CoH2 had virtually no weapon profiles at launch, so what random element are we talking about here? The 20% flamethrower instant kill criticals or the "body armor" where shots deflected on many squads
I get what you mean with inf combat being too consistent, predictable & boring, however I don't see where CoH2 was really better here. For a seasoned player it is pretty easy to predict the outcome of CoH2 infantry engagements in almost every single case as well.
And tanks get crazy RNG wipes 24/7 in CoH3, so there is that
I don't mean at-launch infantry combat, I mean its current state. It's far from perfect, and I have several things I would definitely change (the prevalence of high-accuracy long-ranged squads, and LMGs in general), but overall it's far more dynamic and interesting than Company of Heroes 3 currently is. You can predict the outcome of an infantry engagement, sure - the whole point of the game is predicated on being able to make tactical decisions with the information available to you. Do I retreat to preserve my manpower and deny the enemy veterancy? Do I stay and try to bleed a few models from the squad? RNG injects a bit of fuel into these decisions, because overall the stakes tend to be fairly low (losing an early engagement will not lose you the whole match, unlike in Company of Heroes 1) and for a good player the worst that will happen is a bit of manpower bleed.
Well maybe maybe not. I see where you're coming from; In CoH 2, you might have to gamble a bit to get that squad wipe or finish off that tank. Should I stay or should I pull back? I might be able to bounce that shot, amd if I do I could get the kill, but if not I lose this tank and they keep theirs. Etc. These choices are a bit of gambling mixed in with the skill.
But games don't HAVE to have that RNG element to them. Chess, for example, doesn't have you roll dice to determine whether you capture a piece or not, you simply capture it. Maybe with unit interactions being more "clinical and sterile", it will be easier to balance. Just a thought.
I was going to admit that the "clinical and sterile" nature of chess has created a "meta" where most people play the same openings, but then I remembered that even in top level play, chess players do experiment with openings not considered the best. It's not like RNG somehow cured CoH 2 of this phenomena.
There's always going to be a metagame - literally any competitive activity in history has developed a metagame as professionals attempt to predict and one-up one another. The analogy with chess is somewhat flawed because I find that chess is more applicable to a game like StarCraft than Company of Heroes. Chess and StarCraft are both "macro-level" strategies - the "tactical" level, i.e., what happens when one piece encounters another, or what happens when a StarCraft unit comes against its counter, is predictable. The "strategic" layer, how the player distributes the resources available to them and reacts to the opponent's decisions, is where the majority of these games are played.
Company of Heroes is a "micro-level" strategy game first and foremost, and this is why I enjoy it over most other RTS games. Resources distribution and build order are not as important as having your units in the right place at the right time, and knowing how to use them and what situations they're effective in. Play and counterplay are decided in the moment-to-moment use of units, not in the economic decisions that are largely relegated as secondary. The RNG-reliant combat system is largely what enables this. There will always be a "meta" - that is unavoidable. The question is how restrictive or permissive it is to alternative strategies. In its current state, Company of Heroes 2 allows for a wide variety of units that can actually be a part of a winning strategy - Company of Heroes 3 has factions that are bloated with units that never see the light of day. |
I think that's been one of the consistent issues people have had with Company of Heroes 3 - that the combat has been clinical and sterile. Providing up-front information to the player is important, but when the combat capabilities of each unit are too reliable and too consistent then it removes the fun and nuance from encounters. The random element, done well (like in Company of Heroes 2's infantry combat, and not its at-launch tank criticals, etc.), is an important component in making infantry combat exciting, and will encourage a player to take risks or make daring plays that can turn out well or poorly.
Company of Heroes 3 has failed in that regard, and even watching a dynamic player like VonIvan is terribly boring, to the game's detriment. |
That's the thing, I spend very, very little time here. Yet apparently it's enough to make you unhappy.
I don't know why you find that word choice bothersome, I'm not trying to be original. I use a word because it signifies a specific concept. That's the whole point of language? |
You're clearly perturbed by it. |
I'm far from dedicated, I post here very infrequently. I'm not out to ruin the game for anyone - if you enjoy Company of Heroes 3 then that's your business, and if my posts are making you feel bad in some way then you should probably examine that feeling a little more closely. And the game is doing a perfectly good job at ruining itself without my involvement. But the sad attempts by Relic to keep a lid on everything and Astroturf mean that yes, there is some enjoyment that I get from watching it all crumble. |
We get it. You don't like it. You've been going on about it for almost half a year.
Good grief man. Get over it. At this point despite some valid points that are painfully obvious, it's becoming quite clear that your many of your observations that you're throwing out are just uneducated blathering about something you clearly don't own.
I can't imagine if you did spend a dime. Everyone in a 100km radius around you would develop cancer.
Hence my point about the online population dwindling to a small number of sycophants. I've had a lot of things said about me, but never that I'm uneducated.
If what I write is making you uncomfortable then you can always check out the official forums or the Discord server, I'm sure those will be more to your sensibilities. |
Thing about Discord and Reddit is it's a lot easier to moderate and control the narrative. Take a look at some of the bullshit posts on Reddit and the official forums for reference. So naturally there's going to be a drive for developers to communicate on those platforms where they can be reasonably certain that they're on home ground.
That being said, if we're talking coh2.org specifically, yes, there's been a downtick in activity pretty much since the last Company of Heroes 2 balance patch. But you have your head in the sand if you think the current state of affairs is at all unrelated to the state of Company of Heroes 3. The drop-off has been pretty noticeable, hence the thread.
I dunno why you keep making these gaslight-y posts where you keep repeating the same tired stuff about how this was the same as Company of Heroes 2's launch. A lot of us were there for that launch - most people, I think, aren't so deluded that they can't see the difference right there in front of them. |
It's hard to even get at the balance of the game when so many other aspects of it are broken. My impression seems to be that, with the veritable mountain of other issues aside, the game falls into the pretty standard RTS model of having only one or two viable strategies per faction - I'm sure the majority of people don't really care about this too much. Any RTS game (or competitive activity, for that matter) will have a meta, the nuance comes in how defined or restrictive that meta is. Company of Heroes 2 had major problems with this from its early days, but the community balance patches introduced an environment where you could get away with odd or unconventional strategies, and for the most part, you weren't restricted to a well-defined build order.
Company of Heroes 3, in this respect, is just plain boring. The reduction of individual squad modularity in favour of reintroducing global upgrades was a major step backwards, and combat overall feels very dull. The dust hasn't settled from release yet so there are still cases where an outlier unit is defining a faction's response to a number of threats and leading to scenarios where some units never see the light of day. No lessons were learned, apparently, nor was pre-release feedback taken into account.
The real reason, though, that I think these forums are somewhat dead is that the game is mostly dead. The release drove away a large portion of the long-time members of the community, and the continued poor quality of the patch efforts hasn't exactly encouraged others to stick around. It's very quickly dwindling to a small number of sycophants and a deluded few who think that Relic is going to pull a miracle out of their ass. I would love to be proven absolutely wrong, but I think that's just not going to happen. Either way, there's not really much to talk about, other than the fact that the game is circling the drain. Those watching a car crash don't usually have much to say in the moment either. |
Japanese game development is fascinating in contrast to North American game development, largely because in the Japanese context games media are still seen as somewhat niche products (despite the staggering reality on the ground) and the companies that make them are more than willing to finance ridiculous auteurs and get out of their way. Profit is a motive but corporate culture over there is significantly different and reputation is more of a factor in influencing a company's decisions.
North American companies, on the other hand, controlled by financiers operating off of a financial playbook that works very well in non-creative industries, chase the dollar down to the bottom of whatever hole it goes in. Epic games is a great example of the trajectory of this - they came up with a successful engine and a few good games based on it (Unreal Tournament, Gears of War), nearly killed themselves chasing the latest trend (MOBAs), and then mounted one of the biggest comebacks imaginable by capitalizing on a nascent trend that had only just breached the horizon (Battle Royale). Other companies, looking at that, skipped the first part and promptly poured money into the abyss trying to rival Fortnite's success instead of making something original or improving on their own formulae.
Why do they do this? Because artistic businesses are inherently risky, and investors are notoriously risk-averse. Giving Hideo Kojima millions of dollars to make a giant-budget game about delivering packages isn't as solid of a bet as making a Fortnite clone to them, because the investors making the decisions don't see it as trying to supplant a market monopoly, because the idea isn't to make something that's fun or interesting, but rather something that encourages compulsive behaviour (and spending).
Company of Heroes 3 itself exists in a limbo between these two competing forces, and I sincerely doubt that it's much to do with SEGA as a publisher. SEGA is, if anything, fairly infamous for being laissez-faire with their studios, sometimes to the detriment of the final product. Hell, Creative Assembly basically only exists today because SEGA was bankrolling niche and less profitable historical strategy games since the mid-2000s, and largely letting them do whatever they wanted with them.
If blame is to rest anywhere, it should rest on the people in charge of Relic - time and time again, the management has fundamentally misunderstood what the game is and why people enjoy playing it. Looking at Company of Heroes 3 in action is like looking at the relics of a Vanuatu cargo cult - people re-enacting barely-understood mechanics as rituals in the hope of recapturing some level of past prosperity. It's depressing but it's the reality we inhabit. |
I think you are interpreting too much into it. How do you depict that Germany deployed heavier tanks into a game? You make their stats better.
Also this goes both ways. They literally implemented a non existing super tank for the British in Coh3 or an out of setting Pershing in Coh1.
I don't give a single shit if the Allies got one paper tank, focusing on minutae and tiny quibbles like that is meaningless in the overall scope of my statement, which is that, in all three Company of Heroes games, the Germans are "the late-game faction". Which means they have the biggest and most dangerous armour and infantry and the Allies need to either stop them early or build an unstoppable horde to win. If this were explicitly a fantasy game I wouldn't even remotely care. But it's (nominally) based on historical events and it therefore bears some responsibility in respect to the narrative it's creating. |