Desk Chair Generals

Really looking forward to a return to CoH after all this time.

I mainly plough all my time into Total War: Warhammer but this year has quite a few good RTS on the horizon. Tempest Rising looks like a C&C love child, Broken Arrow reminds me of World of Conflict and obviously Stormgate mainly because of the devs involved.

This year also has Manor Lords, Alien Descent, Terminator Dark Defiance and of course Homeworld 3.

Nice, there's a whole world of tactics games I haven't tried - Doorkickers, Invisible Inc etc - despite a seemingly unremitting diet of tactics games this last few years. Will keep an eye on this one.

I may regret asking this, but what's the distinction between 'tactics' and 'strategy' games? I'd have thought tactics would sit as a sub-genre under a broader strategy thingy.

Oh, so when referring to the tactical component, is this stuff like X-COM, Jagged Alliance, Fire Emblem, etc where you're moving units on a battlefield? And Strategy being akin to high-level war game or Civ style 4X stuff?

Yeah, strategy is planning the war, tactical is fighting it.

That’s generally because RTS concentrate mostly on supply chain and production to amass a force to fight, but it is a little squishy in definition there for sure. There is a Real Time Tactics genre that is specifically “this is your assigned force, you cannot produce more or do any prep or planning, go fight.” Commandos would be the most notable one there.

I think people consider the tactics side of RTS games more important than they actually are. On the whole, getting your economy health and building the right units to fight what your enemy has is more important than fiddling about with your units in a fight, outside of high level play.

Relic games confusing things a bit more, as they are much more tactics focused.

Also, are we talking strictly 'wargames'? Does stuff like Invisible Inc, Darkest Dungeon, This War of Mine, fit here at all?

Genres are a delightful business

Played a couple of hours of Company of Heroes 3 last night and had really good time with it. I only played a bit of the Italian campaign, but it feels like a nice change of pace to the usual CoH campaign. I've cleared what is basically tutorial island and captured the first town of the main map. Playing on the second of four difficulties.

So far, it doesn't feel as much like a Total War game as some may have thought from the screenshots and it also feels more directed than perhaps it could be, with choices being more like taking a left or a right rather than any direction you want. This could just be the opening though and maybe it will open up more as it goes on. Personally, not much of a problem and I don't really mind the directed approach, but I can see why some might be disappointed. It will likely end up not being particularly replayable, but that is fine by me.

I've not encountered any real AI on the map as of yet. Again, it has all been directed events, with companies retreating and having to chase after them. Besides a couple of those companies, everything else has been static. I'm assuming again that is just the early game and they will start taking actions during their turn. I know there were a couple of reviews complaining about AI on the campaign, but can't really say much about it yet.

Battles themselves have been really enjoyable. They are very much in the style of previous Company of Heroes games, so there aren't many surprises to be had. I've played 3 of these. 2 were scripted missions and 1 was a more basic skirmish. With the latter, the strength of the company on the strategic layer had a bit of an effect on the starting positions, which was nice. It also had a secondary objective appear (which was just to capture an enemy anti-armour gun). Assume those are random, which adds a nice twist to the otherwise repetitive skirmishes.

With the scripted missions, 1 was your standard "storm a beach and push up into a town" missions that is mandatory to start all WW2 games with. The other was more interesting, with first needing to capture a hill for a base to be built on, before moving into a town to capture a hospital and then finally destroying 2 bridges to prevent waves of armour pushing across. Really fun mission this one, even though I made a bit of a mess of completing the final part.

For newcomers, I do think the game does a poor job of introducing many of its mechanics. There is a very brief opening tutorial, which doesn't really tell you much beyond capturing points, retreating and building units. Unit upgrades and unique mechanics of sides (such as veterancy) seems to be left completely for you to stumble across yourself. As someone that knows the previous games, this isn't too much of an issue, but I could imagine newcomers to not have a clue what they are doing.

On whole, I had really great time with it last night and looking forward to playing more over the weekend. I'm not sure what is going on with the reviews on Steam, but I don't think it deserves the "Mixed" it is currently getting. It perhaps isn't the perfect package, but it is really good and with a few patches I expect it will be an excellent game.

Been playing some more CoH3. The core RTS battle sections are so good in this game. I don't know the old ones inside out enough to really say what has changed, if there is much, but this does feel like the best version of that game style. There are a few pathfinding issues and I've had units occasionally get stuck on things, but for the most part it plays brilliantly. Most importantly, artillery is still immensely satisfying. I've only played one multiplayer game (a glorious victory - as my opponent suddenly left when I destroyed his first vehicle), but looking forward to delving more into this when I'm feeling more confident with the sides (thinking of mainly going with the Brits).

The single player is really weird though. The Italy campaign just doesn't really work. The AI is completely placid, doing nothing but sending out recon planes turn after turn after turn. If one of your companies is near one of theirs, they might attack, but there is no evidence that they will move their companies if you aren't nearby. You can repair you companies every turn for minimal cost, so there isn't much fear of losing them. You can also build planes and warships, but there isn't much point as you population cap is stingy and it just always seems better to spend that on companies that can actually go out and take capture points and fight battles.

There is an option to build howitzers and supply caches that help your companies as they venture into enemy territory, but not doing these things doesn't penalise you much, so it seems a bit pointless.

I remember playing the beta of the campaign and it seemed much more like playing the RTS game, but in a turn based format. You had to create choke points with defenses and hold off against attacks. I recall initially playing it as I would a Total War game, hoarding my money, but ending up just being overrun by the enemy as I hadn't invested enough in defenses and units. There doesn't seem to be any of this in the final game and it appears to have really been striped back to the barest of bones. There were even a whole class of units (divisions, I think) which were just meant to be used for building defenses and smaller engagements, which seem to be absent now (the beta was from later than I am on the campaign, so perhaps they just haven't been introduced yet, but seems a long time to introduce something so fundamental).

It is a shame, as I remember thinking how good this campaign could have been from the beta, but it is now not much more than glorified mission select screen. Which is mostly fine, as those missions are (generally) good fun, but it could have been a lot more.

The only downside to the battles, mostly the skirmishes, is the AI can be frustrating to play against. They do that annoying thing of grabbing random points all of the map. Suddenly they will pop up at a point in the middle of nowhere, then some more will pop up on the other side of the map. It can end up being a bit of a wack-a-mole game. They aren't hard battles, but it just ends up dragging them out longer than they should. I've found that building up a big force and heading straight to their base works the best. They then just run around taking all the points, whilst I'm obliterating their HQ.

I don't think the community reaction is entirely fair and many of complaints people have seem a bit erroneous (too zoomed in seems to be the normal one, which is a complaint people seem to always have with RTS games, as well as complaining it is too expensive), but it definitely has some issues that are bizarre.

I think I have a problem now in that 90% of my backlog is turn-based tactics stuff. Was looking for something light and shooty to play yesterday and couldn't find anything, even considered buying Borderlands 3 for a quick FPS fix. Ended up going back to another TBS(?) (the Banner Saga-alike, Ash of Gods Redemption).

Still working through the missions on Second Front, which is great. It got a lot of bad Steam reviews at the start, like COH3, but they seemed to be mostly from people who were lured in by the cutesy Airfix-model graphics and didn't understand the nature of RNG. I was expecting COH3's reviews to similarly level out after a few days but seems like there are real issues there.