Game Discussion of the Week: Company of Heroes 2

Recently I've been playing this game a lot since most of my friends who are on console have prioritized PC games, and the one of the few PC games I care enough about to play is Company of Heroes. The 2nd game is still very active despite being nearly a decade old by now. The developers are still updating it and a new patch just hit this week.

CoH2 is a RTS game, but it de-emphasizes base building and instead focuses on the combat. You just build the base and it hardly matters where you put the buildings, what does matter though is every combat encounter because positioning is life and death in this game. A stronger unit can easily wipe a much stronger units if they flank them or land a grenade on their location. You constantly have to monitor your units and micro-manage them because the enemy can throw grenades or flank you any time. Each game has three phases: 1: where you can only produces infantry, mortar teams and small vehicles, 2. where you can also produce light armored vehicles, snipers and AT guns and 3: where you can produce medium and heavy tanks, big artillery guns and more. There is always fun to try to read what the opponent will rush so that you can counter-build him.

A lot of the fun lies in the different play-styles of the different factions. There are 5 factions: US, British, Soviet, Oberst Kommando West and Wehrmacht, the latter two being different divisions of Germany. Each faction play very different from each other, but you can suit them to your liking by choosing a commander as well. The commander gives you options like producing specialized units or have access to different types of air strikes or artillery bombings. This game is super fun to play with friends, but I do find the online randoms to often be way too good or just bad. have any of you guys played this game?

I remember hearing the name, but I think it was PC exclusive, so I never had a chance to rent it, or anything like that. I didn't know it had a sequel.

I have it on my Steam account, but never really played it - I think it was given away by Sega at some point, so I grabbed it and the prequel. I definitely should get into RTS games at some point, as I also have Total War: Shogun 2 here and these games look super fun.