Company of Heroes 2

[bearcat44]

Just an angry rant. Company of Heroes 2, Steam, Win10 PC. Trying to play some of the Theater of War missions. Playing at the lowest of the three difficulty levels, Conscript. I have played the original CoH many times successfully. I play the game strictly against AI opponents.
I never play online against humans because I consider PvP to be irredeemably infested with toxic trolls.

I was able to win Case Blue, Convoy, after about ten attempts.
I can't succeed at any other missions.
"General Mud", in particular, appears to be literally impossible.

The game just isn't any fun. Let me explain. My real life is full of failure, frustration and disappointment. I spend money on a game in order to escape those things, not to get more of them. In a game, I want to be the Hulk, and I want to "Hulk Smash".
What I don't want is the feeling that I'm being repeatedly sucker-punched by a little demon who is yelling "nyah, nyah, ya missed me! You didn't say Rumpelstiltskin!"

A game that offers lots of choices implies that there are multiple ways to win. It's frustrating to then be given a mission that is in fact just a Rubiks Cube. Only one method will work, the game railroads you into a grind of fail until you stumble upon the only right strategy.

It feels as if the game magically sees where I am on the map at all times and magically pops up units where I am to fight me.
There is a famous war novel entitled "Catch 22" that sums it up: you can get out of the Army if you claim to be insane, but if you want to get out of the Army, that proves you are not insane". This game feels like it has been deliberately designed to be too difficult.

I can understand how that might happen. Programming balanced AI takes talent, time and money. Quicker and easier to have the AI cheat. Why sell more copies of the game and make more money by including a level that will appeal to casual gamers when you can just keep regurgitating the same dog excrement to Gatekeeper Masochists? Why play test the game on normal people, when you can test it in-house on a handful of people who do nothing but play games, people who will inevitably say "It's too easy"?

The gaming industry reportedly generates more money than the movie and music industries combined. I'd think that large of a pie would mean it's worth taking the risk of including less skilled players in your customer base, but evidently not.
Steam says I've invested 590 hours of my life in CoH 2, so you can't be lazy and say "Git Gud". I've sincerely tried. I suppose I might be overlooking something, the scenario setup interface isn't particularly easy to understand.

If there is a plug-and-play mod I could download to play this game at a step below "Conscript" difficulty, I'd like to try again. I enjoyed the original Company of Heroes and that game's expansions. CoH2 really just feels like a rip off, made by D-bags, for D-bags.

The entire 'Total War' series very much has this vibe: deliberately unbalanced, frustrating.

 

[ZedClampet]

Just an angry rant. Company of Heroes 2, Steam, Win10 PC. Trying to play some of the Theater of War missions. Playing at the lowest of the three difficulty levels, Conscript. I have played the original CoH many times successfully. I play the game strictly against AI opponents.
I never play online against humans because I consider PvP to be irredeemably infested with toxic trolls.

I was able to win Case Blue, Convoy, after about ten attempts.
I can't succeed at any other missions.
"General Mud", in particular, appears to be literally impossible.

The game just isn't any fun. Let me explain. My real life is full of failure, frustration and disappointment. I spend money on a game in order to escape those things, not to get more of them. In a game, I want to be the Hulk, and I want to "Hulk Smash".
What I don't want is the feeling that I'm being repeatedly sucker-punched by a little demon who is yelling "nyah, nyah, ya missed me! You didn't say Rumpelstiltskin!"

A game that offers lots of choices implies that there are multiple ways to win. It's frustrating to then be given a mission that is in fact just a Rubiks Cube. Only one method will work, the game railroads you into a grind of fail until you stumble upon the only right strategy.

It feels as if the game magically sees where I am on the map at all times and magically pops up units where I am to fight me.
There is a famous war novel entitled "Catch 22" that sums it up: you can get out of the Army if you claim to be insane, but if you want to get out of the Army, that proves you are not insane". This game feels like it has been deliberately designed to be too difficult.

I can understand how that might happen. Programming balanced AI takes talent, time and money. Quicker and easier to have the AI cheat. Why sell more copies of the game and make more money by including a level that will appeal to casual gamers when you can just keep regurgitating the same dog excrement to Gatekeeper Masochists? Why play test the game on normal people, when you can test it in-house on a handful of people who do nothing but play games, people who will inevitably say "It's too easy"?

The gaming industry reportedly generates more money than the movie and music industries combined. I'd think that large of a pie would mean it's worth taking the risk of including less skilled players in your customer base, but evidently not.
Steam says I've invested 590 hours of my life in CoH 2, so you can't be lazy and say "Git Gud". I've sincerely tried. I suppose I might be overlooking something, the scenario setup interface isn't particularly easy to understand.

If there is a plug-and-play mod I could download to play this game at a step below "Conscript" difficulty, I'd like to try again. I enjoyed the original Company of Heroes and that game's expansions. CoH2 really just feels like a rip off, made by D-bags, for D-bags.

The entire 'Total War' series very much has this vibe: deliberately unbalanced, frustrating.

I'm a Total War guy and haven't played CoH. As far as Total War goes, it's hard for me to find a difficulty that I really enjoy because the higher you take the difficulty the more the AI cheats. That's just about all the difficulty does, give cheats to the AI, and that's incredibly frustrating. I realize that creating better AI is more difficult than just letting them create armies out of thin air, but it's really not fun this way. If I'm taking out enemy settlements and it isn't hindering them at all, it's just frustrating.

I don't know about CoH, but Total War has tons of useful mods to fine tune the game. I've made a bunch of mods for Total War Troy that heavily impact difficulty in both directions. But when I go to the CoH Steam Workshop, all I see are user-made maps.

 

[bearcat44]

I'm a Total War guy and haven't played CoH. As far as Total War goes, it's hard for me to find a difficulty that I really enjoy because the higher you take the difficulty the more the AI cheats. That's just about all the difficulty does, give cheats to the AI, and that's incredibly frustrating. I realize that creating better AI is more difficult than just letting them create armies out of thin air, but it's really not fun this way. If I'm taking out enemy settlements and it isn't hindering them at all, it's just frustrating.

I don't know about CoH, but Total War has tons of useful mods to fine tune the game. I've made a bunch of mods for Total War Troy that heavily impact difficulty in both directions. But when I go to the CoH Steam Workshop, all I see are user-made maps.

As I understand "new" AI, it can only imitate, aggregate. That is a shame. It has the potential to be a true "thinks like a human" opponent in games, if given something to model itself after.

As a tip for Company of Heroes, it can be artificially "turn based" by using the Pause keyboard button, issue multiple commands, then unpause and those commands will execute.

I'd suggest you try out the base game under the Steam two hour trial limit, then, if you like it, buy a deep discount bundle that includes most of the DLC, from a vendor such as Eneba.

Be aware that Civilization: Call to Power is not a Sid game, and it has an evidently unbreakable turn limit for an entire game.

 

[ZedClampet]

As I understand "new" AI, it can only imitate, aggregate. That is a shame. It has the potential to be a true "thinks like a human" opponent in games, if given something to model itself after.

Thanks for the tips on Company of Heroes. I'll give it a try.

As for AI (I work with AI about 8 hours a day), it can be set up to learn from it's mistakes (without watching what humans do), and using it could potentially be a game changer. In Forza, the AI was set up to just fuddle its way around the track over and over and over again, paying attention to its times and making adjustments, until finally it became good at it. For something like CoH or Total War, you could set up two AI to play against each other (in super speed), and it would gradually learn the best techniques.

AI, if you let it simulate enough, would get good enough at these strategy/RTS games that it would be essentially unbeatable, as it has become in Chess (although that's not a deep learning AI). Then you could tone it down a little for the various difficulties.

Imagine a game like Total War or CoH where upping the difficulty just means the AI is actually better at the game. It would be a phenomenal improvement. Of course, users couldn't really mod the AI in any traditional way, but that would be a small price to pay.

 

[bearcat44]

Thanks for the tips on Company of Heroes. I'll give it a try.

As for AI (I work with AI about 8 hours a day), it can be set up to learn from it's mistakes (without watching what humans do), and using it could potentially be a game changer. In Forza, the AI was set up to just fuddle its way around the track over and over and over again, paying attention to its times and making adjustments, until finally it became good at it. For something like CoH or Total War, you could set up two AI to play against each other (in super speed), and it would gradually learn the best techniques.

AI, if you let it simulate enough, would get good enough at these strategy/RTS games that it would be essentially unbeatable, as it has become in Chess (although that's not a deep learning AI). Then you could tone it down a little for the various difficulties.

Imagine a game like Total War or CoH where upping the difficulty just means the AI is actually better at the game. It would be a phenomenal improvement. Of course, users couldn't really mod the AI in any traditional way, but that would be a small price to pay.

In the past year or so, as of 2025, I've noticed a lot of posts from people saying "I have a mortgage, a demanding job and kids. I don't have time to replay a level from the checkpoint ten times over to finally progress in a game, the way I did when I was 17 years old"

I do not understand the economics of deliberately designing games to exclude a huge potential customer base. I suppose it could be argued that this is not happening. Games like Candy Crush exist, so why make the "easy" level of a shooter game actually easy.

I've seen people claiming to be programmers saying "It's not our fault! The EXECUTIVES release the game unfinished or with known bugs. If we don't meet the deadline, we won't ever get hired for a job anywhere after this one"

If meat that is rotten gets sold, the people who sell that meat go to prison.
If a car blows up, the executives who designed it to be a death trap go to prison.
Why do we allow buggy software to be sold? Software effects more people than meat or cars.

 

[ZedClampet]

In the past year or so, as of 2025, I've noticed a lot of posts from people saying "I have a mortgage, a demanding job and kids. I don't have time to replay a level from the checkpoint ten times over to finally progress in a game, the way I did when I was 17 years old"

I do not understand the economics of deliberately designing games to exclude a huge potential customer base. I suppose it could be argued that this is not happening. Games like Candy Crush exist, so why make the "easy" level of a shooter game actually easy.

I agree with this. There should be difficulty levels to meet everyone's needs. Unfortunately, you sell a lot more games if you say the game is impossible.

Why do we allow buggy software to be sold? Software effects more people than meat or cars.

I suppose it's because no one dies from a buggy AAA game.

 

[bearcat44]

Any one profiting from selling ANY product they KNOW is broken, deserves to die in screaming writhing agony.

 

[ZedClampet]

And there we go. Nice to have known you. Before using that kind of humor, you at least have to let the mods get to know you first. Then you probably would have escaped with a warning.