For Company of Heroes on the PC, GameFAQs has 2 FAQs (game guides and walkthroughs). About This Game Blitzkrieg mod is a modification for Company of Heroes which focuses on PvP experience - primarily on 2v2 and 3v3 games. It was for the first time introduced to public in 2008.
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Note: This review focuses on the single-player portion of Company of Heroes 2 because there were very few multiplayer matches running on the actual release code during our review period. If there are any huge problems we encounter after release, we’ll update this review accordingly.Company of Heroes 2, the long-awaited sequel to Relic Entertainment’s critically-acclaimed World War II real-time strategy game, belies its name. Playing as the Soviets in the game’s main campaign, there are very few times you’ll feel like a hero.The trials you’ll face along the Eastern Front, from Stalingrad through to Germany, are a far cry from the original game’s D-Day inspired rah- rah-palooza. The campaign in Company of Heroes 2 is a series of morally ambiguous situations where the guys you’re fighting for appear just as bad as the enemy you’re fighting against.Back in the USSREven our protagonist, former Soviet lieutenant Lev Abramovich Isakovich, doesn’t agree with his country’s actions. The story is related as a series of flashbacks from his comfy home in a Siberian jail cell, presumably for rebelling against the Motherland. It’s a gloomy set-up for a discomfiting game.Relic definitely tries to capture what made the Eastern Front so horrific. No matter what obstacle you're facing, the primary solution is to throw more men at the front lines.
Squaring off against the Nazis, you definitely come to understand this war involved a smaller, more powerful German force on one side and a meat grinder on the otherThe Russian Army relies on conscripts backed up by heavy-duty firepower.Your main special ability involves calling up conscripts—fodder troops forcefully drafted into the Soviet army that you can merge into other units to replenish their numbers or treat as disposable forces. These conscripts make poor soldiers, but there are certainly a lot of them to go around—a seemingly infinite number, in fact.Who cares if the Germans have a tank?
You have a hundred men, and a hundred more after that, and a hundred more after that—this is a war of attrition in its rawest form. Unfortunately, the emphasis on this “throw-more-men-at-the-problem” tactic removes any sense of real desperation from the campaign.In one of the game’s first cutscenes you see a line of Soviet grunts, many unarmed, charging a Nazi position. One of the Russian front-liners gets shot, and you see the man behind him scrounge the weapon from the corpse and continue charging.The bleak cutscenes interspersed throughout Company of Heroes 2 belie the game's rote strategic gameplay.Yet that never happens whie you're actually playing Company of Heroes 2. You’ll scrounge equipment from the battlefield occasionally, sure, but you’re never leading a group of unarmed, terrified, underfed Soviets straight into a German machine gun until their bodies form a wall of cover for your remaining soldiers.In fact, considering you’re supposedly scraping penal colonies and other “undesirables” to make up the majority of your army, your soldiers follow orders remarkably well. Every time you call up conscripts, the game enacts Order 227—a real-life (though short-lived) edict by Stalin whereby retreating troops were shot on sight.
While Order 227 is in effect, any of your troops—not just the conscripts you called up—who panic and flee will be executed.It's a neat idea, but in practice it rarely has any negative consequences; in my time with the game I never saw anyone executed because of 227. It’s just another timer to pay attention to, one more example that the horrific images conveyed in the game’s scripted sequences rarely affect how you actually play—they’re just set dressing. Given how linear most of the campaign missions are, Company of Heroes 2 ends up playing out like a weird Call of Duty or Medal of Honor strategy game where you aimlessly follow the game’s directions with no real sense of why. Maybe that’s meta-commentary on Soviet High Command during World War II, but I doubt it.Combat in Company of Heroes 2 oscillates between wonderfully challenging and disconcertingly easy.The AI difficulty is also frustratingly inconsistent.
Playing on “Captain” difficulty (the game’s equivalent to Normal) I alternatively felt like I was squaring off against General George S. Patton himself and a lukewarm cup of tap water.
At best the missions are an exciting push-and-pull of tactics; at worst, your Soviet squads will frolic down the road right next to a bunch of Nazi soldiers, neither group acknowledging the other exists.All this aside, the campaign isn’t bad. There are a few stand-out missions, including an excellent scenario midway through the game where your small squad of infantry plays hide-and-seek with a German Tiger tank in a sleepy village, ineffectively chipping away at its armor with limited armaments. But that's the exception—most of the campaign is underwhelming.Theater of WarThere are very few set up a base, build troops, manage resources, attack scenarios in the main storyline; in fact, the extremely scripted and linear Company of Heroes 2 campaign gives you almost no idea how to jump into multiplayer with the exception of a few missions at the end.Luckily, the Theater of War mode rectifies that shortcoming. Here you’ll find co-op scenarios, solo challenges, and regular battles against the AI. As far as I could tell, all scenarios are based off actual events during World War II, lending the battles a nice veneer of authenticity.
Theater of War is also the only place you’ll be able to try out the German forces in single-player.Theater of War mode is where Company of Heroes 2 shines, at least as far as single-player is concerned. Multiplayer formula is essentially an adapted version of the system in Battlefield: each team has a certain number of tickets when the game starts, and various command points are scattered across the map. Control more of these areas than the enemy and their ticket count gradually decreases. When you run out of tickets, you lose.It's a tried-and-true formula that still makes for great games—battles evolve into a literal arms race as you counter the enemy’s tanks with AT guns and build bunkers encircling your favorite regions, trying desperately to take one more point and expand your supply lines. Throw men in cover and wait for the enemy to fall into your trap, or funnel their tanks into your deftly placed minefield.
Theater of War mode encourages the sort of tactical decision-making that isn't really required to complete the campaign.Sure, capturing and holding points is a classic RTS trope, but it creates plenty of opportunities for challenging tactical decision-making.And that's a shame, because it’s in those moments when you're quickly making difficult decisions that you really feel like a wartime commander. Battles are frantic and very deep, though newcomers may find it overwhelming to manage all this information at once.Right now Theater of War mode contains 18 missions—nine Soviet, nine German—though Relic plans to expand this content later (through paid DLC). It looks like packs will be organized by year; the game ships with scenarios from 1941.Old General WinterRelic adds a few new features to Company of Heroes with this sequel. Most touted is the new ColdTech system, which fits well with the Russian setting.
Here's how it works: during certain matches troops fight in blizzard conditions. Your units will get cold over time, courtesy of “General Winter,” eventually dying from exposure if you don’t huddle near a bonfire or sequester them in a building.Huddle your troops near bonfires to keep them from freezing to death during a blizzard.Deep snow slows down your troops while also leaving tracks for the enemy to know where you’re headed. Frozen rivers and lakes can be blown open with mortars or mines, turning unlucky units into unwitting Titanic reenactors.Relic also does an excellent job with its sound design, rivaling DICE (Battlefield series) for wartime audio. Everything sounds crisp here, from the tank rumbling through the silent, snowy village as your troops lie in ambush to the Stuka planes dive-bombing the battlefield.A note on performance: the game runs fairly well on my PC—an i5 machine with 8 GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 7850 GPU— though I experienced some slowdown during especially busy or explosive sections of the game. I also had odd frame rate hitching during the game’s pre-rendered cutscenes. I’ll keep experimenting with my settings to see if I can find a solution.Bottom lineThe best and worst thing I can say about Company of Heroes 2 is it feels like more Company of Heroes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it’s a testament to how ahead-of-its-time the original Company of Heroes was—or perhaps an indicator of the glacial pace with which the RTS genre evolves.However, this is a sequel to a seven-year-old game that plays almost identically to its predecessor.
Oh sure, it’s pretty and it sounds great, and the winter effects add a new tactical layer, but it’s essentially a big expansion pack.If you’re a diehard fan and you’ve been waiting years for this game, great. I want to stress, Company of Heroes 2 is still objectively one of the best RTS games out there, and I certainly enjoyed my time with it. The formula was nearly perfect last time, and it’s just as good this time around.It just feels kind of like the original Company of Heroes died, dropped its gun, and the sequel picked it up and kept running in the same direction.
Company of Heroes is TOUGH.Even on normal mode. It's as simple as that. Is it unfair?
Absolutely Yes, the rate at which the computer spawns units is simply impossible. Can games be anxiety ridden and tense affairs with little to no fun?
Again, absolutely yes. I ONLY ever play skirmish, maybe 5 or 6 times in ten years against an opponent (I don't have the time or the patience to find an opponent).Regarding difficulty, I’ll say this much there’s no shame in playing on Easy mode. At the end of the day a game is meant to be enjoyed. If playing on Easy means you enjoy it then.
Play on Easy. Life’s too short to worry otherwise about difficulty levels and what being unable to play on harder modes says about your competence with gaming or by extension life (trust me, for some people, when gaming is an important part of your life, it can reach that level of introspection).But here I am having played Company of Heroes, Opposing Fronts, Tales of Valor and its several mods for more than ten years now. Ten years in which I have graduated, gotten a stable job, married and had a daughter. I even brought an expensive gaming laptop back in 2014 JUST so I could play Company of Heroes 2.
Simply put - it's the best RTS I have ever played.It's intense, it's realistic, it's brutal, it's ferocious and it's satisfying. I've played the single player campaigns of these game countless times, I still cannot get over the thrill and the visceral ferocity of the combat.The below are some guiding principles and tips I have for the game.1. Aggression - World War II was a war where aggression favoured the victors. The fact that an entirely new fighting military concept “blitzkrieg” lead to such astonishing early victories for a fairly newly organised military force- the Nazis - pays testament to this. It was a huge leap from the attrition based, deadlocked warfare of the First World War.
COH is no different. Fortune favours the bold, the risk takers and those prepared to kill. Get your men out there straight away, taking over resources, finding victory points, choke points and kill zones to show the enemy that your in control and not afraid to fight.
The slow and hesitant deserve to be crushed, the quick and brutal deserve the crushing victory.2. Battlefield management- you need to keep an eye on micromanagement, unit development, keeping squads alive through cover and Rock Paper Scissors gameplay, fuel and manpower sources etc.
There’s no resource gathering as such in other RTS games which means that supply lines need to be maintained and protected at all times. Most of the battles and fighting in the game will take place over key strategic resource points as this is what provides the backbone of the army. Dismantle this and you break the spine of your opponent, refuse to take action and they will continue to grow and develop until your defeat is a foregone conclusion.3. Tactical Positioning – Perhaps the key trait of the game which sets is part from others of the same genre. Your tactical positioning will either make or break the game. Positioning is everything in the game, this includes understanding the cover system, the flanking system, the range of the units, by extension which units can face which unit and the movement and deployment of armour. I include weapon upgrades and artillery strike capabilities within this too.
An excellent understanding of this system, all of which is based upon simplified real life physics is a fundamental pillar of the game. Truly great players can beat what seems like a far stronger force with superior tactical positioning of the troops at your disposal.Tips and keys to warfare.1.
Be very aggressive from the outset. Train a group of engineers, have the default one create bases straight away whilst the rest begin to take over. Always remember the rock, paper, scissors philosophy of the game. Every unit can be countered in the game. Vehicles beat infantry, anti tank beats tanks, jeeps beat snipers, mortars beat MG nests and artillery pieces can annihilate anything. To reiterate this concept, an anti tank gun can annihilate several tanks.
But a single sniper can kill the crews of these guns. Cap all points as soon as possible to generate more resource.2. Flamethrowers are utterly brutal in the early game. In WW2 flame throwers were some of the most terrifying and psychologically devastating weapons a soldier could ever confront. The effect is remarkably similar in the game, especially early on whilst opponents are still feeling each other out. Two groups of engineers upgraded with flame throwers can be a nightmare to face and can throw a burning spanner into your works.3.
Mortars can be utterly destructive, get them early on, keep them out of sight and keep them near vital points. Think of mortar crews as being no different than mini artillery weapons. Keep them well out of sight, a huge advantage is that the game defaults to constantly pounding on the enemy whenever they fall within range.
At any one time I will always have at least two on the battlefield near the front lines raining sulphurous hell on unsuspecting enemies.4. A group of upgraded, well placed anti-tank guns can decimate armour and prove cheaper than tanks. In fact, I have managed to win games without ever creating tanks and simply relying on infantry, artillery and a few anti tank guns to win. Always keep them facing combat and keep a large line of sight available.5. Love your troops like a true commander. Company of Heroes is about fewer units utilising superior tactics to get the job done. It's the opposite of Command and conquer and other ‘spawn heavily and overcome with sheer numbers’ type of games.
In fact, going back to those games will seem comical after you’ve become an experienced hand at Company of Heroes. A squad of upgraded or veteran soldiers can prove very costly during fragile times in a battle. Seeing my men whittled down during a confrontation sends a pang of anxiety through my heart, and should have the same effect on you. DONT BE SHY TO RETREAT when reduced to a single soldier.
You can swear at him under your breath whilst he sprints back but at least he’s alive. Reinforce and live to fight another day (especially if it's a veteran squad)6. Keep a reinforcing method close to the battlefield. A Half Track or some other resupply vehicle should be kept near the front to reinforce men before moving back out of sight.
It saves a huge amount of time than just creating recruits from base or calling them from off map. Listen out for audio queues on the battlefield, men screaming bloody murder should draw you to their location.7. If you sense an opening or a way of finishing a game swiftly, strike suddenly, for example if you see an opening send a couple of heavy tanks already on the battlefield (if available) to the opponents base and begin pounding them - you never know, they may be poorly defended and it could result in a sudden victory. If they are well defended, then retreat quickly after attacking for a bit. It will shock your opponent and give them the false belief that you are constantly on their doorstep and could possibly beat them at will and give them the additional stress of having to focus on base defences.8. Understand flanking as an elementary concept. Attacking an enemy from the side or from behind can cause untold devastation, attacking a tank from the weaker less armoured sides is such a basic principle its not even worth mentioning.
If you haven’t understood this yet, then you need to seriously consider rote learning the rules of tactical positioning.9. Use artillery to absolutely terrorise your opponent.
There’s little which signifies endgame domination more than a well-placed, fluid frontline of units and armour backed with several artillery pieces. A salvo of artillery pieces is an awe inspiring sight and should be used to cow your opponent into submission or drive them into a temporary state of sweat inducing panic. Use it to scare off attacks, cover advances on key points or to rain Nine circles of hell on the opponents base.
Hell, I play some maps just to build a line of artillery so I can listen to the sweet symphony of unleashed murder. It’s sort of like therapy.10. Try to enjoy the combat. Losing is horribly frustrating and can make you want to quit many, many times over.
I know - I’ve been there. Even if you get your♥♥♥♥♥kicked a hundred times in a row try to enjoy the intense visceral combat. There’s no shame in playing on easy. If your whittled down to the last man and being bombarded by tank shells, artillery or RPGs and the games loss is utterly inevitable, fight to the very end and enjoyable the (try to) thrill of destruction. (Use the zoom and alt button to watch your mens brave last stand or getting vaporised in plumes of blood by artillery, butchered or the soil exploding over the landscape). Hey it's a war and every dog has its day.
Yours, soldier, will come very soon.Play hard fight hard. This a tough game. I don't even try to do anything but the Easy level so far. The Tiger Ace missions give you at most two tanks, thats a good place to start and get an easy win.The mechanics of how units move is tricky, I think I will always find that frustrating. Too often I tell a unit to do something and the command fails for some reason and the unit sits around next to a unoccupied CP doing nothing until I notice it later.One idea playing the skirmish mode is to give your side extra computer players and the other side just one easy enemy. The computer allies will run interference and give you time to set up and build some forces instead of just being wiped out in a few minutes. Reading up and watching tutorials (like this post) is very helpful as well.I haven't even attempted a game against a human player, and I do wish there was an easier level available.but even so this is a great and now classic game.
Picked up on a sale it is well worth it. So I just reached the Hill 192 mission. I thought I was doing well, slowly clearing out the enemy from the map and building up my own forces for an assault.
I took both secondary towns and secured them. Didn't get the medal, but I figured it's no big deal - I'm just learning the map for now. Then I get my forces within sight of the hill, and the enemy suddenly has like 4 tanks, multiple infantry squads all armed with AT weapons, and is calling artillery strikes down on me. Meanwhile I can't even build more forces because of the squad limit which doesn't let me have a decent-sized army while still defending myself.This is just too much unfair and unfun BS for me. Quit and uninstalled, I'm done.
Originally posted by:So I just reached the Hill 192 mission. I thought I was doing well, slowly clearing out the enemy from the map and building up my own forces for an assault. I took both secondary towns and secured them. Didn't get the medal, but I figured it's no big deal - I'm just learning the map for now. Then I get my forces within sight of the hill, and the enemy suddenly has like 4 tanks, multiple infantry squads all armed with AT weapons, and is calling artillery strikes down on me.
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Meanwhile I can't even build more forces because of the squad limit which doesn't let me have a decent-sized army while still defending myself.This is just too much unfair and unfun BS for me. Quit and uninstalled, I'm done.Sorry to hear that, I can't remember the mission too clearly but I remember taking the town (to the West of the starting point of the mission?).
Going up the hill was a nightmare I recall, in fact I think the first time I ever played it I was so sick of it I literally just threw a couple of heavy tanks and a few troops in a last ditch bum rush and managed through sheer stupid luck to take out the defensives a the top.Its mission like this and the Red Ball Express mission (Where i was constantly harangued and decimated by Panzer tanks until I realised that there was a base of production in the North East of the map which needed destroying) which can really ruin the gaming experience and make things so darn frustrating. Taken from post #5 in:The AI stats and modifiers:Easy: Same unit stats and resource as the player's own. Can queue up to 2 maximum spots to attack and 3 to defend.Normal: Receives a 20% Manpower boost, but other than that, stats and the rest of the resources are normal. Can queue up to 5 spots to attack and 6 to defend.Hard: 50% Manpower and Munitions boost. Fuel and unit HP is the same.
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Can queue up to 8 spots to attack and 6 spots to defend.Expert: 85% boost to Manpower and Munitions, as well as a 35% boost to ALL unit HP. Can queue up to 10 spots to attack and 7 to defend.As for what the AI itself does, well, as mentioned before, the tactics themselves don't exactly change per-se, just the resources the AI gets and the priority on attack vs. As you can see, the Expert AI has a much higher emphasis on attacking compared to the other difficulties. Essentially the AI just brute-forces its way through the game, and by recieving a larger amount of resources, it will be easier for the AI to do so.
The AI has to major weaknesses:Their base and choke points.You can basically win every match if you manage to push to their base. I played a match against a hard AI yesterday, 70:450 victory points, almost no territories. I sent 3 Pumas and a StuH to their base and won in like 2 minutes. The AI seems not to be able to defend their base properly, instead of retreating their units were aimlessly walking around the battlefield.Choke points are an AI counter in almost every game.
Bridges, corridors, you name it. CoH AI wont flank in most cases but send their troops straight into you. And they wont stop that, no matter what. Use tanktraps and barbed wire to block paths and make them move in the right direction.
Put a machinegun and a mortar down near a choke and enjoy the free commander points.In the campaign, the AI usually follows a fixed path that you can camp. At Hill 192, a single MG-Nest defended my base against dozens of goliaths for the entire mission. Also, most enemy units will stay at their postions, meaning you can just mortar your way throw them. Originally posted by:The AI has to major weaknesses:Their base and choke points.You can basically win every match if you manage to push to their base. I played a match against a hard AI yesterday, 70:450 victory points, almost no territories. I sent 3 Pumas and a StuH to their base and won in like 2 minutes.
The AI seems not to be able to defend their base properly, instead of retreating their units were aimlessly walking around the battlefield.Choke points are an AI counter in almost every game. Bridges, corridors, you name it. CoH AI wont flank in most cases but send their troops straight into you.
And they wont stop that, no matter what. Use tanktraps and barbed wire to block paths and make them move in the right direction. Put a machinegun and a mortar down near a choke and enjoy the free commander points.In the campaign, the AI usually follows a fixed path that you can camp. At Hill 192, a single MG-Nest defended my base against dozens of goliaths for the entire mission. Also, most enemy units will stay at their postions, meaning you can just mortar your way throw them.Correct.And if you are able to drive ai to an attrition fight for 5 min and exhaust the ai resourses, then ai will be unable to stop/counter you.
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