What is wrong if Relic sells cosmetics? As long as I have the option to turn off unhistoric skins etc. I support it. People seem to forget that Relic is a company who needs to generate revenue after the launch. They can only support the game long term if they sell cosmetics, customization etc. I really don't understand why people care complaining about this, honestly. If I can customize my units then I happily throw my money on it. I also don't mind to pay for quality battle groups - as long as they are balanced.
Gameplay wise there is nothing wrong with it. There can be social/financial issues with microtransactions generally for people vulnerable to spending, but that's quite a whole different topic.
People mostly complain because nowadays you'll also not get a finished game anymore at launch. We're already only buying licenses without any reselling value, and many games are in a decent state months to years after launch, which should have been actual development time. The 'games as a service' model is often being abused to actually ship an alpha version of the game and excuse bugs.
Relic knows that it crossed a line in CoH2, they will not do the same mistake again. They also adressed that several times btw.
All in all I would recommend to have some patience and look back at his topic 3 months after launch. If we have balancing breaking battle groups I'm the first who will rage. But I'm optimistic that this will not be the case.
I wouldn't trust any game company on their promises, especially not if publishers are behind them that have proven to cut content and sell it later as DLC.
We'll see what Relic will do, but since these MTXs can heavily influence the game's design and balance, it's necessary to draw a red line before important design decision have been made
I've made a post after digging tech test files, which had connections to montization.
Pretty much what will be monetisation
1) Separate\bundled skins for tanks\captured points\inf units. Pretty much every aspect of army will be customisation
2) Things like player avatars, titles, player cards
3) There will be 3 types of item rarity similar to common\rare\epic
4) And I believe game would have 2 types of currency one being free and the other one will be paid one.
Also again, for those who think "skins aren't sufficient enough", there are passive income, to generate more $ proper game-developers\publishers use expansions, the same way Total War did.
I mean sure, big companies always trying to milk you dry, but lets be honest "EA\Ubisoft style" is not the single one here on the market.
I remember your post, it was a pretty interesting read, but quite a while ago.
Did you find anything regarding battlegroups or other gameplay content? What you list up there seems to be cosmetics only.
I don't see how CoH3 can monetize cosmetics successfully. Sure they had some throwaway camos and cross-over skins in CoH2, but even with 10k concurrent players on the regular basis, they stopped making simple textures (where other games have remodels, voice-overs, vfx for skins). It was unprofitable, and same will be for CoH3 - tank skins aren't sexy catgirls or black knights - they barely matter.
There's already a CoH3 cosmetic DLC out there. They'll clearly monetize it.
Creating a new skin is not that much work. If a somewhat decent artist spends half a day on it (and he'll probably need less), Relic spends a couple of hundred dollars. You'll break even if 200-300 player's buy it for 2 dollars.
original:
"Having vehicles generally recoverable could mean some good news for overall gameplay. Artillery can not be as strong anymore in large games, because the main counter to arty at least in CoH2 was diving a tank, which in turn is only viable if you don't hand over your vehicle to the enemy. "
I don't get why you quote this twice now. The meaning is still the same, and even if you misunderstood it the follow up posts made it pretty clear that diving in CoH3 could be less viable compared to CoH2. So nothing is "contrary to what I claimed". I always said the same thing.
By "can not" do you mean it will be less oppressive or it should be designed to be less oppressive?
Yet from first look of COH3 the easy access to healing/reinforcement in map it seem that the game will require strong artillery or else it will static camping around these points.
I am not a soothsayer, I have no idea what Relic has planned. The section you quoted above is only one of multiple aspects that I mentioned, where Relic needs to take special care and thought in order to not break the game AND keep some vehicle recovery mechanic in the game.
We'll see how Relic handles the forward reinforcement. They'll surely need to tweak it, I'd personally prefer some longer setup/teardown for the med trucks in order to put more thought into where and when to place them down and how to defend them. Artillery would surely help to destroy these forward points, but I hope they'll manage another route. Spamming arty is already way to prevalent in CoH2 to the point where whole games are just decided by who has more artillery, not who organized better pushes. Obviously it is highly map dependent, but still. CoH3 should focus more on ground based pushes, at least in my opinion.
I also noticed most fresh wrecks are so fragile they can be easily ran over, and don't seem to bounce shots like wrecks in coh2
If the resource economy worked similar to CoH2 (which would be bad), I could even imagine that the recovery vehicle is worse in 4v4 than e.g. in 3v3, depending resource refunds after cancellation etc. If you overflow with resources anyway (at least fuel), there is less benefit of saving some by recovering a vehicle while still having the same - if not even higher - risks. But that is pure theocrafting from my end. I really hope larger maps will have more, but less valuable resource points so that income can be easier contested
When it comes to dives in coh2 it is safer to dive contrary to what you have claimed:
In coh2 there is a slight chance the the vehicle might be abounded, in COH3 there is high probability that the defended might be able to recover his artillery vehicle and the vehicle that dived (for a cost).
As for "just adjusting a simple slider of how much original cost you need to pay" imo there is nothing simple about that. One has to balance the cost across all modes and so accurate that its worth building the recovery track but not being op and one has to do that for all vehicles and all commanders.
You didn't understand what I wrote in my posts.
I clearly said that diving in CoH3 is not as viable as in CoH2, therefore artillery cannot be as oppressive as it was in CoH2 as well, because otherwise we'd get even heavier arty feasts than we have now.
Your last point applies to literally everything in the game. Your suggestion of gathering wrecks to build an enemy unit also does not scale independently of game modes. My whole point was that your suggestion adds a very convoluted system that takes away focus from microing your troops. The current system is at least easy and streamlined in many ways. We'll have to wait for the release to see how the economy works out, especially across different modes.
Still does not make sense since one can probably also recover katyoushas so one player would have back all vehicles the other none...
Once more you should be looking at from a perceptive of how often this would happen. Abandon has something 5% chance (if I remember correctly) while now it would almost certain and it also available only to half the factions...
You're missing the point. You can tune how much recovery is worth it by just adjusting a simple slider of how much original cost you need to pay. If the truck is fragile, artillery could just shoot the wreck both to remove the wreck as well as to attack the recovery vehicle. Which in turn is not for free, too. But all this discussion is just for dives. Most vehicles die near the front line, where the long recovery process is way more risky.
That not all factions have it can indeed cause balance issues, but my point was that I do not agree with your specific suggestion due to aforementioned reasons. The current system is design wise fine. If that's true for balance as well, we will see.
Player B both killed an enemy PZIV and got one for his own...
Lets look at this another way. What in COH2 was a low chance event (having a vehicle abandoned) in now a much higher chance event only for the benefit of faction who have access to those trucks. Only now it take more time and it has a cost.
(edited)
That's not how it works. CoH3's recovery is not free, so you don't just get a P4 for your own.
The calculation (pure resources at least) goes as follows:
CoH2:
You lose the P4 (350 MP, 120 FU), but kill two Katys (720 MP, 170 FU), giving you a net gain of 380 MP and 50 FU. In those 5% of cases, it would screw you over and gift the opponent your tank, reducing his effective loss. At this point, you traded 350 MP and 120 FU for 380 MP and 50 FU. Since the chance is rather low, everyone would dive at 2 Katys in CoH2 for the loss of the P4.
CoH3:
If recovery does not cost anything, the same situation would be the same as if the vehicle had been abandoned in CoH2.
If we apply a 80% cost of the original price to resurrection, then the enemy can reduce his loss only by 20% of the P4's price. At this point you lose your P4 (350 MP, 120 FU) for two Katys - 20% of the P4 price, which totals to 650 MP and 147 FU. That's a clear win. Depending on additional mechanics (no refund for cancelling, fragility of the recovery vehicle, cast time etc), there is additional cost and risk for recovering a vehicle, at which point it does not become a nobrainer anymore as in CoH2.
These factors can tune very well how viable recovery vehicles are.
That does not make sense. Currently the risk of abandoning a vehicle is quite low. With recovery the chance of recovering an enemy destroyed vehicle behind your line would be almost certain if one's faction have these tracks available.
Yes, that's what I wrote.
In CoH2, you dive based on the assumption that your vehicle will not be abandoned in case it gets destroyed. In CoH3, your vehicle will be recovered.
Diving a P4 for 2 Katys is absolutely worth it in CoH2 (unless RNG abandon kicks in). Doing the same thing in CoH3 would be roughly an even trade.
These are question that obviously can not be answered here since the require extensive planning the testing.
A rough idea though would be:
Number of vehicles need to be able to build a vehicle would be according to vehicle category (light,medium, heavy, super heavy).
Nope, when it comes to recovery wreck would only count for the specific vehicle or category.
Vehicles would be unlock one by one
answered in point 3
In addition one could use the wreck for other reasons. For example one salvages a dingo armed with bren now one can equip an infatry with bren, one salvages a hmg now can get a free pintle, one salvages one a PzIV, one can give skirt to PzIV or salvaged vehicles can offer discount to techs.
It could be explored in a number of ways, but at some point the mechanic will become to fiddly to be attractive. Do you really want to gather X light vehicles to be able to build one of them? Your opponent could just not build the 3 needed light vehicles that you need. Unit classes are even less defined than in CoH2. How do you deal with that? If you recover a Stuart and a Greyhound, which one are you allowed to build? Which one if the vehicles are even from different factions? What happens if at least one vehicle is from your own faction or the other Allied/Axis? Would it then be possible to exploit that you can build a unit of your Ally?
Is it really worth the micro and resources to build a recovery vehicle, micro it to salvage a wreck and then get a free pintle (or any other smaller bonus) for it? I'd have to do that an insane amount of times to be worth it.
Your suggestion would take a lot of focus from the rest of the game. There's so many questions that will give rise to logical and gameplay problems. Even if you'd achieve a system that is fair and balanced, it would probably not be fun, and that's what playing computer games is all about.
At least the current system is easy to understand and logical. There's a destroyed wreck on the battlefield. You need a specialized vehicle and some resources (spare parts) to get it into working condition again. Or you just scrap it for what you might be able to use and get some resources. That's easy and straight forward, still has some decision making and pre-planning involved and does not need any counters or other indirect mechanics to work. It's an overall better design. Does it fit the gameplay? Is it balanced? We don't know yet, we'll see after release and the first months or patching.
Imo recovery cost and fragility are too few variables to be balance the mechanism across all modes when the price can be something as important as Black prince. Providing more tools would help balancing the mechanism greatly.
To be honest I don't fully remember what the costs of recovery were. But if the recovery cost scaled with the unit's cost, it would already be a decent screw to tune balance. Especially if you don't get refunded if you need to cancel the recovery. You might get a cool vehicle for rather cheap, but pay resources, risk completely losing them, risk the truck itself and have an opportunity cost of not being able to use those resources earlier.
Relic Entertainment
cblanco ★ 
보드카 중대 
VonManteuffel 
Heartless Jäger 
