehow) then I don't really believe it for many reasons.
THe way damage happens to terrain, the way effects look in the game, they way all map artifacts look in game ( fences, trees, bushes ect) it looks like the DOW2 engine to me and not the vcoh one.
I can understand them removing the damage tables ect to make the game simple and the make the DLC stuff easier to implement but why would they remove the physics effects from the game? why would the camera angle change ect if it was the same engine.
Look how infantry moved in coh, bigger distance between men, they would expand and contract with distancing as they moved, soldiers would slow down and speed up relative to their squad, it was fluid, responsive and worked beautifully.
Tanks responded instantly to commands, vehicles maneuvered terrain better and all micro input was rewarded.
How arty and all mortar type weapons had accuracy that was inversely proportional to distance to target, that is gone too.
All that is gone from the game.
I really think they used a different engine with pretty graphics cos the thought players would not notice all the substance removed from the game.
I cant imagine them taking the same game engine as vcoh and then removing nearly every single feature out of the game. |
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RNP was awesome - sad to see you go Rogers but I don't blame you at all for leaving. Cheers for the good times |
You're in LUCK! We have COH2!
Not quite  maybe just on the surface |
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