Company of Heroes

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Company of Heroes is a game series produced by Lelic Entertainment, that, until the sequel came out, was known for exciting tactical multiplayer combat that separated itself from other micro-heavy APM clickfests. It also atleast TRIED to portray all factions in a slightly heroic way, and how brave soldiers suffered in the war. Both games either way always had ridiculous balancing problems, dueto incompetent developers that didn't give a rats ass about the overcrowded balancing forums. Nowadays this game only keeps itself relevant by releasing more paywall DLC to a disgruntled fanbase full of raging axis fanboys and braindamaged allies sympathizers.

Company of Heroes

The penetration power of german steel

CoH is an RTS that imitates WW2 by putting units with ridiculous uniforms, which sometimes look more like snowmen or neon-green latex onto the field, where they shoot barely-lethal yellow laser beams at each other until one decides to fall over and die. They also tend to shout and scream a lot and have stupid one-liners ready for every situation. Gamewise it's a continuation of the "capture zones and reinforce units" - system from the previous game Dawn of War, which in turn seemlingy incorporated ideas from the old Bitmap Brothers game "Z". You basically send units to their near death and then push the retreat button to add new cannonfodder at the base. You keep doing this until either you or the enemy has lost so many units and territory that either side will be pushed off the map. By putting your stupid infantry behind cover, you can prolong their short lifespan by a few minutes. Simple really.

Unfortunately, the entire game is built upon RANDOMNESS. Sometimes a unit hits, sometimes it doesn't. A lot of times your tanks don't hit, your units gets stuck, your infantry runs around like headless chicken, your expensive artillery shell can't hit the broadside of a barn and so on. At certain times, entire squads are wiped out by a single artillery shell and make the enemy player ragequit. The longer a battle lasts, the more frustrating these events become. It is no wonder that CoH players can be some of the most infuriated gamers of all time. The levels of rage this game causes are phenomenal.

Multiplayer was once the main selling point of the game. It is split into two modes, "Victory Points" and "Annihilation". However, since the playerbase is too retarded to play VP mode, everyone only plays "Annihilation", which is literally just team deathmatch. The game used to run on Relic Servers, but the provider shut them down because Ubisoft bought them up, so Relic had to force players to enter their keys on Steam to keep playing on Steam servers. The new client that was needed ruined the entire online experience with constant crashes and connection drops. Nobody plays CoH multiplayer anymore thanks to this.

Axis always ruled supreme over Allies dueto more unit versatility and a broken veterancy system.

The game had two expansion packs, "Opposing Fronts" and "Tales of Valor", one bringing two new factions while the other gave you shitty campaigns and worthless replacement units. Standalone though, which made it possible to unlock all multiplayer content at once.

Factions, units and all the other garbage

The main difference to CoH 2 is that each faction is capable of choosing from three different doctrines that allowed for new strategies. It also wasn't behind a shitty paywall, so that's a plus.

This was probably written by a German

Units & doctrines

All you need to know.

• US Army - These guys rely on spamming riflemen and piss-weak tanks in the hopes of making uncle Sam proud. As soon as anything bigger than a Panzer IV arrives, they run away.

Doctrines	Infantry	Vehicles	Tanks	Misc

• Infantry Company - The absolutely most generic doctrine available. Makes it possible for riflemen to be spammed and build annoying tank traps, while you call in the wannabe tough guy Rangers with OP Tommie guns and near useless bazookas. You can also spam off-map artillery that never hits anything, or call in even more spam with off-map reinforcements, which are the biggest letdown in RTS history. They shove in machinguns and armored cars into a late game ability, only to have them get overrun by Panthers and AT guns. There's also a howitzer, but nobody ever builds that piece of shit.

• Airborne Company - When you're so lazy that you can't even build an AT gun anymore, that you call it in with an air drop. Used to be the most insanely OP doctrine thanks to P47 strafing runs that would wipe out half of the German Army in one go. Today it only tickles and stuns. The bombing run is expensive and useless and the recon plane is a waste of munitions. There's also a call in drop that gives the player free ammo, fuel, mortar and a machinegun. This usually litters the entire base with unused guns, as nobody in their right mind would pick up a murrican mortar. Oh yeah, there are also Airborne rangers, but they're garbage.

• Tank Company - The only reason anyone picks this one is for the Calliope rocket launchers. Nobody that wants to win the game ever chooses the Pershing path first. For hilarity's sake you can spam jeeps.

• Engineer Squad - Big buff dudebros that fight like little girls. They can set explosive charges on buildings and bridges, but nobody ever uses that, because it would take away munitions from the off-map artillery spam. Eventhough they are THREE guys they almost never win against TWO pioneers.

• Riflemen Squad - Six rednecks that suck ass at long range fights, take forever to get any veterancy and are constantly mowed down by MG42s. They are spammed left and right because otherwise every single axis unit outclasses them until they get the BAR upgrade, where when they die like before, they give free bars to the Wehrmacht. Also Conrad can't tie his boots.

• Ranger Squad - The only infantry that has bazookas. Most US players seem to enjoy spamming this super expensive infantry unit and putting it into a huge blob, then letting them all die so the regular rifleman can pick up the bazookas. They suck shit against tanks and without the Thompson gun upgrade they're useless against infantry. They only pose a danger when they've reached vet 3, when they finally become unstopable Terminators. But that won't ever happen in your lifetime.

• Airborne Squad -

• HMG Team - A MG that can't suppress but can kill light vehicles if you got extra ammo. Reduces your capping power to near nothing because you can't build riflemen without wasting more fuel for barracks now.

• Mortar Team - A 60mm mortar that has no range, is easily killed and is never used by anyone except when there are MGs and bunkers all over the place.

• Sniper - Ultra-fragile tryhard sharpshooter with a mobile cloaking device. Best used when spammed, because he gets vet easily. The only allied infantry unit that makes enemies ragequit.

• Jeep - Does no damage. Used for hunting Kettenkrads and annoying pios during breakfast. Can cap points with the Armor Company, but nobody uses that.

• M3 Halftrack - Only used for reinforcing riflemen blobs, has a useless 50cal and is extremely fragile. Can be upgraded to a quad-cannon as long range support, which then gets one-shot by an invisible Pak38.

• M8 Greyhound - Plants mini-nukes that instant-kill almost everything, including the car itself when a mortar round lands next to it while it's planting. Can also shoot stuff, but is rather bad at doing so.

• T17 Armored Car - The retarded step-brother of the Greyhound.

• M10 Tank Destroyer - A glass cannon that instead of using machineguns to kill infantry, has a secret gravity well generator that pulls up people next to it and crushes them instantly.

• M18 Hellcat - Useless tank destroyer that does NO damage, can cloak but gets spotted all the time anyway. Comes with an MG, but has no gravity well generator installed, so it can't do ANYTHING right.

• M4 Sherman - Takes a bunch of hits, then uses the smoke canisters to run away like a bitch. Has several upgrades like a mineflail that slices nazis into gibs or smoke canisters, which both nobody uses. Upgrading to the long gun makes it a infantry sniper. This tank is all about murdering infantry, which brings us to...

• M4 Crocodile Sherman - ... this thing. 110 fuel for a weak-ass flamethrower that can't kill anything. Up to this day nobody knows what this thing is even useful for.

• M26 Pershing - A weak-ass Tiger knock-off with bigger splash damage.

• Sherman Calliope - "Just fuck my shit up" - THE unit. Wipes out entire armies effortlessly. Used to be able to also use the main gun, but was nerfed so murricans don't call in Shermans with rocket launchers that cost no fuel.

• Machine Gun Emplacement - Easy to kill MG nest with an annoyingly wide range.

• Medic Station - Creates zombies from the wounded.

• M2 105mm Howitzer - Expensive, easy to blow up, never hits anything, but shoots across the entire map.

• 57mm AT Gun - Does more damage than the Pak 38 counterpart, but has no cloaking device installed, so it gets murdered by just about anything.

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• Commonwealth - The cancer of CoH. The absolute worst failure in game mechanics of all time. And yet these assholes received great orchestreal music.

Doctrines	Infantry	Vehicles	Tanks	Misc

• Royal Canadian Artillery - Artillery spam all day erryday.

• Royal Commandos - Commando spam 24/7.

• Royal Engineers Support - Churchills. That's about it.

• Infantry Section - A bunch of bullet sponges that move like snails while in enemy territory. You can give them a recon upgrade that gives them a sniper kit that costs money per shot and makes the movement like NORMAL infantry. You can give these wankers rifle grenades, but they won't hit anything with them at all, so the typical upgrade is of course the machinegun. Overall these unkillable fucks don't scale very well into the late game at all. They always need a babysitting Lieutenant with them at all times, otherwise they can't move or get veterancy and typically get mowed down.

• Sappers - Why the ONLY unit that can repair and is not a overpowered bullet sponge is at tier 2 will always be a mystery.

• Commandos - Tough little bastards that randomly plant explosives everywhere and are pretty gud at killing stuff and running away like little bitches with smoke grenades. They used to be able to crash land their glider into the enemy base and blow up the enemy HQ with charges, but this was patched out and reduced lulz massively.

• PIAT Commandos - Garbage, nobody builds them.

• HMG Commandos - The only mobile machine gun unit of the tea-drinking island monkeys. Nobody builds them either way.

• Mortar Commandos - You got mortar emplacements, heavy artillery, why the FUCK would you EVER build THESE GUYS?!

• Captain - Gives a useless defense bonus and is always the first to die in combat.

• Lieutenant - Gives veterancy and speed to nearby units. Easy as fuck to kill and another reason why Brits always play Sim City.

• Bren Carrier - Extremely annoying Pioneer-murdering combat transport that is always used for abusive tactics and not for straight combat.

• Stuart Light Tank - A shotgun that looks like a tank. Drives next to a blob of nazis and kills them all with a single shot ability. Why the commonly American-built and used Stuart is with the British forces is something that has never been explained.

• Tetrarch Tank - A pathetic call-in tank that you can upgrade with a barely-less pathetic gun.

• Kangaroo Carrier - A once unkillable broken piece of shit replacement unit transport that has a huge hole in the top where infantry fires out. Everyone just built 2 or 3 carriers, put all their sappers and infantry into them, and ran past a bunch of enemy tanks and defenses. They destroyed EVERYTHING, nothing was safe from them. They were also literally unkillable. It took more than a YEAR for Lelic to fix this game-breaking piece of shit. After it was nerfed, nobody ever played this unit again and Cromwell tanks became a common sight again.

• Cromwell Tank - A rather generic tank that doesn't really do anything remarkable and is slightly stronger than a Sherman, but sucks pretty bad against infantry.

• Sherman Firefly - The ultimate glass cannon. Fucks up every single German tank with its ridiculous range and damage on the field, but can't do ANYTHING against infantry.

• Cromwell Command Tank - The only time anyone ever builds this thing is when said person doesn't have the expansion installed or someone really wants him to build this heap of junk in a teamgame. Works like a Lieutenant for tanks, except the tank has NO CANNON.

• Churchill Tank - Soaks up damage, but really isn't much of a threat otherwise.

• Churchill AVRE - The blob destroyer of the Brits, when said player refuses to build artillery.

• Churchill Crocodile - A Churchill with a flamethrower. Way too expensive.

• Vickers Machine Gun Emplacement - Fucking pain in the ass MG nest that takes lots and lots of Panzerschreck- or mortar fire and can deny an entire point for several minutes. Used to be unkillable, but thank god it was fixed.

• 3" Mortar Emplacement - British players build a Sim City next to it, and then it continues to fuck up your infantry for the rest of the game until you finally destroy it with a suicide rush.

• Bofors 40mm Cannon - Makes all armored cars and non-AT infantry useless.

• 17 Pounder AT Gun - Fucks up tanks with no remorse.

• 25 Pounder Gun Howitzer - Pray to god that the enemy Brit is not using these together with the Artillery doctrine.

• Casualty Clearing Station - Tea-sipper Zombie creator. Is never in range to pick up any dead bodies because they need that thing next to their mobile HQ at all times.

• Detector for Radio Triangulation - Oh yeah let's just put a triangle across the map so you can see stuff, it's not like the Krauts aren't basically everywhere trying to find ways to deny access to their territory. Seriously, what the fuck were they thinking?

• Priest Self-Propelled Artillery - 25 Pounder not enough of a pain in the ass? Here's the American artillery piece that kills even more stuff.

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• Wehrmacht -

Doctrines	Infantry	Vehicles	Tanks	Misc

• Defensive Doctrine -

• Blitzkrieg Doctrine -

• Terror Doctrine -

• Volksgrenadier Squad -

• Grenadier Squad -

• Stormtrooper Squad -

• Knight's Cross Holders -

• Pioneer -

• MG42 Heavy Machine Gun Team -

• Gr.34 81mm Mortar Team -

• Sniper -

• Officer -

• Motorcycle -

• SdKfz 234 Armored Car -

• SdKfz 251 Half-track -

• Geschutzwagen -

• StuG IV -

• StuH 42 -

• Panzer IV -

• Ostwind -

• Panther -

• Tiger -

• King Tiger -

• Nebelwerfer -

• Pak 38 50mm Anti-tank Gun -

• 88mm Flak 36 -

• Goliath -

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• Panzer Elite -

Doctrines	Infantry	Vehicles	Tanks	Misc

• Scorched Earth Tactics -

• Luftwaffe Tactics -

• Tank Destroyer Tactics -

• Panzer Grenadiers -

• Assault Grenadiers -

• Tank Busters -

• Fallschirmjäger Squad -

• Luftwaffe Ground Forces -

• Kettenkrad -

• Scout Car -

• Infantry Halftrack -

• Munitions Halftrack -

• Funkwagen Vampire Halftrack -

• Mortar Halftrack -

• Light Armored Car -

• Light AT Halftrack -

• Marder III Tank Hunter -

• Hotchkiss Light Tank -

• Panzer IV Infantry Support Tank -

• Panther -

• Wirbelwind Flakpanzer -

• Hetzer -

• Jagdpanther -

• Goliath Tracked Mine - Got some spare ammo and you really wanna make your enemy ragequit like a boss? Well too bad, you have to build a Funkwagen first.

• Bergetiger Repair and Recovery Vehicle -

• Flakvierling 38 20mm AA -

• 88mm Flak 36 AT/AA -

• Hummel Self Propelled Artillery -

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The campaigns

The Panzer Elite at its best

• Battle of Normandy - You replay "Saving Private Ryan" and blow up secret V2 bases n' shit.

• Liberation of Caen - You sip tea all day and slowly grind through tedious long missions.

• Operation Market Garden - You play a bunch of stormfront brothers that wtfpwn the Brits in holland, no weed though. Also your bro dies.

• The mini-campaigns - They all fucking sucked. LOL direct aim for units, what a fucking selling point for expansion. It was never seen again in the sequel. What a great feature.

Company of Heroes 2

CoH 2 shows how Russian commanders encouraged anal-probing

Following the purchase of Lelic and the rights to both the Dawn of War and CoH series, the sequel was released way too early in a bug-ridden state. The game itself was a unplayable, unoptimized mess and it took over one year of bugfixing to make the game actually somewhat enjoyable again. The only thing that is truly good about the game, is the graphics, because everyone knows that the road to success in any RTS game is graphics, so they fucked up the rest of the game, and had good graphics, enjoy the graphics.

Eventhough the game was released five years after the original and runs on almost the same engine, it barely looks better and it runs four times worse. What's playable now is almost a different game than what it was at the original release and the balancing and flow is much worse than in the previous game. Also, the entire product is segmented into standalone DLC, you literally have to buy EVERYTHING.

Multiplayer is heavily biased towards whatever new faction was recently added (in this case, the British) and broken units run rampant for weeks, even months. It nows runs entirely over Steam, so enjoy the server crashes. Compared to the original, there is also a heavy focus on artillery spam and fucking up each other with mortar strikes. The addition of "true sight" made the randomness of the unit behaviour even more frustrating, as sometimes a tiny fucking bush can hinder your tank from doing a killing shot. There was also a so-called "ColdTech" system implemented, which made your units freeze to death in a snowstorm, unless you built fires for 100 manpower each. It slowed the game down for anyone who played infantry-heavy. Meanwhile, a vehicle spammer could just plow through the snow and fuck up your units as they got stuck in snow while retreating. Lelic finally removed this garbage feature from Multiplayer in the latest patches.

The campaigns

• United States Forces (DLC) - You get to choose 4 commanders, one of which is behind a PAYWALL (A DLC IN A DLC, WE ARE NOT MAKING THIS UP!), which you can't even use in Multiplayer. You're supposed to pick three of these jackasses and win the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes. This campaign consists out of boring-ass grinding and sneak-missions that have no real cutscenes and end with hypocritical or whiny monologues of each commander. All you have to do throughout the campaign is to not lose every single unit like a retarded noob and you're fine. If you don't do just that you will run out of ressources and get a permaloss and you're forced to start over completely. At the end you're rewarded with worthless items and skins, half of which have been patched into a non-functional state.

• Soviet Union - CoH 2's Soviet campaign is all about mindlessly sending your soldiers to get raped by machine guns. There is literally no penalty for this, because you cannot take experienced units into the next mission anyway and all the new recruits that you can call in are FREE. Sure, there is a commissar waiting for your retreating units to shoot them in the face, but by just letting your guys walk in circles and reinforce at the base, you basically completely nullify the negative consequences. You basically keep spamming your infantry until you're able to get tanks, at which point all you have to do is press A and left-click and occasionaly activate an ability. You will be sending them to be raped by AT guns, this is all totally true and even works in HARD difficulty, because after all Russia didn't give a fuck about its people, however some people don't like the truth...

The controversy & Russian butthurt

Some Youtuber called Bad Comedian, butthurt of the fact that the Russian Army sucks and did horrible warcrimes, grabbed his personal army and downvoted the game on Metacritic, which had its rating move from 8.9/10 to 1/10, truly shows the might of Soviet Russia...

Why Russians hate COH

The developers

The logo of Lelic

Lelic Entertainment is a powerhouse of incompetence. What once used to be a company made out of the best artists, programmers and designers that could rival the old (now deceased) Blizzard is now filled with millenia faggots that heavily rely on retarded and incompetent community managers, that never communicate with the community at all, but instead rub the balls of the very few progamers that exist for their games. It is known that after Company of Heroes was released, probably half of the original dev team left, which made it almost impossible for the leftovers to fix bugs, as CoH 1 was supposdely a extremely complex programming nightmare. After every expansion pack, more and more of the original team fled from Lelic, until there was almost nobody left. This left us with todays developers.

Their design choices have become very questionable and they screwed up one of their most promising attempts at a free to play game. After THQ killed itself and SEGA bought them up, they now shamelessly fill their FULL PRICE GAMES games with heavily overpriced DLC, hard-to-get unlockables. Thus their games have become an unfixable, unbalanceable mess.

Things you get to do ingame

• Burn your own people
• BUY ALL THE DLC!
• Wonder how the game lags even on modern gaming PCs.
• Play against an AI that doesn't know how to remove barbed wire.
• Watch as your squad that took you ages to gain elite veterancy gets accidentally wiped by your own mortar round.
• Become a Nazi aka Wehraboo and play Axis only for the rest of your life.
• Ragequit and almost succumb to a heart attack as you pathetically lose to the broken flavour of the month unit.
• Smash your keyboard into pieces.
• Insult the developers to get a permaban on the Steam Forums.
• Burn the game.

Gallery

The Gallery of a broken game About missing Pics

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  Rape is imminent
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See Also

• StarCraft - The go-to alternative if you're azn.
• Supreme Commander - The Dwarf Fortress of real time strategy games.
• Nazi - The playerbase of CoH.
• Communism - The thing this game hilariously tries to deconstruct.
• Russia - Guess who's butthurt the most?

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