Company of Heroes 3
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Join Date:Posts: 34203
I thought the fanbase broadly hated CoH2 though? Suppose there is always a cohort all the same, but didn't think it was especially voiciferous.
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There's a big contingent of players who picked up COH 2 well after Relic spent ages updating it so the state it was in when they played it was 'better'
Continued the campaign on sunday and I stand by 'most' of what I said earlier. I am still getting the occasional new bonus objective (steal a panzershrek was a silly one) and I did run into one new game mode (this one basically treated your units as tickets and any casualties you inflict or suffer lower the tickets, so it was a bit different mechanic wise). I do still think the different missions are company based as I got this with the British armour division and hadnt seen it with any other company.
But I am doubling down on the games biggest flaw is how it communicates things to you and how they affect the game + the bugs on the world map.
So its much more structured then you'd think as it actually introduces things with set deadlines in pretty rapid succession, Gustav line, Anzio Annie etc but if you are not where it thinks you should be then it all gets quite confusing as its telling you about things on the other side of the country (for example Anzio has a beach landing occur on it, and I'm told to rush to Anzio to support them, but at the time they told me this I had made almost no progress in the direction of Anzio. forcing me to skip and hop from port to ship to launch a company at anzio from the sea.) Then it has events that seem bugged, Anzio Annie is meant to be a nuisence constantly shelling your companies while active, but the animation is bugged so it only sometimes show it hitting a company. And it always plays the same voice message from the american general saying Anzio Annie is hitting our companies, so I confused for many turns what he meant as I didnt see the animation for ages nor noticed any substantial damage to my companies.
The worse offender has to be Monte Casino, where it gives you a tight deadline to take the monestary before its bombed to hell, but if you get troops over to it you cant attack. Turned out I had to click on the Monte Casino itself where it gave me a list of side objectives where I needed to do one before assaulting monte casino. Which naturally I did not know about at all And I am now rushing to finish one of them in a single turn so I can attack Monte Casino in the next turn.
On some positives the set missions get a lot better as you go further into the campaign. Potenza was a delight of a mission, there are some no build ones that pop up in certain situations.
But the granddaddy (so far) has to be Anzio. Proper difficult hard nose grind of a mission. I have not actually completed it yet. I foolishly sent my weakest company to Anzio (they were closest) and Anzio is a timed mission where the germans are dug in like ticks with multiple pak 88s and a tiger and a bunch of other tanks and horde of infantry both AT equipped and elite. the game also throws 3-4 bonus objectives (two of them timed) at you while also putting the whole mission on a timer as Anzio Annie shells your base constantly. I think 3rd time I'll get it, but its a genuinely big mission and highlights the frustration that there does not appear to be any mid mission saving in the italian campaign.
Which is dumb.
I look forwarding to silencing Annie tonight when I get back. I dont think any mission in COH 2 punished me as hard as this one.
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Ah that explains Anzio, I don't even know where it is and I keep getting told about those guns. I am currently ignoring the "objectives" for the most part. We'll see if it has a major impact.
With regards to not being able to save mid game, yes it's a pain. I'm playing on a fairly high difficulty level and sometimes I breeze through the skirmishes in minutes but yesterday I ended up doing a skirmish for over 80 minutes. It was fun and very challenging but midway through I wanted to stop but had to keep going or all that time would have been wasted!
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I'd be curious what changes for you when you eventually reach anzio because the game put a time limit in turns to do the anzio mission (like with monte casino) so I wonder how they change when you get to them later.
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3rd report and pretty much the same issues.
I finished the Italian campaign, the last mission is pretty cool, introduces a unique mechanic. Think final level of warcraft 3. Its genuinely a shame it's the only mission to use this mechanic, it's also a damn shame that you dont realise it's the last level, the game gives you the impression there is a small bit more to push on, but then it just ends. I dont know if this is because I had cleared out every other town before the final assault or if it just ends there every time.
It's a shame overall that the campaign basically ends when it feels the map side of things kick into high gear properly. I got the hang of jumping my infantry units around via paradrops to put out fires and quickly shipping my armoured columns up and down the coast. But by the time I got to gripes with this it was pretty much just mopping things up.
For the 3rd time in a row I can happily report that there are still EVEN MORE varied mission types in the skirmish, I had two more show up tonight, one of which was a cute opposite of an earlier one, which was kind of cool. Another was a rescue mission which I've only got once (I think it's tied to the special forces company which I didnt use much) And on top of that even more secondary missions, including one that just dropped a panther tank on me and another which coated the map in mines which was actually genuinely frustrating and was the only skirmish I outright lost because I kept losing key units to mines.
I can also report for the 3rd time that the same two big issues remain. Awful awful tutorials and map bugs. The final level of the game suffers from the same unclear explanation as Monte Casino, I reached it quite early in my playthrough but it refused to let me take the city, I couldnt work out why and as I had a bunch of secondary objectives I left it. When I came back and realised what I needed to do I spent ages preparing my lines to assault both objectives, but again like Monte Casino, you only need to do one. Very unclear. The game also runs to its own tune regardless of what you do in some aspects. I thought if I attacked Monte Casino before the bombing I'd get a different level to one after the bombing, but nope Once in the mission the monestary is still bombed by bombers prior to your mission start. So it feels like your decisions have little consequences beyond loyalty bonuses from the 3 characters and some bonus resources.
Speaking of the 3 characters, their bonuses are the worst. At least the US and UK general are. The Partisans are actually useful. The generals are just there to ruin your population cap as each have a loyalty bonus that gives you an extra unit every time you do X and at one point in the game I realised I was over my pop limit by 30 points. All because of these 'bonus' units. I had to go through the map salvaging all these units to bring my pop back under control.
And then there's the bugs. This time we had a mission disappear on me. It seems every character has a final loyalty mission and I had done both the generals and was waiting on the partisan, she then called in asking for help on a mission and I was like 'Yes this is it, last loyalty mission' moved my company up to the point, started the mission and it loaded an old mission I had done before. A side mission from earlier. I was confused. So I reloaded a save. But this time she didnt give me a loyalty mission so I kept on playing, then she said the same line again this time about a different town, so I moved to it, but she never gave me a mission. Eventually I took the town and she gave a 'Well done for sorting that out commander' response. Did I just skip the mission?
This was all very silly.
In the end I put 30 hours into it. I enjoyed it enough. It's got its problems but if it's something Relic want to follow up on then I think something in the future where they might end up doing something similar to Immortal empires in Total War where they add multiple theatres and then merge them all into one World War 2 maps would be pretty cool.
On to the africa korps campaign and then finally perhaps some multiplayer.
I guess that's my money's worth.
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Only starting dabble in this now . Loving the campaign so far .
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