New direction for Relic?

[Samuel]

http://pc.ign.com/articles/932/932463p1.html

Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor

To give the gameplay more of a kick there's something called a direct-fire mode. Instead of you giving an order for the tank to destroy something, you control the tank and its turret. It's basically like an action game, as drive the tank around the map yourself and try and engage targets by using the mouse as an aiming cursor. You'll find yourself mashing the button to get a round off, or be in such a hurry that you miss the target. It makes the action much more immediate and personal as you're not just sitting back and giving orders, you're caught up in the battle directly.

There's also a reason you should blow things up aside from just having fun. The resource system no longer depends on capturing nodes that provide fuel or ammo. In fact, there are no capture nodes. Instead, you're rewarded fuel and ammo for killing enemy units and vehicles. And as for repairing damage, there is a repair ability that costs munitions points. You want to ration it out, though, not only because of the point cost, but because it immobilizes the tank, making it a nice fat target.

This is an RTS that almost looks like a shooter.Meanwhile, each of your crewman have special abilities that they can unlock, not unlike the doctrine abilities seen in CoH. Litzke, the loader, can unlock high-explosive rounds, rapid fire, and improved rapid fire, letting him load the gun faster. Schraf, the driver, can unlock flank speed to drive faster as well as turret overdrive, which lets the turret move faster. Burndt, the commander, can unlock a machine gun atop the turret, as well as a smoke grenade launcher and the ability to call in an artillery barrage. Schultz, the gunner, can improve his marksmanship. All these skills are persistent, so if you unlock them in one mission they carry over to subsequent missions.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/932/932471p1.html

For Dawn of War 2, they have a new video up... that ends with a boss battle.

I know that I probably shouldn't say this, but it feels wrong to me. Shouldn't strategy games be about strategy? I know, it isn't my place to decide, but for a person who likes watching massed armies duke it out, this seems to be a disturbing direction.

I hope they don't actually embrace this. If they do, that means less RTS games like CoH.

[wautd]

Yeah, can't say I'm looking forward to this expansion.

I was hoping that they kept the CoH gameplay and add 2 more factions instead (who wouldn't like an eastern front campaign playing with a soviet faction?). Why change a winning formula?

[Steel]

this sounds like a simplified version of the system they use in soldiers: heroes of ww2 and faces of war. Those are pretty good, but I'm not sure that it'll work in the coh format.

[Stark]

By 'new' are we to understand 'like World in Conflict'? It's actually quite amusing that they've moved away from resourcing (finally, Relic grew up lol) but they apparently still have the different TYPES of resources. I'd laugh if, say, killing an MG squad got munitions and killing a tank got fuel, so if the enemy just stopped building a certain type of unit you wouldn't be able to build or did so at a much reduced rate.

It's amusing to see Relic look at something good and different, and take such bizarre lessons from it. It's good they've been stung out of their hopeless conservatism, but these ideas sound pretty fruity.

[Uraniun235]

Isn't there potential for some pretty gross imbalance there? So repairs cost munitions, and munitions come from dead enemy units... now I just use the munitions from the dead enemies to repair my forces, and suddenly I'm back up to (near) full strength while the enemy is still struggling to assemble another force to hit me with.

I mean yeah obviously if I got mauled while attacking it wouldn't be quite so grossly overpowering, but it still seems to make it harder for an opponent to recover and bounce back. Maybe that's how it's supposed to work? Or maybe that's one of those delicate things where if they get it tuned right it works awesome. I dunno. I was never great at strategy game theory.

[Tanasinn]

The idea of controlling some of your units more directly at least mildly appeals. One thing that infuriated me on Company of Heroes was trying to pull back from a big ugly enemy tank, and my retard Sherman driver shows him the rear armor, no matter how many times I tell him to face frontal.

[Stark]

Didn't CoH have a 'reverse' button? I'm pretty sure it did.

[wautd]

The idea of controlling some of your units more directly at least mildly appeals.

Muzzle Velocity did it a good decade before. Even in 1997 the game looked like vomit (but I must admit I had quite some fun with it back in the day)

Didn't CoH have a 'reverse' button? I'm pretty sure it did.

Nah, either right-click and drag to choose your direction or click a few times behind your tank to move it backwards. While the latter didn't always worked perfect, it worked fine most of the time.

By 'new' are we to understand 'like World in Conflict'? It's actually quite amusing that they've moved away from resourcing (finally, Relic grew up lol) but they apparently still have the different TYPES of resources. .

What I liked about the recource mechanics in CoH was that you could cut off large chunks of your enemy supplies by holding the right areas. That's one more thing that this expansion will lack appearantly.

[Stark]

Oh. WiC had a button you could hold down to 'force' the reversal, so you didn't have to take the chance the unit would decide to turn around instead if you clicked behind them. It made smoke-nade ambushes way easier to acomplish.

And while you wont' be able to cut off a particular 'type' of resource by holding terrain, it'd be pretty funny if you could simply not let them kill the right type of units (since there's no point having separate types of resources if they're all collected at the same time beyond 'omg can't have too many tanks'). I'd prefer the WiC method of build points, honestly, but without a role system I guess it'd be too wierd.

[Samuel]

I think I omited the important part:

Tales of Valor isn't an expansion that requires you to own CoH; it's a stand-alone game that focuses on you controlling a handful of units at a time. In fact, this isn't a "traditional" RTS game, as the single-player campaign doesn't feature any kind of base building or node capturing as seen in CoH. This is a much more tactical game in that sometimes you'll control only a single tank and its crew. The reason is because you become much more invested in your units if you don't have an endless supply of them being churned out at some base. And if you don't have to manage a dozen vehicles and squads over an entire battlefield, you can focus on carefully controlling a small team as it navigates around the map.

[CaptHawkeye]

Call me when they fix the game's AI. I had absolutely zero fun with the game's "over in 3 minutes" multi matches. I turned to the single player only to find that the game AI sucks and cheats like mad. (Can see right through fog of war, huge supply bonuses, can instantly order units around.)

It's too bad, because I like CoH's unit setup and game build even if it is tech menu bullshit.

EDIT: The removal of base building and increased concentration on unit survival sounds good...as long as they place the same limits on the AI too. They probably won't though, since the RTS genre has become the PC's new top multiplay genre.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

So is this an RTS, or something like that squad based game that was set in WWII? This is beginning to sound more like the latter, except with tanks.

[Commander 598]

In my opinion, the new "baseless" DoW (Which is only in the campaign part btw) will probably be just as much "strategy" as all the other linear SP RTS campaigns out there.

Also my opinion, but CoH just feels mostly annoying. The whole game basically just devolves into a less fun DoW thanks to a number of factors.

[wautd]

If yet to see a comment from someone who is looking forward to this change. Makes me wonder what Relic was thinking

[Covenant]

Baseless sounds grand, I'm very hopeful. I'm not expecting it to be a strategy revolution, but it'll take the focus off base-nannying. I hope there's objectives and land to take and sieze though. I wouldn't mind securing drop locations for reinforcements, but I don't want a focus on protecting a base forever. Makes too much turtling. However, it looked way too bright and colorful the last time I looked at it. Nearly cartoony in the way RA3 and SC2 look. I hope that was just a bad screencap.

Not sure I like the direction CoH is headed. I do like CoH quite a bit, don't have a problem microing my tank's facings exactly where I want them, enjoy the coordinated combat and understand some of the deeper strategy (how to pin units, what weapon teams to use where, the joy of tactical withdrawls) so I really feel it's fun and much more complex than any of your average games, with greater explosions and so forth. Removing more of the over-strategy of controlling your multi-squad force will damage the better part of the game (complex unit combinations to achieve tactical victory!) and emphasize the "lolz I have one super unit i pwn" aspect. I really have enough trouble as-is taking down a King Tiger, I don't need someone personally microing it from the inside just to make it harder.

[Stark]

Jesus fuck Cov, buy WiC. It hurts me to see you speculate on what something might be when it happened more than a year ago.

The only reason I'm even slightly interested in DoW2 is because it looks WiC-like in that they've ditched all the nonsense bullshit and just focused on actual tactical play. I didn't realise it was so far off, however.

[Commander 598]

I haven't seen much of anything yet that qualifies as "far off" or "changed" beyond the baseless part. I think you're all just getting worked up over previewers who don't really know what they're talking about. They see "boss fights", I see a commander unit stuffed in a likely linear campaign map, etc.

Of course, I haven't actually seen any of the newer gameplay videos yet, but I doubt it's anything significant.

[Samuel]

I haven't seen much of anything yet that qualifies as "far off" or "changed" beyond the baseless part. I think you're all just getting worked up over previewers who don't really know what they're talking about. They see "boss fights", I see a commander unit stuffed in a likely linear campaign map, etc.

Of course, I haven't actually seen any of the newer gameplay videos yet, but I doubt it's anything significant.

I was basing it off the most recent video where your marines battle a warp spider exarch. Who has a health bar mounted on the top of the screen. And taunts you. Yeah, it is a boss battle.

[wautd]

Baseless sounds grand, I'm very hopeful. I'm not expecting it to be a strategy revolution, but it'll take the focus off base-nannying. I hope there's objectives and land to take and sieze though.

The Europe In Ruins mod for CoH does that. Before a battle, each player had a fixed amount of points in which he could spend to buy units, upgrades and abilities. You then had to divide them into squads he could trow in at regular time intervals during a battle. The more ground your team held, the more squads you could draw from your reinforcements pool. Since the multiplayer itself was more or less a campaign mode, you even took your experience/losses with you to the next battle.

The downside was offcourse that it could be a real bitch to find a game or get one started. If Relic were to give some real support to such game mode it would be a really fun alternative.