But more importantly, they were realistically affordable after just a couple of minutes in-game. There were plenty more available, for a start.

While I wouldn’t pretend to be on top of the CoH2 meta, my game plan has always tended towards an initial push to seize resources with infantry, who will then be tasked with hanging on for dear life while I hoard enough resources to get out the Big Lads.īy contrast, in my CoH3 games so far, I’ve found myself mixing way more light vehicles into my force composition from a much earlier stage of play. There are lots more armoured cars and halftracks on the table now, as well as real featherweight assets like jeeps and motorbikes. Commensurate with the slower acceleration of a typical match, a big slice of the new stuff comprises light vehicles, which bridge the gap nicely between infantry-only skirmishes, and monstrous land-battleship slugfests. Deneault told met he game will feature around three times the number of vehicles present in CoH2, which was already a decent roster at 35-odd. Nevertheless, there are still loads and loads of tanksin Company Of Heroes 3. What Relic actually meant by this was that the rhythm of a typical game has been tweaked so the early, infantry-heavy phase of the game simply lasts a bit longer before the heavy metal arms race begins. Having heard that CoH2 was going to play more like the original Company Of Heroes than its direct predecessor, with a heavier focus on infantry, I had assumed it would come with a smaller dose of Vitamin T. When Company Of Heroes 3 lands next year, we’ve been promised an even chuggier time, so I had a chat with the game’s lead campaign director Andrew Deneault and lead mission designer Sacha Narine to find out more about what to expect. It makes Panzer Vs every bit the icons of fear they should be, while T-34s career about the place like the reckless, clattering have-a-go heroes they were.

And while there are many games which go well deep into simulating tanks, they’re largely not RTS games.Īmong the extant tank-havers of the RTS genre, it’s probably Company Of Heroes 2 which lends the big metal lads the most personality. I want tanks which feel like the messy, complex, cantankerous machines they are. A video game tank in 2021 might have a damage-reducing armour value, but it’s still essentially a box that snarls “yessir” when you click on it, and which functions perfectly until its hit points run out, whereupon it bursts. I must have commanded millions over the last three decades of real time strategy, but in all that time they’ve not really changed much. Ever since the pixellated rectangles of Dune 2 trundled into my world back in the early 90s, I’ve had a soft spot for tanks.

Company of heroes tank