Good company of Heroes mods

[wautd]

So I'm reinstalling CoH after seeing some good replays and noticed there are quite a lot of mods out now. Anyone knows a good recommendable one? Oh yeah, I'm only interested in multiplayer so there should be a large active community playing that particular mod as well.

- I saw an eastern front including Soviets which looked nice, but how well is it balanced? Is it being played a lot? Oh yeah, I'm only interested in multiplayer so.

- I remeber playing some games of Europe in Ruins. I liked the different style of gameplay, but it wasn't beginner friendly and sometimes it took ages to get a good game going. Has this been improved?

- Other recommendations?

[CaptHawkeye]

Eastern Front is good because the Soviet Union Faction is well designed and makes sense. However it still needs some balancing as right now it can just outspam Wehrmacht. The mod does improve the AI though. Other mods I haven't played though i'll get around to them when I have the time. Basically after the most recent patch they finally balanced the game to playable levels.

That being said I still encounter guys Ranger Spamming all the time. Too bad it doesn't work anymore because upgraded Volks and well placed machine guns cut them down even when they charge right at you. Like it SHOULD have been 4 years ago.

[wautd]

I checked out the Eastern Front mod last night and I was pleasantly surprised at the level of professionalism. You could almost fool me by saying it's an official expansion. I had the feeling the makers read my mind because a lot of their ideas totally made sense

Speaking of expansions, is Tales of Valor worth it? I wasn't really interested in the singleplayer campaign and the handful of new units, but I noticed it offers different multiplayer modes as well. Are they worth it?

[CaptHawkeye]

Not really. The only interesting mode is Stonewall which is basically Horde mode for Company of Heroes.

[wautd]

Yeah, assumed as much. I'd rather spend that untill the Men of War expansion comes along.
Although it sucks that people can trow those new units against you, when you can't build them yourself. At first glace, those new units seem more powerful than the old ones they replace.

[adam_grif]

Yeah, assumed as much. I'd rather spend that untill the Men of War expansion comes along.
Although it sucks that people can trow those new units against you, when you can't build them yourself. At first glace, those new units seem more powerful than the old ones they replace.

They were. The British Bang Bus (10 Fuel?!?!) was ludicrously good if you loaded it up with commandos + Piat Sappers, the Panzer Elite buggy thing could disable strategic points as soon as you picked scorched earth doctrine, making it super OP on small maps with certain kinds of cut-offs, and the Staghound was like an M8 that fired 4x faster than normal.

Wehr was the only one without super OP bullshit units getting added. Luckily they've all been toned down somewhat since then.

[CaptHawkeye]

The Kangaroo Carrier is still monstrously durable. Though i'm hesitant to think any of the Brit units needing a nerf. As it is the Brits spend most of the game fighting for their lives. Even with Sim Cities nowadays.

[JointStrikeFighter]

The Kangaroo Carrier is still monstrously durable. Though i'm hesitant to think any of the Brit units needing a nerf. As it is the Brits spend most of the game fighting for their lives. Even with Sim Cities nowadays.

Sim cities?

[adam_grif]

The British could do with a small buff in a few areas, but cheap BS like the Roo carrier isn't where it should draw it's strengths from. There was a huge backlash against them a few patches back and they've never recovered ,but people still have the audacity to cry OVERPOWERED everytime they're considered for the next patch.

I remember back in the good ol' days when HQ glider was a 340 manpower airstrike. The amount of ragequits was astounding when you'd call down a glider that crushed 1.5 squads of infantry and then a squad of Commandos or a tank would waltz out the front to finish the survivors off

Sim cities?

Sim City = building an unusual amount of fortifications or buildings. Generally speaking, it's when British players spam MGS nests, AT guns and stationary artillery instead of investing in actual units. Brit fortifications used to be stupidly tough to kill, so there was a horrific amount of bullshit going on in low-to-medium level online play (although it was never really competitive for the pros).

[CaptHawkeye]

Only idiots would let a Sim City happen though. It was easy to just pound the place with artillery or just flank it on any of the well designed maps.

[Stark]

Wait wait wait are you telling me a Relic game was unbalanced?

HEAVY TANKS TOO HEAVY!

[CaptHawkeye]

Teh Rangaz!

I doubt RUSE will end up being much better in balance though. "Hey this is a cool game oh no airborne ALL MY BASE ARE BELONG TO THEM"

[adam_grif]

Only idiots would let a Sim City happen though. It was easy to just pound the place with artillery or just flank it on any of the well designed maps.

I dunno about "idiots", it was fairly trivial to prevent it from happening but you have to kind of expect it and have prepared accordingly. But once it was established, the only arty that was any good at taking them out was Walking Stukkas

These days you don't even have to bother with prevention, because they're all made of cardboard and sticking guys in a trench is more likely to get them killed than anything against even a slightly competent player. 25 pounders are pretty much worthless because of stupidly high pop requirement and complete lack of survivability.

[wautd]

Only idiots would let a Sim City happen though. It was easy to just pound the place with artillery or just flank it on any of the well designed maps.

I dunno about "idiots", it was fairly trivial to prevent it from happening but you have to kind of expect it and have prepared accordingly. But once it was established, the only arty that was any good at taking them out was Walking Stukkas

These days you don't even have to bother with prevention, because they're all made of cardboard and sticking guys in a trench is more likely to get them killed than anything against even a slightly competent player. 25 pounders are pretty much worthless because of stupidly high pop requirement and complete lack of survivability.

Isn't accuracy been nerfed as well (or was I just unlucky)?

[adam_grif]

That's possible, I haven't seriously used them in months. Forward Observation Officers > all.

[open_sketchbook]

The British fell into a common trap of classic-style RTS; trying to make a defensive faction almost never goes over well. There's some sort of wierd economy of scale bullshit with stationary defenses; for the most part the rusher beats the turtle because the rush can just go around the turrets, and if you make turrets cheap and common enough to be able to cover a whole base there is nothing stopping you from building so many as to be overpowered, not to mention if you make them build too fast and have mobile construction units you can run into such bullshit as the enemy building turrets inside your base/spawn zone, a tactic that basically broke RA3 so badly online play was totally pointless until the later patches. Adding an absolute cap on the number of turrets you can deploy doesn't quite work because a number of turrets that is too much varies depending on the terrain, so you'd have to assign a different value for every map and trying to balance that would be like herding cats. Add onto that the way artillery works in Company of Heroes and the British were doomed from the start to have very fiddly balance.

The opposing fronts factions were neat but you can tell they were experiments; their balance has always been off and their playstyles very strange, somewhat gimmicky compared to the main factions. Also, it always struck me that the British and Panzer Elite should have each other's build and base mechanics; give the panzers the mobile base trucks and the british a base to turret up around.

[adam_grif]

CoH has kind of always been broken in some ways since OF. Ages back, you used to be able to retreat to a HQ truck that wasn't set up, so you could storm your HQ truck into their HQ sector then "retreat" past all of their base MG's.

[CaptHawkeye]

The British faction basically isn't well off as long as the game forces no long term penalty on casualties. The attacking side can just keep assaulting the Brits until they find a crack in the defenses and then its all over. This is really true for Wehrmacht, who have the easiest veterency system in the game.

The Brit veterancy system also needs serious work. Its too expensive for too little benefit.

[adam_grif]

Yeah, but they don't need to go for an annihilation victory. Automatch games always include VP, so do tournaments. And yeah, Brit veterancy is shit. It's mainly shit because LT's and Captains get focus fired so easily, so if you take your eye off them for a few seconds they might decide to charge towards the enemy to get a better shot with their ridiculously long range smg and run into a face full of vet 3 grens.