Profile of Inverse

Drophacks aren't handled by the trust system. The servers can tell which player is still connected after a disconnect, and will award the win accordingly. If you're getting constant losses from drops, it's likely a problem with your connection. This is even more likely based on the numbers you give. 100 drops is a ridiculous amount.

The only way to reliably detect sync hacking in an RTS is with intrusive client-side anti-cheat, which just isn't a viable solution. It has nothing to do with money or laziness, it's just a technical problem that really can't be reliably solved.

Too bad that was ONLY and SPECIFICALLY for the wehr.
All other armies were about who can blob more and faster while spamming automatic weapon upgrades.

Guess what? Not much have change since, at least for axis factions, except now even wehr have powerful automatic infantry weapons and allied blobs are nothing like coh1 bar rifles or brits as a whole.

All of what you miss so much is in coh2 for a long time already and there is one of two issues:

Severe case of denial about CoH2.
Severe case of pink glasses of nostalgia.

The OF factions were a design disaster. There aren't many people who would disagree with that. They moved completely away from the drawn-out vehicle play, suppression-based infantry combat, and dynamic upgrade systems that made the vanilla matchup a joy to play both tactically and strategically. CoH2's original vanilla matchup had all of those tactical elements with none of the strategic ones.

@pigsoup You're absolutely right, the Americans were a relatively simple faction to play from a strategic perspective. Their support units were very situational, and the general flow of play was largely figured out, though there was still room to maneuver within the constraints imposed by the game. That said, the simple fact that upgrades were such a huge part of the vanilla matchup in CoH1 that entire games could be won or lost based solely on their razor-thin timings added a layer of strategic depth to the game that is far deeper than anything present in any faction in CoH2. There really isn't any serious representation of CoH1's global upgrade system in CoH2, and the game lacks a large amount of depth as a result.

RTS games have to keep track of exponentially more entities than an FPS. Destructive and dynamic cover in a game like Battlefield actually isn't all that demanding for a server because it's structured. You can't just destroy anything, and everything you can destroy is set up to be destroyed in certain ways. All the server needs to do is keep track of the destructible entities and their current states, then refer to those states when making hitbox calculations.

In an FPS, you rarely have more than 128 players in a single server (competitive games usually only have 10-20, depending on the title). That means the server only has to keep track of the locations of 128 entities, and calculate hitboxes on those entities. It also only has to send very limited player data, such as location and player action (firing, reloading, changing weapon, etc.). Even though FPS games usually run at a significantly higher tickrate than RTS games (CoH's simulation engine runs at around 8 ticks per second, compared to between 64 and 128 ticks per second for CS:GO games), it still uses significantly less bandwidth than an RTS that has to transmit location, health, entity, and action data for potentially hundreds of different units.

This is a big problem in a game like Starcraft where players often control over 100 units late in games. If both players had 100 units to command and the game was running at 8 ticks per second, the game would have to transmit and receive 1600 (100 units * 2 players * 8 ticks/second) units of information per second. Compare that to a 1v1 in CS:GO, where at 64 ticks/second the game would only have to transmit/receive 256 units of information (note for games like Battlefield, where the tickrate is far lower than that of Counter-Strike, the difference would be even greater).

That's 6.25x the bandwidth being used in the RTS compared to the FPS in order to accomodate the same number of players. Now if we look at things from the CoH perspective and use 15 or so units per player instead of the large numbers typical of traditional RTS games, we can get the bandwidth down to something approaching that of an FPS. However, we still have to consider the cost angle.

Dota 2 is structured very similar to an RTS, which makes sense considering it was originally an RTS mod. It was designed from the start to use client-server because it was designed first and foremost as a competitive game, and a competitive game that cannot gracefully handle disconnects makes running serious competitions an administrative nightmare. However, such architecture comes at a pretty steep monetary cost. Servers have to be globally located in order to accommodate people around the world, have to be maintained, and most importantly, have to be able to handle the immense bandwidth that a client-server game with large unit counts is going to produce. That last point is the most expensive, and one of the main reasons (along with having to recode most of their engine) why Relic will never adopt such a structure for CoH2. Maybe for CoH3, but even then it's unlikely.

Valve was willing to spend that money because they were trying to build a competitive game and a competitive community and knew they needed consistency if they were going to be taken seriously. Hell, they committed $1.6 million to a tournament prize pool before the game was even released to the public. Relic has neither the money nor the inclination to invest in something like that when it's seen as a luxury and not a necessity.

So no, building an RTS with a client-server model isn't impossible, especially if you have low unit counts like CoH does. But it's expensive, and in the case of CoH2 it would require a major rewrite of most of their codebase. In other words, it's completely impractical to hope for such a system to be implemented in CoH2.

If you're interested in reading more, I'd highly recommend this Gamasutra article by a Supreme Commander developer. Very enlightening on the challenges surrounding synchronization, message passing, and bug fixing in RTS games: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/126022/Opinion_Synchronous_RTS_Engines_And_A_Tale_of_Desyncs.php

And another interesting article, this an academic piece on SC2's pseudo-client-server architecture: http://choongsoo.info/docs/starcraft2.netgames12.pdf

A note on that, before the SEGA purchase multiple Relic employees went on record saying purchasable downloadable content would have absolutely zero impact on actual gameplay and would be purely cosmetic or single-player content. Perhaps they were mislead by higher management, perhaps they straight-up lied, or perhaps they were given a mandate by SEGA after the purchase; it's really impossible to tell. Something definitely happened along the way that changed the company's stance on the matter though.