So having had time to play it, I can safely say it’s a far inferior game to the original company of heroes. Pretty much everything about it that they changed was for the worse.
Infantry and support units are simultaneously too tough and too weak. They reduced the general damage that small arms do across the board, so infantry combat is slower with less damage. That makes a well-timed flanking maneuver less devastating. It means that if you out-micro the enemy and keep your infantry squad up an MG gunner’s ass, following him around as he looks for cover to deploy, you barely do any damage to him. It takes roughly 2 hours for the natural counter of AT guns - infantry squads at close range - to actually kill the stupid guns. It makes movement and micro feel less important, and fights just drone on.
And yet simultaneously, this game features far more lucky/devastating hits that you’d rarely see in the first game. Mortars are less accurate but more powerful than in the first game, which basically just means they’re more random. You’ll have a mortar in the perfect spot to target an enemy unit and miss it 5 times in a row. Or you’ll get a lucky shot and wipe out an entire squad in one hit. It feels way too random. I’ve lost many games where a lucky mortar shell wiped out a couple of vet squads and that’s all it took to turn the tide of battle. I outplayed the guy all game, but a lucky shot or two cripples me.
Flamethrowers don’t really serve a distinct purpose. In the first game, they were basically reverse cover. Hiding in a bunker or in a building would give your troops good protection against small arms, but they’d be utterly wrecked by flamethrowers. It made an interesting early dynamic where you’d distract units in buildings with your regular units and sneak a flamethrower up to him. Now it feels like flamethrowers have no real distinct roles, they’re just engineers that do more damage. They don’t feel especially effective against units in cover - and quite frankly they’re very random too. Sometimes it seems like my flamethrowers can fire at a unit 5 times and do no damage, where other times it just completely wrecks a unit in one shot.
One of the main viable paths to the Russians early on is just to cheese the fuck out of the game using halftracks that you can fight from, including snipers. It’s among the cheesiest tactics I’ve ever seen in an RTS game. It’s almost impossible to counter if done properly - you just have to hold on until the next phase of the game - and it feels cheesy as hell to use.
The resource sector system is really dumbed down, with only 3 types of sectors. Regular, fuel, or munitions, but all have the same fixed resource value. This limits map designers and makes maps dumber - basically every 1v1 or 2v2 map is going to have 1 fuel and 1 munitions on each side. The fuel cache/munitions cache system is dumber than the previous OP system for related reasons and is just a hassle. You can’t design super important sectors by awarding them a higher value, or create asymmetric map designs by putting a lot of lower value sectors on one side and a few higher value sectors on the other. They’re re-adding maps from the original game and it just highlights how dumb the new system is, since the old maps are dumber under it.
The commander system is stupid. I mean, aside from the idea of paid DLC commanders. There are no choices to be made, no trees, you don’t specialize one way or the other, make decisions about when the implement command points - they just come automatically. The German commanders are poorly designed - all of them basically feel crappy and there’s not a single one I like, and none change the German playstyle all that much. On the other hand, the Russian commanders are fun and actually make your style of game feel varied by using different ones. But vastly inferior to COH1 commanders.
The sector capturing mechanic where you can remain anywhere in a sector during capture is worse. In the previous game you’d have to make a tactical decision between choosing to make a squad capture a sector and basically not fight and be vulnerable, but now you don’t have to make that decision, you just sit around in the sector fighting as you normally would.
Veterancy boosts are too big and too sudden. The first rank sucks for most units, useless for most - but then with rank 2 and 3 they suddenly skyrocket in power. Especially the defensive bonus with the units already being too strong and damage too slow, it just comes on too suddenly.
They made grenade placement require more micro by always forcing you to pick an exact spot and not just a unit to throw it at, which is a nice improvement, but the responsiveness of the units under your command is less consistent, sometimes it feels like they’re too slow to respond, their animation takes them too long to move, so a grenade can end up wiping out your whole squad even though you reacted skillfully and instantly to it just due to an inconsistent animation.
That’s all I can think of off the top of my head. The new sight/spotting system is pretty cool, the winter mechanic is alright, adds variety to the game. I can’t think of anything this game does significantly better than the first game. At times the combat seems more visceral, until you see how slowly units are killing each other 5 feet away.
Oh, and of course that ignores the complete idiocy of unlockable traits and other nonsense of course.
It’s hard to overstate how much more random this game can feel in competitive play. In COH, maybe 1/10 or 1/12 of my losses I felt like I was outplayed and only lost due to flukes. In COH2 it’s more like 1/3rd.
Now I’m being overly harsh because COH was one of the best games of all time, and in my opinion the best RTS of all time. So it had a lot to live up to, and it doesn’t. It’s still a pretty good game anyway, and probably worth it on discount.