#Company of heroes 2 review windows

It’s not so much trying to simulate every single unit in the game acting at once, instead it’s trying to simulate you and your opponent actively selecting and moving units, one click at a time. Your next turn you can come back and move that same group of infantry two more hexes and maybe an MG team nearby into a building. So you could advance one of your infantry squads one hex, and then move your scout car two spaces. You can spend those three cubes each turn on any combination of units. But it does a really smart thing in that you don’t alternate activating single units. I know, I know, alternating activations isn’t a new idea. You have to focus your attention in micro-bursts, ones small enough (three actions) that the alternating tempo produces a facsimile of simultaneous action. Now, you can’t simultaneously tell all of your units to advance because you simply don’t have the capabilities to click them all with your mouse. By breaking a turn down into action point clusters, you’re taking a turn issuing orders to units. What’s interesting here is how it fundamentally frames the action around your implied focus. We do this to and fro, alternating turns, until we’ve spent nine total cubes. Players do alternate in turns as we’re used to on the tabletop, but here you spend three action cubes before tossing the ball back to your opponent.

This is called actions per second (APS) and it’s a big measuring stick among the most skilled players in the world.Ĭompany of Heroes in its cardboard version captures the micro aspects surprisingly well. This skill is so integral to the genre that your efficiency is given a value. It’s frantically telling your mortar team to pack up the weapon and fall back while you select your Sherman tank to advance and give it covering fire. It’s minute tactical decisions such as selecting your conscript squad and moving them behind cover to escape the onslaught of an MG42. Micro on the other hand is all the mouse clicking. It’s the contemplative and thoughtful portion of these games. You know – building units, researching upgrades, executing large scale maneuvers. It’s the overarching strategic layer of play. Macro is the side of this genre that best translates to board games. To explain this I need to break down the macro/micro dichotomy of RTS video games. While this isn’t a real-time thing, it is an experience that captures some of that feel. This board game does not shy away from its limitations. “ It’s a Mark VI… And we’ve got it by the ass!“ It’s just a thing and it feels fantastic if you’re the one giving instead of taking. One of the defining elements of the property is your opponent’s Tiger tank rolling into sight and causing a cascade of loose bowels among your infantrymen. Can you have a Company of Heroes board game without fog of war? It turns out, you can.Ī great deal of tension is lost due to this. This is that mechanism where you can’t see what your opponent is doing unless you position scouting units nearby and employee tactical voyeurism. So just ditch the real-time variant and play the game as it was intended to be played.Īnother divergence is with fog of war.

#Company of heroes 2 review windows

Since firing occurs in a separate phase, it removes any tension and loses the significance of timing windows in regards to line of sight. Company of Heroes feels as if it includes a real-time mode in homage to that previous game, but it fails to elicit the same response because the timed aspect of play is confined to only the movement portion of play. Publisher Bad Crow Games previously released this underrated giant robot game called Mech Command RTS which was full-blown real-time mayhem, and it was surprisingly engaging. Well, actually it has an optional real-time mode of play with sand-timers and increased heart-rate, but it’s not a great fit. This is a board game so it’s not real-time. In many ways they’re one in the same.īut first lets talk about how they are different.

That’s sort of backwards, I know, but I just now finished a very intense match and I feel spent. I didn’t get into Company of Heroes 2 – the video game this board game is translating – until a couple of months ago. “ All the burning bridges that have fallen after meĪll the lonely feelings and the burning memories“