Capturing airfields gave me places to station fighter and bomber squadrons, which could then conduct recon or airstrikes. I spent most of my game playing with the Indian troops, who seemed to be built around a subtle strategy of "blast the shit out of the Germans with high-explosives, then wipe out the survivors with Gurkha shock infantry."īut first I had to establish a beachhead on the strategic layer, which operated a bit like a megacosm of the RTS layer: taking over different town and crossroads would provide bonus resources that I could use to call in fresh reinforcements at my landing site, or that I could spend on special attacks like bombing raids or partisan harassment campaigns. For this section, the American forces were a Special Forces company and an airborne company, while the Commonwealth brought an armored company and an Indian artillery company. Each option brought different bonuses and changed which forces were available at the start of the campaign. A branching choice was proposed at the start: I could go with the US plan, the UK's plan, or some mix of the two. The Big Idea behind CoH 3 was visible right from the start of the playable campaign: instead of opening on a cinematic or an RTS mission screen, it opened on a large strategic map of the western coast of Italy from Naples up. The section of the campaign that was made available to media during a session two weeks ago covered the Allied landings in Italy in 1943 and the slog up the mountains to the infamous Monte Cassino monastery that became synonymous with the bloody, often futile combat that defined the Italian campaign. These abilities can be dramatic game changers, but they tend to cost significant resources and operate on a long cool-down, so picking your moment is a big part of the game.Ĭompany of Heroes 3 brings all these familiar elements to a new setting: the Mediterranean theater of World War 2, where the western allies and eventually Italian partisans fought the German and fascist Italian forces from North Africa to Sicily and up the Italian peninsula. An airborne company can call for aerial reinforcements, and an artillery unit can order up a barrage of high-explosives to strike a part of the map. Third, as a mission unfolds your company levels up and you choose from a variety of special abilities that you can add to your army's baseline list of units. Instead, you're going to be carefully positioning heavy machine gun teams behind stone fences, peeking armored vehicles around corners on city streets, and building individual obstacles like barbed wire or landmines. Second, Company of Heroes is all about micro-management: you're rarely going to be click-dragging a box around a dozen units and flinging them at the enemy base. First, the game is entirely about controlling territory for resources, there's no "harvesting" of resources in this game. Since it's been a few years, let's talk about what distinguishes Company of Heroes from a lot of its peers. It has the potential to make Company of Heroes 3 a uniquely approachable RTS game, but also turn the campaign from an appetizer / tutorial to a deeply replayable main event. It presents a familiar problem: People who like multiplayer will find the story missions boring, and the people who find the campaigns challenging will often find the multiplayer to be totally overwhelming.Ĭompany of Heroes 3, newly-announced by Relic and Sega and slated for a release in late 2022, is aiming squarely at this traditional disconnect in RTS design with a campaign that scraps most of the RTS single-player playbook, borrows a few pages from more open-ended strategy games, and remains connected to the multiplayer and skirmish modes that make RTS games so enduring. Effectively, then, they are two different games that speak to different audiences, without a ton of overlap. That's how RTS games have generally worked: forgiving scripted missions with lots of voiceover and cutscenes that are designed to let you play around with all the toys in the box, and then hyperactive multiplayer battles where the primary resources are time and attention, and efficiency reigns supreme.
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