Profile of Inverse

RNG itself isn't bad, it's just the implementation of it that matters. I haven't played CoH2 enough to speak to that, but the people who blindly slag on RNG as being generally bad are misguided. I can't comment on how LoL handles things because I don't play it, but Dota 2 and CSGO are two of the most popular competitive titles right now and they both have a ton of RNG. Hell, there are entire heroes in Dota designed around RNG, every autoattack you do deals random damage, and every creep kill you get gives you random gold. RNG isn't inherently bad.

PwnageMachine above me made a lot of really good points. Personally I don't enjoy CoH2 as a competitive game because I don't like how the core factions have so little in the way of strategic options. Because of this, the variety comes entirely from commanders, and since you're limited to three of those per game, your options are limited as well. Something like having to choose between building more units or improving the units you currently have may seem so simple, but it adds incredible depth to strategy games. The fact that CoH2 entirely lacks that decision-making element is the main reason it doesn't interest me.

That said, at the end of the day all that matters is whether or not people enjoy watching it. I know I don't, but that's fine, because there are plenty of other competitive games out there that I do enjoy watching and playing. If CoH2 can find a large enough audience, it can be successful. It's usually easier if you can attract that audience at launch when your game is in front of the most eyes (see SC2), but games like Dota 2 and CSGO have shown how you can grow a competitive community over years with smart management. The main problem with that approach is that Relic has never prioritized the competitive communities in any of their games, and you really need a developer actively working to grow the competitive scene these days if you really want it to flourish. Only time will tell.

Holy shit that's goofy expensive. Not a chance in hell this expansion should be priced higher than $30. Command & Conquer Red Alert 3: Uprising was an expansion similar in concept to this (different single-player experience, no multiplayer content), and that released at $19.99. The two aren't the same, obviously, but it's an interesting comparison. $43.99 is just ridiculous.

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.

Your geographical location to the server doesn't matter too much as there is some input lag added on top so the playing experience is uniform no matter where you live. My ping to the server is about 150ms but input delay in game is at about 450ms - 670ms when I have the game running at 60fps.

Oddly enough the game runs better when I use the recommended settings in graphics rather than turning everything to low or off.

That's a good point, I forgot to include the built-in delay. It seems SC2 has a built-in delay of 200ms, which is probably a good place to start when guessing at what CoH2's is, which also lines up nicely with those values you gave. Your ping to server still matters though, since the total delay you experience is ( 2 * ping + built-in delay ).

I find from playing Dota 2 that I start noticing major responsiveness problems around a ping of 120ms, but that could just be personal preference.

What is this target table and simplified damage calculations? What did you mean by they removed it? What do they do actually?

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.

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.

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.