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Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

I felt that Company of Heroes was a nice evolution of the genre and minimized the need for incredibly high APM.

For those who have not played Company of Heroes it is more about unit positioning and microing those units effectively. It requires a different set of skills than other RTS games.

Unfortunately I have not seen this catch on. Relic, the developers of CoH are working on Age of Empires IV and so I hope they will infuse their particular style RTS in it, but, for good and bad, it looks to be very similar to past AoE games.

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Yeah, vanilla CoH had "The stuff" IMO.

It was more about decissions than APM. The resouce system was very cool too.

It was super streamer friendly; any viewer could look at it for 10 seconds and understand what was going on - zero nerdiness required. And it was gorgeous for its time.

Then Relic started making a lot of mistakes:

- New factions with units a viewer would need to "learn" to be able to understand what was going on in the match.

- Introduced a super defensive faction which could fight the old defensive faction, resulting in long, abhorrently boring games.

- CoH2 which sold new mini-DLCs each month with special units purposely not balanced for online play. Top scummy.

- A plethora of other things I won't bore you with. But Relic became a customer-toxic company in my eyes.

But vanilla CoH could be examined to find gold, IMO.

Company of Heroes 2 is fantastic. I bought everyone in my Steam list that game -- it was €1 a few months ago. However flops like Dawn of War 3 (a sister game to CoH) are why publishers are slower to risk on RTS.

I feel like dawn of war 3 commited StarCraft suicide, they scrapped almost everything that made the dawn of war series great and replaced it with a more "StarCraft like" gameplay to cater to a larger audience, instead of evolving what they had from dow1 and 2, making it a mediocre sc2 :(

Yeah. I was pretty disappointed when CoH2 wanted to get on eSport bandwagon and shoveled in a lot of micro heavy features. Suddenly every unit had bunch of manually triggered abilities you had to babysit (because apparently WW2 soldiers are too dumb to throw a grenade on a tank by themselves).

As such, it got significantly less fun for me with the exception of Ardennes Assault campaign.

Company of Heroes was an amazing game. I still work with some others on a community mod project from time to time which adds the Russians and the Ostheer as new factions.

Wargame/Steel Division are other games in the company of heroes vein.

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