Company of Heroes 3

Have you been playing the pre-alpha, @pixelburp?

Ha! Similar story here. Hopefully someone with a good enough PC to actually play modern RTS games will enlighten us. 🤷‍♂️

Sounds promising enough. I see there's a full sequel to Men of War on the way as well!

Ah poopsicles.

Reviews are pretty good! There are some missteps (mainly with the campaign it seems) but overall it seems positive.

initial impressions of the italian campaign 'total war' campaign

The tutorial is useless and the world map is buggy.

Those are the two main cons.

Everything else is at minimum interesting, at best a breath of fresh air in the strategy genre.

So working from Best to worst

there is a shocking amount of variety in the mission types. And I dont mean they did what the Total War games did and drop a few Story missions here and there in the campaign. The actual dynamic encounters actually throw up a varied set of circumstances, based on where you fight and what sides are fighting etc to vary the encounters, The story missions play like good solid Company of hero single player missions, they expand, and throw in dynamics etc. All good. They feel a tad on the shorter/smaller side then COH 1 or 2 (but when you consider the overall length I think I can see why) But the skirmish battles. Which happen when two armies dynamically engage are also pretty good, sometimes it'll not be a victory point battle but instead a mission where you got to lock the opposing army into their base by grabbing all the points around their base and then holding it. Sometimes it's a ticket match but it's a race to just hold the majority of the map. Sometimes you've got no base but have to defend 2-3 key emplacements with a set number of units. I dont know if there are more, I think there might be as it could depend on your company that is fighting and I've almost been esclusively fighting with the airborne company (more on this further down)

There a fun variety of secondary objectives too, these are random objectives added to the missions you can do for extra experience. They range from challenges like getting X kills using mines to testing out an AT gun by killing enemy tanks to minimizing casualties. One mission even had a supply plane shot down overhead or a convoy of damaged german tanks on retreat are passed through the area.

There is also variety in your armies and abilities, both from experience and unlocks but also from the circumstances, fighting in an area with partisan forces will get you some partisan abilities and bonuses, fighting near the coast with a battleship off it will get you coastal artillery call is during the battle and so on. I'm still not 100% clear what generates what effects. Some missions I was given the support of a medical unit which meant I had a call in for medical half track. This also effects the germans, they sometimes get bonuses that change their army make up a bit.

The campaign throws a lot of variety at you too, It keeps dropping in potential missions all around you, designed to appeal to the 3 sides on the allied command (British general, American General and Italian Partisan leader) Doing these missions earns you loyalty from the side that benefits from it the most, The british like it when you capture porst, build defences and connect territories. The partisans like it when you support their attacks and bail out their forces when they get surrounded or drop them supplies. The american general likes it when you push forward and break through the german lines. These 3 sides give you boosts if they like you more. But certain actions will upset each side. Taking things slow lowers american loyalty. bombing or bombaring italy using ships or bombers diminishes Partisan support (which is a good touch) not sure what upset the brit yet, I guess I'm playing to his style.

Once you work out how it works, the campaign map actually has a lot of varied features. There is a lot you can do on the map, and a lot to watch out for. There are different type of emplacements you can build and the germans can build, some related to supply, some are defensive (AT guns for armoured companies, mg nests for infantry, AA batteries for dealing with aircraft) every place you capture actually has a bunch of upgrades you can add to them, they vary from ammo dumps to ports to hospitals to partisan towns. Objectives are both marked clearly and have clear turn timers on them if they are time sensitive. It's obviously not HOI deep, but a damn good base for a potential Company of Heroes Total War cross over in the future. It does feel there is a lot of nuance here, its just buried under a bad tutorial and some bugs.

The missions are blessingly quick as well as fun. Those varied missions are also currently designed to be completed quickly, while a normal out of campaign Skirmish match could take up to 30 minutes to complete by draining tickets. Here the missions are designed to go a lot quicker. So I've not run into the issue I have with Total War where I start skipping fights I dont want to bother with. Also because you are not really building up an army size, the game does encourage you to play the missions over letting ai autoresolve as the AI would say both sides are evenly matched but in game you can find yourself easily throttling the enemy. So I dont feel confident in letting the AI decide a fight.

The first ehh not sure aspect is while there are a lot of mechanics in the game I am worried the AI is not using them to their fullest or they've not been fully thought through. I have a single airborne company waay further north then my other companies, I pushed them up to answer a partisan call for support. They are still by a very thin margin in my territory so are still supplied, but because they are behind the german defensive line every turn they get attacked by another german unit trying to push them back. Because I keep winning each of these engagements and I get bonus xp for fighting the battle instead of auto resolving I've now got a super buffed up airborne unit on the frontline. There is no means to exhaust my unit unless they push me out of my territory but they wont. There is nothing stopping the germans from retaking the town I took and putting my infantry out of territory (and thus they start losing resources everyturn) but they dont, instead every turn they attack and I get a bit beefier. Now the last time they attacked they sent a much more experienced luftwaffe unit, that I still beat, so they may just get stronger with each battle, but currently I am still winning easily and getting very experienced off it. I think they need to put in some sort of exhaust mechanic if the same unit keeps getting attacked over and over. Also I'm not 100% the mechanic for draining companies outside their territory 100% works, I have had plenty of german AT guns refuse to go away even after I circumvented them and took the city behind them.

The tutorial is useless, both in that it doesnt really tell you the important bits of the campaign and it does appear to be a bit bugged. My first time through it did not explain detachments to me at all. When I reloaded because I felt I had snookered myself it did explain detachments. It does not give any warning or explanation for emplacements so you are incredibly likely to lose your first company by moving around a corner into the line of sight of 2 AT guns which pulverize you. It doesnt explain the ability to heal or repair yourself. Nor gives a clear explanation of how airports work pass the scout plane. I had to reload the game because as part of the tutorial the game intentional puts you over in population 26/25 (does this by gifting you transport planes after you secure the airfield) so if you lose one of your first two companies you cant replace them without sacrificing your battleship or airforce as well.

The map has bugs, annoying bugs involving destroyed units or pick ups getting 'stuck' and not being able to interact with them but they remain on the map. There are bugs with tutorial prompts not appearing, or a fighter unit disappearing because it got shot down but the animation showed it landing. With a bugged stuka stuck in one of my airfields and my own AA battery keeps shooting at the bugged stuka and not at the actual stukas flying over head. I think the germans are meant to be bombing me but they just circle over head, while some of their AT guns have shot through mountains at me. Put simply BUGS!

I absolutely love it, it's a great game. SOme bugs but nothing too bad.

Ah that explains Anzio, I don't even know where it is and I keep getting told about those guns. I am currently ignoring the "objectives" for the most part. We'll see if it has a major impact.

With regards to not being able to save mid game, yes it's a pain. I'm playing on a fairly high difficulty level and sometimes I breeze through the skirmishes in minutes but yesterday I ended up doing a skirmish for over 80 minutes. It was fun and very challenging but midway through I wanted to stop but had to keep going or all that time would have been wasted!

3rd report and pretty much the same issues.

I finished the Italian campaign, the last mission is pretty cool, introduces a unique mechanic. Think final level of warcraft 3. Its genuinely a shame it's the only mission to use this mechanic, it's also a damn shame that you dont realise it's the last level, the game gives you the impression there is a small bit more to push on, but then it just ends. I dont know if this is because I had cleared out every other town before the final assault or if it just ends there every time.

It's a shame overall that the campaign basically ends when it feels the map side of things kick into high gear properly. I got the hang of jumping my infantry units around via paradrops to put out fires and quickly shipping my armoured columns up and down the coast. But by the time I got to gripes with this it was pretty much just mopping things up.

For the 3rd time in a row I can happily report that there are still EVEN MORE varied mission types in the skirmish, I had two more show up tonight, one of which was a cute opposite of an earlier one, which was kind of cool. Another was a rescue mission which I've only got once (I think it's tied to the special forces company which I didnt use much) And on top of that even more secondary missions, including one that just dropped a panther tank on me and another which coated the map in mines which was actually genuinely frustrating and was the only skirmish I outright lost because I kept losing key units to mines.

I can also report for the 3rd time that the same two big issues remain. Awful awful tutorials and map bugs. The final level of the game suffers from the same unclear explanation as Monte Casino, I reached it quite early in my playthrough but it refused to let me take the city, I couldnt work out why and as I had a bunch of secondary objectives I left it. When I came back and realised what I needed to do I spent ages preparing my lines to assault both objectives, but again like Monte Casino, you only need to do one. Very unclear. The game also runs to its own tune regardless of what you do in some aspects. I thought if I attacked Monte Casino before the bombing I'd get a different level to one after the bombing, but nope Once in the mission the monestary is still bombed by bombers prior to your mission start. So it feels like your decisions have little consequences beyond loyalty bonuses from the 3 characters and some bonus resources.

Speaking of the 3 characters, their bonuses are the worst. At least the US and UK general are. The Partisans are actually useful. The generals are just there to ruin your population cap as each have a loyalty bonus that gives you an extra unit every time you do X and at one point in the game I realised I was over my pop limit by 30 points. All because of these 'bonus' units. I had to go through the map salvaging all these units to bring my pop back under control.

And then there's the bugs. This time we had a mission disappear on me. It seems every character has a final loyalty mission and I had done both the generals and was waiting on the partisan, she then called in asking for help on a mission and I was like 'Yes this is it, last loyalty mission' moved my company up to the point, started the mission and it loaded an old mission I had done before. A side mission from earlier. I was confused. So I reloaded a save. But this time she didnt give me a loyalty mission so I kept on playing, then she said the same line again this time about a different town, so I moved to it, but she never gave me a mission. Eventually I took the town and she gave a 'Well done for sorting that out commander' response. Did I just skip the mission?

This was all very silly.

In the end I put 30 hours into it. I enjoyed it enough. It's got its problems but if it's something Relic want to follow up on then I think something in the future where they might end up doing something similar to Immortal empires in Total War where they add multiple theatres and then merge them all into one World War 2 maps would be pretty cool.

On to the africa korps campaign and then finally perhaps some multiplayer.

I guess that's my money's worth.