True, Downfall is a really good movie, it's acting and plot are far better than Fury's, but it's not a combat film. I meant that there has not been an American Perspective WW2 combat Movie this good since Saving Private Ryan. I Just did not write the sentence properly to get my point across.
I personally did not like too much flag of our fathers, letters from Iwo Jima was better though, they are still hagiographic when it comes to portraying the "Greatest Generation". Fury is surprising in that aspect, I walked into the theater expecting a simple tank warfare fuck yeah murica movie, boy I was proven wrong. Regardless of that, Fury is a flawed flick cuz of the last act, shame.
To be honest Fury is a great modern WWII film. There hasn't been a WW2 movie this good since Saving Private Ryan. The setting feels authentic and the acting is really good!
Thing is that people go into the theater expecting a tank movie; well it isn't; it's about debunking the myth of the "Greatest Generation". Actually it's the exact opposite of the cheesy, silly, corny "Monument's Men".
Fury is a brutal, visceral war movie about the relationships & camaraderie of a tank crew and what they are prepared to do to survive the shitstorm they're in. The yankees aren't exactly portrayed as saviours: rape, looting, summary executions, cruelty, anger, hate. Well a fatalist portrait of war to diminish the "heroism" of said generation and expose the horrors of war, especially knowing that WW2 is too often portrayed by media as the clean, humanist, righteous war by/for the Allies perspective.
Fury just has 4 combat sequences and all are short.
They just used the tank battles to bait in the the teenage/"I need to see shit blow up cuz it's manly" crowd. A third of the combat is seen in the 3 minutes trailer and the movie is over 2 hours long.
Regarding the Tank combat, it's authentic, but not realistic, they did a good job knowing they only had 60 million $ for the movie, which is little compared to the massive budgets of dumb Superhero movies that get 200+ millions for bad plot, acting and over the top silliness CGI.
As CoH 2 player said it, it must have been quite expensive to rent the tanks and shoot the engagements, that's why they only had 1 tiger and 4 sherman tanks. In order to extend the tank battles, introduce new tank skirmishes or even make the combat more realistic by getting the tactics right, they would have required twice the budget and twice as many tanks and shooting days. Surely it was a luxury the director could not afford, as this would have required more rehearsing and shooting to get it perfect and that's too expensive. Plus, David Ayer is not as obstinate as Sam Peckinpah (Cross of Iron director, my second favourite WW2 movie after Come & See) to push and expensive and long production to nail the realistic WW2 combat.
And actually, the shermans are not OP in this film and it's not typical "MURICA fuck yeah" propaganda movies à la "Lone survivor"/"Act of Valor".
However it's true that the third act spoils the movie, which otherwise could have been an instant WW2 classic.
Capwalking is fine IMHO, It won't give you a huge nor decisive advantage over the opposing player and uses a lot of your micro/concentration which is a valuable resource in-game. I don't think it can be used after the first capping phase is over, it's just too taxing later on and you might forget about some units and lose them while capwalking.
So, there's a risk vs reward and an opportunity cost involved, it's not abusive at all.
SwS Truck crushing, as during the release of WFA was extremely abusive, that's why it got fixed in a matter of days. It involved a free truck that could wipe out entire enemy squads without the OKW player ever suffering loses and bleeding MP.
Truck pushing can still be considered abusive if using the SWS trucks. The way I see it, it's a free truck that is unarmed but you can still use it to push/harass the opposing player's infantry preventing it to deal consistent DPS, there is no trade off and no downside to using it in this manner unless you over extend dramatically and lose it to concentrated fire, if you lose it good job you just tied down a sizeable enemy force for a few moments and captured the point/won an engagement, but if you do lose it you delayed your tech (But I don't think the penalty is that severe as you receive a new truck for free, not sure how much you delay your tech tough as I don't have OKW).
Whereas If you push with a kubelwagon, an M3, or an Ostheer Scout car, you are trading DPS for pushing/disrupting infantry because these units are most efficient at range to deal consistent DPS, so there's a tradeoff. Still, I don't consider SWS pushing truly abusive, but more of an annoyance. Lastly I'm fine with it as I rarely see it.
I don't think the issue with Assault Engineers is their stats or price, it's that they are easily spammable. Thus allowing them to reach critical mass very early in the match, it's a momentum issue.
They are a glass cannon 4 man squad, extremely fragile and they have to close-in to do a lot of damage. Once singled out and focused fired they drop like flies.
Therefore, instead of increasing their manpower cost I suggest doubling or tripling their call-in cooldown!
That would be a fair in my opinion, it gives USF an alternative opening to riflemen. I think this way Assault Engineers will remain a viable unit throughout the whole game that complements your army instead of being it's backbone.
If Relic just increases the price to 300-320 manpower most people won't use them that much as they will MP bleed them, if overnerfed they are cast into oblivion and we won't see them ever again like it was the case before 9th Sept patch. Overnerf and overbuff, that's Relic logic and I don't like it. Every single unit should be good and viable in this game, and every time there's a good unit, people call for nerfs.
Just increase the call-in cooldown, they won't be easily spammable anymore. This will allow Ostheer to get up the right counters and not get swarmed by the AE blob. That's my main gripe vs the AE blob, that they reach critical mass (3-4 squads) by the 3-4 min mark when I only have 2 grens, 1 Pio and 1 MG42 and can't repel them because they flank and swarm me. Ost has the right counters we just need a little more the time to get them and even out the early game engagements. Soviets deal with Assault Grenadier spam by going for a M3 scout cars opening which the Ost don't get until T2.
Regarding Assault Grenadiers, they need a moderate durability buff to be competitive against Assault Engineers.
Decent balance patch, at least the meta will change. I'm feeling like playing coh2 a bit more now.
With the Sturmpanzer IV and Panther buff Ostheer T4 might be finally worth it. They should have decreased the munitions cost of "button" seeing it got nerfed. And I sincerely hope they fixed the HMG bugs and abilities cancelled refunds for real this time. Crossing fingers for a noticeable improvement on vehicles pathfinding!
However I'm still waiting for an overhaul patch addressing the mediocre optimization and glitches that bog down CoH 2.Plus a redesign of the Red Army faction.
You can edit the config file and disable specific effects that way. I agree it's dumb that you can't do that in the settings, but anyway, it is possible.
Thanks for the heads up. I gonna try it! I guess it's in the my documents folder right?
I'm with Inverse, the UI is awful, full of unnecessary visual noise to make it look rugged and war weary, the only thing it has over vCoH great UI is the top right bar with all the squad icons and the reinforce button that reinforces all selected squads instead of having to TAB them as in vCoH (that's really useful).
My main gripe with CoH 2 is the awful optimization this game has. It's the best looking RTS, I salute that, but that's no excuse for subpar performance.
I've stated this before in the official forums, Relic has to work together with Nvidia/AMD on their next drivers, and also work on getting some Crossfire/SLI Profiles.
Another thing that really causes unnecessary performance issues is the all inclusive "Image quality" setting. This does not allow the players to tweak and fine tune the game. There should be separate settings for shadows/smoke & fog/ Shader & Lighting/Effects & Particles as those are the usual suspects for terrible performance drops.
For instance one could keep nice lighting & shaders, disable smoke and shadows and the game would run better and still look good, but if we want to disable smoke and shadows, we have to put Image quality on minimum and we lose the shaders and lighting. Go figure.
I have a gaming rig that is over 2 years old:
Windows 7 64-bit
Intel Core i7 2600k OC to 4.2 Ghz
EVGA GTX 580 OC to 900 Mhz
16GB DDR3 1600 Mhz RAM
128 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD.
These are my settings:
The game runs like crap on my system, I struggle to keep 60 FPS with these settings on 1v1s. I play mostly 3v3s and 4v4s and my average FPS is 30 frames... On top of that, I get frequent bugsplats every 3 to 4 games out of the blue. Apparently something to do with my Nvidia drivers hanging up. Well I have the latest Nvidia drivers and every other game I own does not crash. Again it's an issue between Relic and Nvidia not working together on the drivers, so It's Relics' fault not Nvidia's.
Then comes the frequent freezes, hangups and mini stutters to nail the coffin; that I guess have to do with the battle servers having issues or overloading.
Optimization must be a priority for Relic, otherwise they are going to start to lose players.
I play CoH 2 less and less because WFA armies aggravated the performance issues and I can't be bothered to play a game that runs like crap on a rig that runs BF3, Far Cry 3 and a Heavily modded Skyrim all on ULTRA at 60 FPS. I'm also tired of making my teammates lose games because Coh2 bugsplats on me so frequently.
weird, runs fine on high settings on my one year old 500 euro pc.
Depends on what you consider "fine". For me 30fps is not fine but others consider it okay, but I'm not a console peasant, constant 60 fps is fine, not a single frame less. CoH 2 is notoriously bad when it comes to optimization, just look the graphics settings most streamers use to achieve 45-60fps, it's mid or low settings.