As a casual player. are you able to conjecture why Relic even bothered to waste time making a new engine? I am grateful for your brief analysis as to how COH2 was created - so why not simply adapt COH2 to COH3 and cut out the time and expense of the new engine?
That's actually extremely easy to answer:
CoH1 and as a result, CoH2 had too many things hard-coded, which resulted in certain mechanics being inflexible and impossible to change - primary example is front/rear armor of CoH2 and lack of side armor - a design choice that happened on engine level and could not be changed.
Main reason to make a new version of the engine was to get rid of hard-coded mechanics and allow flexibility to alterations if they prove to be in need of severe changes.
Second, it is evident that COH1 concentrated on 1v1 and LV play, while the introduction of the 'casualisation beam' in COH2 led to a concentration on team games with plenty of Armour and Arty, to the extent that by the end of Relic's active development of COH2, balancing was concentrated on team games.
That isn't what I meant by 'casualisation beam' there tho, it was not team game focus of coh2, it was early coh2 extreme simplification of the game, plain, uninspiring and shared by all vehicles and infantry cope+paste veterancy, linear weapon dps profiles, lack of damage tables(I would argue that was a good thing, but executed very poorly due to all of the remaining choices), stupidly overpowered health increases/damage reductions.
Early CoH2 in terms of gameplay and stats was very shallow compared to CoH1, it just did not had the depth until weapon profiles rework and veterancy revamp.
The consequence of the first 3 COH iterations is that the 1v1 players from COH1 tended to look with disdain on COH2, while the team players from COH2 seem less than enamoured with COH3.
My other questions are:
- You state that Relic failed to satisfy either group of DOW players. But it looks as if history may be repeating itself with COH3. Is it not possible with a new engine to apply different balancing and values to team games as opposed to 1v1? e.g. is it possible to create different BGs for team games only which could not be selected for 1v1?
- Since developers presumably wish to maximise their income, would Relic have been wiser to concentrate on team games rather than 1v1?
- Is the relatively crude COH3 UI indicative of the loss of ability and/or experience of those Relic Devs who departed the game pre-COH3?
Same questions to Tiger Baron
PS Let's lay off with the fisticuffs, please.
The big thing to notice here is that all 3 CoH games are, without any question, CoH games.
There are pace, TTK and where the game is reaching "golden point" of combat differences, but all are very clearly CoH games.
DoW on the other hand went from large squads and armies macro strategy to purely micro and hero oriented one in 2nd part.
3rd part attempted to merge previous 2 together and fell flat in the attempt - it was good RTS, but it was bad DoW from DoW1 players perspective, who wanted massive escalating battles with large customizable squads as well as from DoW2 players perspective who expected hero and squad preservation oriented gameplay with individual squad upgrades vs tech up gameplay.
It did had elements that made both DoW1 good and DoW2 good, but it got rid of all that made them distinct, which resulted in both playerbases rejecting the game.
No idea for dynamic balance changes, but no RTS ever did that and from design pov, its clear as to why - learning balance all over again just because game mode changes is very bad for the accessibility of the game.
What they should have done is what they did in DoW2, largest problem of CoH team games balance is the fact that contrary to 1s and 2s, map is very rarely contested, there is too many resource points in team games, which give regular values as in 1s and 2s.
Instead of trying to drive into a wall with dynamic balance, DoW2 solution of dynamic resources should be applied, where increased number of players in team games meant that there is indeed more resource points, but each of them provided LESS resources than corresponding one in smaller game mode while costing the same amount to build up.
Resource caches providing +1/2 instead of +3/5 in team games alone would massively improve the balance there, lowering regular fuel points values would go a long way too.
Fundamental problem with CoH series and team games was always imbalance in fuel abundance between game modes, not the balance itself.
You can pump out brummbar in 10 minutes or less in team games.
Good luck with that in 1s or 2s.
That to me is the crux of team game imbalance and as long as relic will refuse to accept resource inflation being main driving factor of imbalance between 1s and 2s and larger team games, there will never be balance there.
As for the UI, its not the easiest thing to design, but it is far from hardest, my experience is they aimed for simplicity and readability and as a result, some clarity going towards much smaller group of more experienced players was sacrificed, given how CoH3 is 1st CoH to land on consoles as well.