How winter in Company of Heroes 2 will change online multiplayer
Relic Entertainment has added the dead of winter to its already formidable recreation of World War 2 in Company of Heroes 2. But Relic's Global...
The biggest addition to Relic Entertainment's Company of Heroes 2 has to be winter. Braving the elements in a bone-chilling Russian winter will force players to approach online multiplayer in a new way.
"Tactical RTS is about being a smart commander and making smart decisions on the fly," communication manager Simon Watts told Shacknews at a recent multiplayer event. "If they're a great player, it shouldn't be just about having one build order. If a blizzard blows in, they should be ready to adapt to that. If they don't have a contingency, they aren't a great player. That's what strategy is all about."
Watts said winter effects make CoH2 a different type of game, and that playing between summer and winter will force different strategies. "You see that the match is winter, so you think, 'Alright, I was going to go heavy infantry, but maybe I'm going to go more mechanized.' Or vice versa. One blizzard could also be your savior because it forces an opponent to kind of hunker down and wait for it to end. We think that it could be something really exciting for the competitive game."
We'll have the full interview with Watts soon. Company of Heroes 2 is scheduled to come out in March for PC.
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replyKat Bailey posted a new article, How winter in Company of Heroes 2 will change online multiplayer.
Relic Entertainment has added the dead of winter to its already formidable recreation of World War 2 in Company of Heroes 2. But Relic's Global...-
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"If they're a great player, it shouldn't be just about having one build order. If a blizzard blows in, they should be ready to adapt to that. If they don't have a contingency, they aren't a great player. That's what strategy is all about."
And that is why Blizzard sucks at strategy games. There are no dynamics, their maps are all symmetrical, the still isn't transferable. Blizzard has been a really shit company since (and including) Warcraft 3. I don't even touch there products anymore.-
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Welllll ... in a sense, yes. You can be the most brilliant strategist in the world with an IQ off the charts, but if you don't have the 50 most common openings memorized out to 15 moves each, you'll likely get stomped by a crap player who does. Lots of IMs and GMs recognize this as a problem with chess and Bobby Fisher specifically created a variant of chess to avoid the reliance on memorization and dull repetition and put emphasis back on strategy and tactics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960
It's been gaining traction slowly, with GMs participating in tournaments and such, but who knows if it will stick.-
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Also, this is complete nonsense: "it shouldn't be just about having one build order. If a blizzard blows in, they should be ready to adapt to that. If they don't have a contingency, they aren't a great player. That's what strategy is all about."
It is nonsense because in a game where you are dealing with build orders, you are still adapting to what the other player does. If I as Protoss FFE vs a Zerg player and he decides to 8 pool me (because he knows most Protoss will FFE in the current metagame), then as a good player I had better be ready to respond to that early attack on the fly even from a relatively weakened position.
It isn't just two players blindly rolling dice with their build orders and seeing what happens, things move and shift depending on the current state of the game. I've had super long macro games arise from the cheesiest openings.-
Yeah, that also struck me as odd. You react to a build order, to what the opponent does, not to a dice-roll.
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It kinda felt that statement came from the old WC2 days. Back then, build order was everything; mostly because you were racing to bloodlusted orcs.
Most of my CoH games were about plans on how to control the map. Very different from build order mentality. Granted everyone has a kind of opening build order to execute their general idea.
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AFAIK go doesn't fall to that the way chess does! could be wrong though
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"One blizzard could also be your savior because it forces an opponent to kind of hunker down and wait for it to end. We think that it could be something really exciting for the competitive game."
I could see a random factor like this being absolutely infuriating in a standardized competitive match.-
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nope. pro players hate random shit. like crits in TF2? drama bombs galore.
everything must be controllable, in perfection, at all times. it must be neutral, or it will get screamed at.
the environment can't spiral out of control, like a ball bouncing weird, because that automatically cannot affect both sides equally. a chance event will positively impact one side, and negatively impact another.
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If it affects both sides equally at the same time (ie, the blizzard hits the entire map and not just small areas) then yes it's fine. You can gamble that you'll see a blizzard and build accordingly and suffer the consequences if one doesn't appear and the other player didn't, but reap the rewards if it does happen.
But if its a random effect than can just happen to one player while the other player gets to ignore it then its not a good mechanic as it then becomes a random effect that directly impairs or benefits some players no matter what they prepared for.
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The best competitive games (DOTA, Starcraft, Street Fighter) don't have randomized elements like that.
Things like that have been done for funny showmatches in Starcraft 2, and its great, but those are just fun lols.
But I dunno, if its balanced well enough then it could be a fun casual mode, like some of the silly custom games you see but made into a primary game mode instead.-
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One reason CS:S failed in the competitive scene is that it made bullet spread patterns far less predictable than what was in 1.6. Pro 1.6 players had insanely high accuracy because the "random" bullet patterns were consistent and predictable.
It all depends on a bunch of other factors, of course. Consistency of the rules and mechanics are only one element. :)
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DOTA has a maximalist design compared to most games, and certainly over games like SC or SF, absolutely. A very simplified summation of the design is basically "everything is OP so nothing is OP".
The thing is that are still constants that characters are balanced around, the main one being the map.
A huge component of balance in Starcraft isn't races, it is the map itself. DOTA carries this even further by having only one single map and other constants like creep respawn timers, etc. Everything else is built around those things being consistent.-
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In Brood War there is a 30% less chance of being hit if you are on the high ground. This is a form of balance, not randomness though. It gives a positional advantage to one player over the other, it is not the product of imbalance within the game design. It does things like give the defender an advantage, it puts importance on positional play when taking the map, etc. The same goes for the high ground advantage in DOTA.
To be clear, I'm not talking about a complete removal of random elements equalling a well balanced game. A game being properly balanced around those things, in this case a randomized or lower hit percentage being the product of being in an inferior position, can be good game design and balance.
When some random element is there for willy-nilly or superfluous reasons, that's when its not so great. Like I said, we'll see how Relic does here. Their balance has consistently gotten worse with every release and expansion since the original CoH, but we'll see. They have to know that this might be their last shot at an RTS so I'm sure they feel the pressure to do well there.-
BTW, the way DOTA achieves balance is pretty amazing. So many games have been nerfing things in the name of balance for so long, and here comes DOTA which does the opposite by making individual heroes seem broken on paper, but to compensate it gives you other heroes or team compositions (or items!) that are just as "broken" to compensate.
Lots of OP tools to survive with, its pretty cool!
I'm not sure but it might have influenced the recent HoTS balance patch, where instead of nerfing units they instead made a bunch of things SUPER buff (speed booster for medivac, 4x health regen and speed for mutas, insane speed for reapers, etc etc).
Anyway, DOTA's balance isn't perfect by any means, tournaments have gone to their own lengths to make the game more appropriate for competition. There was the recent banning of Drow Ranger in CM, banning a team rushing five Necronomicons, etc etc. It sure is fun though!-
I like the idea of buffing to balance things. The thing you have to balance around is players still having time to react to things.
If you have an engagement where units die in 5 seconds, and you buff everything to where they die in 3 seconds, great! But if you go from things dying in 3 seconds to things dying in .75 seconds, that's pretty shitty.
Counterplay is pretty important.-
Absolutely. I feel like all of these competitive games, LoL included, have been doing a really great job striking that balance between overbuffing but not pushing that too far past the limit. There's always a point where things get pulled back, and that's fine.
On a side note, what's funny though is when some mechanic that seems impossible or unreasonable for a time eventually becomes standard.
Creep spread for instance, at first people were like "Pff, who's going to bother doing that? Lots of work for not so much benefit!". Now good creep is an accepted requirement for good zerg play, and great players are lauded for how quickly they get it to the enemy base, some even using it to deny their third!
My favorite example is when MKP introduced marine splitting to counter banelings. It was a technique that was deemed a ridiculous and borderline impossible response to that sort of play, but now it is commonplace and is an almost standard way to play the game.
Anyway, its interesting to see how top level pros manage to push the game in ways beyond what the design intended or what "common knowledge" is.
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It's true.
I played in a L4D tournament back when stuff was randomized and it was the WORST ever because we were clearly the superior team, the other team just had vastly superior spawns of medkits and molotovs.
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It's a neat gimmick for a friendly comp stomp or something, but unfortunately no one's going to want to bother with it when they're playing even semi-seriously.
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