14 DAY TRIAL // I have been back playing Company of Heroes 2 every day since the new The Western Front Armies standalone expansion was launched and I am getting a little frustrated with the current state of the balance and might soon exhaust my patience reserves with the title.
I tend to play as the Axis most of the time and both Russian and United States players, especially those who have some experience with their chosen factions, are using great amounts of artillery in order to pound my infantry into submissions and deny control over resources nodes.
I tend to do well in the early game, using infantry to move around quickly, establish some chokepoints and to try to secure a resource lead, while upgrading in terms of tech.
This is rather easy to do with both the regular German forces and the OKW and I often manage to secure a 100 point lead over my enemy in the race towards victory.
But often, players who use the indirect fire weaponry that the Allies get access to protect them with one or two machinegun-equipped infantry teams, with the entire group placed in a central map location, which makes it harder to cap any point and to keep that lead.
At the same time, I take infantry losses that I tend to quickly replace, which leaves me with a manpower deficit that stops me from bringing in armor as fast as I would like.
The match often ends when I become unable to keep up in the battle for resources and fail to take out enemy squads that have managed to acquire solid experience and are now battle hardened veterans.
In theory, I know that this kind of tactic can be stopped by fighting over the central position when mortars and artillery are often concentrated and by using the flanks better, but I fail to implement the strategy that would give me a better shot at victory.
I am still having fun trying and there are plenty of other matches that take very different turns, but it seems that this is the way to win currently in Company of Heroes 2 – The Western Front Armies.
The addition of the United States and the OKW forces does make the entire experience more varied than before, but if most battles tend to involve the same strategies, I doubt that the community will be happy.
Relic has a long history of patching its titles in order to keep them fresh and probably the next big update will involve something about the efficiency of artillery use.