Just played it through… this game looks really good, love the destructible environments.
Crazy hectic, though I have to admit I haven’t played an RTS since I cheated through Starcraft. I kept wishing I could pause things and make orders from there (can I?). I found I couldn’t keep up with three bridges to defend without complete chaos happening, maybe that’s the point. Anyway, a little gamey to me, what with all the building squads and tanks in houses silliness (ordering them from offmap would have sufficed), but the presentation and gameplay is undeniably cool. I just might pick this up, if the single player campaign gets good reviews.
spiffy, how did you cheat in Starcraft? Because I don’t consider putting the speed slider on the slowest setting “cheating”.
Does anyone know if Company of Heroes will support “pause and give orders” for single player? Because otherwise I suck horribly at RTSs.
well, I played the human campaign for a few tedious missions until I realized it wasn’t going to break any of the conventions warcraft, C&C, and Dune2 had already set, so I used the ‘skip mission’ cheat to watch the CGI cutscenes. So I’d say that I was a pretty thorough cheat.
I loved the demo except that one time it ran out of virtual memory, and then I couldn’t skip the cutscenes after restarting the game (???). Also, has anyone figured out how picking up weapons works? It seems like when I had my paratroopers pick up an MG, they magically transformed into a cheaper MG squad :(.
Now why isn’t this game out in stores already? ARGH!
Pausing and giving orders currently works in the single player demo. Pause is the “pause” key on the keyboard I think.
So I see no reason why it would not work in the final game.
I am pretty sure that when you click on a crew served weapon with an Infantry squad, enough men as appropriate break off to become a full crew for that weapon, and form a new squad. The crew served weapons seem to include Heavy MGs, Anti Tank Guns, and the 88 Artillery pieces.
The left over men in the infantry squad can then be reinforced back up to full strength. Whether you can “uncrew” the weapon and stick the squad back together I dont know.
One other interesting thing I noticed is that the US infantry squads seem to be able to pick up small weapons Germans have dropped to be their “special” weapon. On the D-Day map, I noticed the infantry could pick up MP-44s (which presumably give higher short range firepower), and on the Carentan map the airborne could pick up Panzershrecks. They couldnt pick them up if they already been upgraded with the recoiless rifle special though.
This game is going to get so much love at release. I’ve been playing Co-Op multiplayer in the preorder beta with my friend all weekend. The game is absolutely fantastic. Every aspect of it is pure polish and fun.
Like I said, I usually do not like RTS games, and I especially don’t like playing them online. This game just has so much cool stuff in it. It’s got a great tactical feel, almost like Xcom. You can position your guys behind walls which they use for cover, but that wall can be blown apart with too much fire.
The destructable environments are just amazing. Every single thing on the battlefield can be destroyed. For instance, on one of the maps there are thick hedgerows everywhere. These allow for nice defendable corridors. I had a victory point in the middle of a hedgrow corridor. I reinforced both sides of it with sandbags, MG squads with their MGs mounted on the sandbags, and behind them AT guns. This worked great, until later in the game when the German player shelled the position. This pretty much devastated my encampment, and not only that but completely blew away the north hedgerow wall. When I reinforced the area again, I had to defend it from three fronts.
Also, the craters created by this destruction deform the terrain in realtime. These craters can then be used as cover for your infantry. In a particularly large crater I deployed an AT gun. The lip of the crater actually gave the AT gun a “hull down” position, and many shells fired at it hit the lip instead of the gun itself.
Every bullet has a modeled trajectory, and most likely whatever it hits will take damage. Be it a cluster of sandbags (some sandbags will fly off it), corner of a building (that corner will actually blow off the building, exposing things inside of it to fire), a telephone pole (pole will break in half or tip over), etc etc.
I love this game!
This is the first game/demo that really has my admitedly already aging machine crawling, I hate it for that (PIV 2.8, Radeon X800, 1Gb RAM is borderline/under the recommended, so I can’t really complain).
I like the further refinement of the Dawn of War squad reinforcement/deployment rules, which is my all time RTS favourite mechanism. I only have a complaint, the american soldiers blend too much into the terrain, while this is realistic and looks awesome, it makes playing them harder, I find myself looking too much at the blue dots in the minimap.
Maybe I’m getting too old, like my gaming rig.
Hotkeys are your friend:
“,” cycles through all idle engineers
“.” cycles through all idle infantry units
“/” cycles through all idle armor units
Ok whoever decided to put unskippable movies in the demo deserves a repeated kicking to the groin. To the Spielberg wannabe at Relic who insisted his cinematic masterpiece should not be skippable (even despite previous viewings), fuck you.
I second the motion. Those voting Aye?
(Seriously, the movies are nice and all, but please Relic, make them skippable, especially on second viewing and onward).
Just keep in mind it’s a 2-month old “pre-release” demo and I’m pretty confident (judging by Dawn of War) that you won’t be forced to sit through movies in the release version. I have no inside info, it’s just an educated hunch. :)
If you’ve seen the insane MP beta patch notes for this, they’re changing the MP beta almost daily in response to player feedback. I’m sure they have plenty of feedback about non-skippable movies too. :)
Speaking of movies, I have a few streaming movies at Putfile I like to share, esp. with dialup folks or others who haven’t gotten to try the demo yet. I have some frame rate problems if I turn up antialiasing too much, but most of these run OK:
http://www.putfile.com/metalmandroid
I’m another one of those “I’ve lost interest in RTS” guys (I did buy Dawn of War, but haven’t played much beyond its tutorial). I’m particularly not fond of base building (I suck at it basically), but I fell head over heels for this demo, to the point I replay even the tutorials regularly.
While I’m glad you can pause and give orders (in single player) I’m a bit perplexed about using company commander “powers” while paused. I tried to do an artillery strike while paused (once anyway), and it seemed to use up the 2 “points” without actually dropping artillery blasts.
There are a few fan sites for this, but most have very empty forums. The THQ “company run” sort-of fan site Able Company (it seems to be a temporary “buzz building” site, for lack of a better term) is pretty fun, with lots of little contests and a fairly busy, “only registered members can view” kind of forum. Apparently they’re taking the site down in October or something, which is kind of a shame. Anyway, for now, it’s at:
http://www.ablecompany.net
The fan site scuttlebutt is that an optimized official demo with some aesthetic improvements to the interface and bug fixes is due shortly. Let us pray skip-pable movies are among the fixes. :)
I’m looking for anywhere to jaw about this game in a friendly fashion once it’s out, so I hope there will be some of that in addition to the usual “This game rocks! This game sucks! No you suck! I know you do, but what am I?” sorts of discussions common everywhere on the 'net. :)
So how are you guys approaching the second demo mission? (Carentan)
The first time I tried it, I took the ammo and fuel dumps on the north side of the river, and set up just a few troops there (just a paratrooper squad or two, and an engineer squad using a captured MG42). I was kinda clumsy about fortifying the bridges on the southern side.
It worked for a while. I was amazing how long my skeleton crew hung on up north (using cover and stuff), but it was hard with few troops to flank a heavy German tank enough to damage it much. After that I basically slowly got overwhelmed, they snuck in over the bridges and took my southern resources etc.
The second time, I decided to give up going after the northern resources cause the German’s had two well placed snipers and I didn’t really feel like wasting time trying to take them out.
Instead I really fortified the southern ends of the bridges, attempted “enfillade” (with supporting machine guns, emplacements etc.) and mines, bared wire etc. Put some paratroopers and snipers in buildings near the bridges, got at least one antitank gun or weapon near each bridge for support. I found the mortars quite useful too.
Here was my attempt at Enfillade:
http://media.putfile.com/Company-of-Heroes---Enfillade
This worked a whole lot better. I was able to make the bridges killing fields mostly, especially when you rain mortar shells on the bridges.
Although the mission seems scripted a bit to go the way it does (trying not to spoil anything :)), this time I was in far better shape by the time the demo cuts off although some of the incoming kraut artillery barrages were frightening. I had my sound turned up, and it was quite immersive even on two tiny speakers.
Anyway, I’m sure these aren’t the “best” ways to tackle it, just curious what others did/are doing. :) There definitely weren’t any snipers picking at me the first go round, so I liked how it seemed to differ from one time to the next.
Unskippable movies is a bug, not a feature. Calm down :) (you can remove them from the directory, I think)
Carentan was fun. I started out by mining and barbed wiring the bridges, and by putting a machine gun nest at the end of each (on the Allied side). Then I sat there for a while until I realized I could produce more squads and actually take the supply areas across the bridges - so I wasted a bit of time.
Once I figured out I could make more guys, I reinforced the bridges with some anti-tank guns. Then I sent maybe 3 squads of paratroopers over the bridge to capture the points. Once captured, I had them (or engineers perhaps?) build some sandbags so they could dig in around the roads. I also started producing some machine gun squads and entrenched a couple behind the sandbags.
Once the action started flying I micromanaged the guys across the river, and was moderately successful holding off the advance. Thrown satchel charges do a pretty decent amount of damage to a tank, by the way. Imagine my surprise when I finally scrolled back to the bridges to see all my loving fortifications gone - so hurredly rebuilt them. As the scenario progressed I just kept cranking out squads and basically funneled them into the 3 points that needed protection. It seemed to work pretty well.
In retrospect, I should have laid down a lot more mines - I’m not sure how successful they were, but I think putting them down on the north side of the area would have been pretty successful.
Fun scenario.
Mines will only go so far, after a tank or two gets taken out by mines the AI will clear them with engineers. If you have infantry overwatching a mine field so they can engage enemies coming to clear the mines it increases their effectiveness greatly.
Using the bridges in that scenario is important. If you can knock out some tanks on the bridge it will effecitevly close off that bridge to vehicle traffic allowing you to allocate your anti tank defenses elsewhere.
Oh shutup you goatee sporting evil twin of mine. I tried deleting the movies from the directories but it didn’t work. It’s still a gooderly game one that I’ll pick up after I do an upgrade. You know it’s time for an upgrade when an RTS humbles your machine =(
I am not the goatee sporting one! I’m the optimised version.
Or something.
Don’t base upgrade requirements on this demo, though - performace is godawful compared to the current codebase.
Don’t quote me on this – well I know this is the wrong forum to say that on. :)
Over at ablecompany.net they were saying the official, optimized (i.e., not “beta”) demo should release on or about Sept. 5 (next Tuesday). I saw a list of revised requirements for the optimized version, can’t find it right now I’ll post it if I can.
Also, maybe of interest to some, GameReplays has an interview with the Company of Heroes “balance team”:
http://www.gamereplays.org/community/index.php?showtopic=131613&st=0&p=1600855&#entry1600855
When you pick the artillery power, you just give yourself the ability to use it. It spends the 2 points, then a artillery button appears above the GUI. It costs 200 munitions to drop it, and you can use it as many times as you want.
I’d suggest playing without the pause/give orders thing after a while. The co-op in this game is really really good… and you can’t pause in co-op.