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As a player who has had multiple Red Dragon campaign experiences ruined by its atrocious AI, this is music to my ears. Makes me want to pick up Steel Division soon
.Perhaps I'll wait until the balance problems everyone complains about get sorted, but still. This one thing alone makes me want the game. A Wargame wargame with good AI is like a dream come true
.What is dead may never die, but rises again, patch by patch!
CoH sets the bar pretty high here, though. I mean, you have recorded voice lines not only for specific units, but for all kinds of situations for each unit type -- riflemen shot at by an armoured car, for example. Then you have things like different "moods" for calm soldiers, soldiers in combat, etc. I get that devs may not be able to afford that, or be willing to put the time into all of that. SD has some of it, and I'd love a CoH-level of detail, but it feels like too big of a wish to me.
What I would really love to see for SD, which I think would fit very well, is numbered units like in Ground Control, with a two-digit system indicating unit type and then squad number. For example, if infantry squads are assigned the number 1, the first five infantry squads you deploy would be 1-1 to 1-5.
Then instead of an attack cue you'd hear "Squad 1-12 engaged by infantry!" or "Squad 3-5 engaging armour!".
Heck, the GC devs even had a great idea to have your units speak when they are ordered to do things, but have a computerised "artificial aide" voice announce things like "Squad 2 is under enemy fire" or "Unit lost, Squad 5". This kept them from having to record a ridiculous amount of voice lines so that every unit type had a set of alerts.
For SD, you could have one or more voices that could be your sub-officers yelling updates at you. Like "Section 1-4 reporting casualties!" or "We lost 4-2! We lost a tank!". Would be both very immersing, in that it'd make you feel like a commander directing a battle, and very informative.
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I do understand how a CoH player might feel the Wargame-style games, boring, though. Don't quite get the patronising "durr he just wants pretty splosions" comments. They are different games, after all, one with a larger map and "slower", more strategic gameplay, and one which is about micro-ing a smaller number of units.
Point to even one person saying this.
Many authenticity nerds turn this I left it on, but I did turn on the (poorly supported) NATO counters because I've been playing games with them for decades.
Total war battles are slow with minimal necessary player involvement at standard difficulty. The entire experience is designed to enable players to spend time zoomed in watching heads go sploosh. Even in MP (I played a bunch of shogun 2 mp up until FOTS made it stupid) there's plenty of time for that.
I've never seen anyone even attempt to zoom in and watch a unit doing stuff in an even remotely competitive SD44 game. Maybe you do?
Malarky. COH and COH2 both grabbed authenticity with both hands by stealing voice lines, character names, themes and tropes from Band of Brothers and other WW2 movies and shows. They also make heavy use of art and animation to reinforce that authenticity, especially in COH2. If you've read Vasily Grossman's work or The Unwomanly Face of War (Nobel winning soviet book from the 70s, finally got a real English translation), you'd know how authentic they attempted to make the Soviet snipers in COH2 for example, right down to the two person teams, the sniper cult representation, and the high frequency of women snipers. In terms of attempts at depicting realism from an OOB and Toe perspective SD44 goes further, but that's honestly less important. Most people can assess authenticity of experience based on what they've seen in films and shows and occasionally in books, few can assess authenticity of equipment and organization.
And SD44 plays fast and loose with history on many occasions throughout the game, with tank, small arms and artillery ranges, the accuracy of ground support from level bombers, the frequency of air support, the frequency and availability of artillery support, the lack of pre-planned artillery fires, the on field representation of artillery that is wildly out of scale, the lack of movement critical and mechanical failures, the lack of animal transport, the existence of dedicated reconnaissance units, the lack of WP for allied units, the lack of vehicle launched smoke, and the entirety of everything to do with incendiary weapons to name a few examples. There's also the preference for techno determinism and paper statistics - especially hard ones like armor and gun size over soft ones like doctrine, organizaton, automotive reliability, quality of components and armor plating, crew comfort, and turret rotational speed - over real world outcomes, which generates weird stuff like panthers owning Shermans despite real world combat results favoring the Sherman to win that engagement damn near every time according to Zaloga in his exhaustive assessment of AFV performance.
As far as game play - aka the important stuff - I'd argue that COH2 and its focus on fire and maneuver infantry action comes a lot closer to capturing the dynamics of American and German infantry at the tactical level (at least in a "this is what they were trained to do" sense, because in many cases the conscripts in US line infantry divisions (aka not paratroopers) lacked the elan, experience and experienced NONCOMs to pull it off) than SD44 manages to pull off. It is also much more obvious what is going on, what is going wrong and why each individual component matters thanks to unit barks and clear animations. COH2 is also much more willing to reject paper stats in favor of balance, and as a result has greater realism of outcomes despite lower realism of equipment.
More importantly, COH2 ensures that players have the UI support they need to understand proper usage of units. When a vehicle gets shot in the rear big glow red words pop up saying "REAR ARMOR HIT". When a tank is in a bad position it starts yelling that it needs to be moved because of AT guns or low health or other stuff. In short, COH2 is constantly teaching the player to play it well, while SD44 couldn't give less of a fuck if you suck or get confused by how things work. When mechanics as critical to game play as AP scaling aren't introduced outside of a tool tip, that's a problem.
The COH2 system is better if only because all decisions regarding it are under player control and players can't lose units in an intensely gamey way through the surrender system. Units can be lost on retreat, but only if the other player works for it. Tanks can't retreat, so high cost high impact units can't be wiped out by surrendering them or taking advantage of stupid AI decisions. And infantry can reinforce, so stupid ai choices can be made good.
I see a lot of potential in the vehicle portion of the SD44 morale system, but the implementation sucks from a user experience perspective. I've lost close games because a tank in a reasonable position was stunned and then turned side armor to the enemy to go around a hedge and retreat. The rage, man, the rage. If my tank's accuracy and ROF went to shit and it started screaming about how it needed to be gotten out of there that would allow me to make decisions while still clearly penalizing me for sticking around beyond the limits of the crew.
I think I'm going to bookmark this post and refer to it in the future when CoH vs SD is brought up
. Excellent work.
Not sure about that, the devs can get their asses handed to them by regular players.
I agree that the devs need to make a tutorial, but i disagree that they always know the way the game plays the best. Often devs lack an objective viewpoint as they already have in their head the design philosophy of what it is intended to be and may play this way.
Competitive players have no such "prejudices" they will try to find out which units are the most powerfull without considering design philisophy, they may often try to break the game by using overpowered units/decks & taking advantage of those.
More often than not a tournament will show the flaws in game design by showing certain decks are picked more than others or if you have a tournament final with 2 of the same decks then your game design has failed. At least if one of your game design goals was to make a number of balanced decks. Painfully it will show that also some decks are never used in tournaments, making u question what they are for in competitive play other than eyecandy.
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And to answer the OP.
No I think that this is not the best RTS there is. I certainly don't think it is better than Coh2, it simply isn't around that long to compete with this kind of game. Competivitive multiplayer gameplay isn't good enough for this game to compete with coh2 that has less but balanced factions, as you can see in my previous post I don't believe that Steel Division is there yet. But if the devs are willing they might be able to get there, depending what their goal for the game is. I m not even sure they aim for the competitive multiplayer game market, i rather start to believe that they more enjoy making historical units for games (in wargame they made pretty much every unit of every country from the cold war).
I do think Steel Division is probably one of the most original RTS games that thinks outside the box: I m talking about the moving frontlines, "stress/panick" & "overrun" game mechanics, logistics, ... . And that s why I play it, to play a different kind of game.
It plays also on a bigger scale then coh2: bigger maps, longer time to play & bigger distances.
No I think that this is not the best RTS there is. I certainly don't think it is better than Coh2, it simply isn't around that long to compete with this kind of game. Competivitive multiplayer gameplay isn't good enough for this game to compete with coh2 that has less but balanced factions, as you can see in my previous post I don't believe that Steel Division is there yet. But if the devs are willing they might be able to get there, depending what their goal for the game is. I m not even sure they aim for the competitive multiplayer game market, i rather start to believe that they more enjoy making historical units for games (in wargame they made pretty much every unit of every country from the cold war).
I do think Steel Division is probably one of the most original RTS games that thinks outside the box: I m talking about the moving frontlines, "stress/panick" & "overrun" game mechanics, logistics, ... . And that s why I play it, to play a different kind of game.
It plays also on a bigger scale then coh2: bigger maps, longer time to play & bigger distances.
COH2 has longer matches which to me is a strike against. If SD44 could get match length down to 30m I would appreciate it.
Also if eugen isn't aiming for competitive multiplayer market then they're aiming for sim market and need to do more with single player. A lot more.
Also if eugen isn't aiming for competitive multiplayer market then they're aiming for sim market and need to do more with single player. A lot more.
Coming of coh2 and hearts of Iron this game is easily one of my favorite titles of recent memory
This is a really good post.
What you say about developers is true. They think of the game one way, and as we have seen dozens of times players will obliterate that thinking by finding the smallest chink in the armor of a build and exploit it.
The only issue with relying on 'competitive players' which I think was tried with the Marshals System was that players are subject to their own bias and will defend their favorite units to the death. This can be said of all players as it is really hard to find objective people. I won't name names, as some of those people are here, but there were some Marshals that I found to be clearly biased towards particular nations and decks in previous Eugen games.
This leads to your third point, which is the direction Eugen went. They don't use a tournament, they use all games as a whole. So they take the performance of the units and the decks and look for outliers and make changes as they see fit.
The problem now is that A) it doesn't seem that the dev cycle is presently fast enough to address the concerns of the community so the Devs appear to be aloof and B) they may honestly not even have enough data or at least not enough compared to what their models were used to with Red Dragon. This may slow changes down even more and Red Dragon patches were already infrequent.
I don't even know if Eugen considers 'competitive' play as their ultimate goal for all decks. I wish they'd be more open about it, but that would surely piss people off if they were told 'No, sorry 6th Airborne is sort of a meme deck meant for fun and needs to work with X Y and Z decks in a team game to be useful'.
I mean, what purpose does North Korean national serve in Red Dragon? It's a disaster.
as far as I know the Marshal program had a few competitive players, but most weren't there for any ingame skill.
Rather, the majority were there so that Eugen could outsource their historical research, or for other miscellaneous things.
Rather, the majority were there so that Eugen could outsource their historical research, or for other miscellaneous things.
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imo SD is the best ww2 rts out there.
graphics are great, the engine zoom in and out is one of the biggest plus.
sounds and music are not the best but still on average/good.
its not a base building RTS which is great for my taste(even though RUSE was great game too)
It combines greatly strategic and tactical gameplay.
It's not as realistic as Assault squad 2 but still one of the best ww2 rts simulators.
The balance is not bad and you can see clearly efforts towards it.
The gameplay mechanics is a fresh experience and upgraded version of Wargames(which are also great games)
The devs are reading everything and care about people opinion about their game.
There should be some fixes about pathing and retreat pathing so some units won't get stuck if they hit a house or a wood. One way to maybe fix this is that when a unit is on retreat status should get an auto click (right click for units that can use hedgrows and woods and reverse for armor and vehicles) back to closest allied unit(in allied controlled area) that is not recon and panicked or try to move towards spawn. Or give control to player to move a panicked unit safe retreat. Since you use R for retreat ,make R a move option but disallow weapons use (as if it was weapon damage for both soft and hard units) till panick meter is back to normal(weapon damage can only be fixed with support vehicle nearby, but for panicked units it should be only be panick meter that should dissalow fire back). So with that, players will be able to avoid weird situations that come up with pathing.
As for matchmaking, i understand its hard to make a worthy matchmaking, considering that there are not many people playing atm and elo difference. But adding an option for both quick match and ranked, to apply as pre made or random would help a lot. So pre mades will fight pre mades and randoms fight randoms. If its difficult for pre mades to find game, then there is always the custom setup option.
Another thing that could be added and be optional is, to allow to apply with both factions divisions( for example i pick 12th ss for axis and 15th Scottish for allies, while my team m8 select his if i am grouped with someone). that way the time waiting will decrease a lot. Along with that there could be also be an option for pre mades(with just a tick to apply as randoms too) to have the chance/option to find a game, even if they end up being enemies in the end(still should be optional). So that will give the chance for all players to find easier games on quick match or ranked. Then the game should be able to match up better the players considering their elo rating or multiplayer stats.
I am not a programmer and i don't know how easy it is to have a system like this but certainly this will help a lot for decreasing waiting time.
graphics are great, the engine zoom in and out is one of the biggest plus.
sounds and music are not the best but still on average/good.
its not a base building RTS which is great for my taste(even though RUSE was great game too)
It combines greatly strategic and tactical gameplay.
It's not as realistic as Assault squad 2 but still one of the best ww2 rts simulators.
The balance is not bad and you can see clearly efforts towards it.
The gameplay mechanics is a fresh experience and upgraded version of Wargames(which are also great games)
The devs are reading everything and care about people opinion about their game.
There should be some fixes about pathing and retreat pathing so some units won't get stuck if they hit a house or a wood. One way to maybe fix this is that when a unit is on retreat status should get an auto click (right click for units that can use hedgrows and woods and reverse for armor and vehicles) back to closest allied unit(in allied controlled area) that is not recon and panicked or try to move towards spawn. Or give control to player to move a panicked unit safe retreat. Since you use R for retreat ,make R a move option but disallow weapons use (as if it was weapon damage for both soft and hard units) till panick meter is back to normal(weapon damage can only be fixed with support vehicle nearby, but for panicked units it should be only be panick meter that should dissalow fire back). So with that, players will be able to avoid weird situations that come up with pathing.
As for matchmaking, i understand its hard to make a worthy matchmaking, considering that there are not many people playing atm and elo difference. But adding an option for both quick match and ranked, to apply as pre made or random would help a lot. So pre mades will fight pre mades and randoms fight randoms. If its difficult for pre mades to find game, then there is always the custom setup option.
Another thing that could be added and be optional is, to allow to apply with both factions divisions( for example i pick 12th ss for axis and 15th Scottish for allies, while my team m8 select his if i am grouped with someone). that way the time waiting will decrease a lot. Along with that there could be also be an option for pre mades(with just a tick to apply as randoms too) to have the chance/option to find a game, even if they end up being enemies in the end(still should be optional). So that will give the chance for all players to find easier games on quick match or ranked. Then the game should be able to match up better the players considering their elo rating or multiplayer stats.
I am not a programmer and i don't know how easy it is to have a system like this but certainly this will help a lot for decreasing waiting time.
But you don't need objective people to balance a game. You need claims and experiments to verify them. But your statement is probably what eugen consider balance, a set of opinions.
The Marshals thing was added in WEE, and included people from the community, a few of which were very good at WEE, but most were not there for that.
Quote from madmat which he wrote in the stickied post called "introductory speech to new Marshals":
By the time ALB came around, the skill of the marshals varied from very low to alright with a very small minority being at the top of competition, for a short time.
At the beginning of WRD 6 of the best players at the time were added.
However the program was already too disfunctional, and largely ignored by Eugen, and the large majority of marshals were not good at the game, yet still demanded that their oppinion had equal weight and that they did not need to justify their oppinions at all*.
*producing gems like this:
Basically the point is that "relying on 'competitive players' which I think was tried with the Marshals System" never happened.
Yes, at the very end they added a few comp. players, but that was never the reality of that program, which I consider a complete failure and achieving almost nothing after WEE.
The marshal program could have worked if they actually added and removed people based on merrit and had clear tasks for the different subgroups ( community, historical research and gameplay). But they did not and the program fail to achieve anything whatsoever.
The last patch the marshals did something useful for afaik is the conquest-patch for WAB, beta testing and allowing the victory-points-rate and other things being adjusted.
I can't disagree, which is why I said it was tried. Not that it was tried well or really produced great results in any of the titles.
Eugen was always slow to implement changes, but I feel the reliance on internal data gathered from the game has made them even slower.
I really feel like Steel Division needed a much longer closed beta and instead of relying on forum bitching to interact. Send out a questionnaire like every 3 days and if a person doesn't give copious/useful feedback, pull their beta key.
Meh.
Oh, Vassily.........haven't heard that name in a while.
I like this game personally. Say what you will about it being inferior to its WG predecessors, but I have fun playing it just like I have (had?) fun playing RD and ALB.
What we have to understand is this game does not have the support it needs (whether from devs or community) to actually draw a sizable player base. As niche as this game may be, the concept isn't incapable of drawing a larger audience. However, the fact is, Eugen built a game with quite a few issues and little to no accommodation for the average green player. While they did make a tutorial, it in no way prepares these greens for what real high-level play looks like. Especially without the View Profile feature and a pretty dead matchmaker, greens are prone to get utterly thrashed and getting a bad impression from the game.
But, you may say, game tutorials rarely are a representation of advanced play anyway, and yes that is true. This is where the community comes in, and to be honest, we are simply not sizable enough to give the kind of information to the average player that a big AAA game's community can pump out. Add this to the fact that Eugen makes games with learning curves rivaling (exceeding?) those of Dark Souls and other titles notorious for being a complete pain to become good at.
Personally, it does frustrate me how poor Eugen's PR is (though I guess I'm part of that PR, but whatevs), and I really wish they did a better job of being vocal to the community. I consider the amount of memes about the devs to be a good assessment of how well they're doing at being there for the community, and I really doubt most players even know who MadMat is anymore. All new memes made about the devs are shared in the somewhat elite circle we share in the long time players. If I was a new player, I would feel lost with how little the devs seem to address anything and how limited community info is.
Simply put, the game is flawed, and doesn't have the kind of support available that it needs to really grow a better playerbase.
In the end, Eugen games will always be a labor of love to "get gud" at.
What we have to understand is this game does not have the support it needs (whether from devs or community) to actually draw a sizable player base. As niche as this game may be, the concept isn't incapable of drawing a larger audience. However, the fact is, Eugen built a game with quite a few issues and little to no accommodation for the average green player. While they did make a tutorial, it in no way prepares these greens for what real high-level play looks like. Especially without the View Profile feature and a pretty dead matchmaker, greens are prone to get utterly thrashed and getting a bad impression from the game.
But, you may say, game tutorials rarely are a representation of advanced play anyway, and yes that is true. This is where the community comes in, and to be honest, we are simply not sizable enough to give the kind of information to the average player that a big AAA game's community can pump out. Add this to the fact that Eugen makes games with learning curves rivaling (exceeding?) those of Dark Souls and other titles notorious for being a complete pain to become good at.
Personally, it does frustrate me how poor Eugen's PR is (though I guess I'm part of that PR, but whatevs), and I really wish they did a better job of being vocal to the community. I consider the amount of memes about the devs to be a good assessment of how well they're doing at being there for the community, and I really doubt most players even know who MadMat is anymore. All new memes made about the devs are shared in the somewhat elite circle we share in the long time players. If I was a new player, I would feel lost with how little the devs seem to address anything and how limited community info is.
Simply put, the game is flawed, and doesn't have the kind of support available that it needs to really grow a better playerbase.
I wasn't a mod when he was banned, but it wasn't exactly undeserved. Thankfully the Eugen forums doesn't have to deal with the likes of him for the time being, but then again, it's not exactly thriving either. Just a few spats about 404 and Euro politics really.
I feel like Vulcan needs a disclaimer that watching his videos will only help you cross the first threshold of the game into actually really understanding how it works, but not actually how to be good at it. Vulcan himself isn't an awful player, but his content doesn't really have the direction to really make a tourny ready player. For that second level, you have people like Razz and Firestarter, but their production quality and commentary are admittedly rather lacking (Razz's entire aesthetic was basically made and maintained by me after all) and they are obviously a lot harder to follow for a new player.
In the end, Eugen games will always be a labor of love to "get gud" at.