Relic is still hard at work keeping their popular RTS Company of Heroes 2 in battle ready shape. A huge patch titled “Southern Fronts” added a number of bug fixes and balance adjustments to units as well as some free and premium content. In addition they revamped the commander point system to be based off a 16 point total instead of 7. Commander ability costs are doubled but so is the rate at which you gain them. The pace is roughly the same but allows for more design choices later down the road and some more interesting point strategies for players.
For the huge list of patch notes read on after the break.
- Updates for December 10th, 2013
- Updates
- Improved Invite UI – game invites now appear next to players’ faceplates in the Front End in addition to in the usual Steam overlay notifications. These invites allow you to instantly accept and join a game without having to open the Steam overlay.
- Improved unit responsiveness to player commands as squads will no longer wait for a transition animation to finish before carrying out a new command
- Added a “Confirm Email” field to the Email Registration when new users boot up game to help prevent people from accidently entering in an incorrect email address.
- Improved Replay Functionality – ability to display the resources of all players at once, additional stats (damage/units killed/units lost) display in player list
- Chat Improvements
- Players can now send game invites from any channel, not just LFG.
- Added new chat groups:
- Looking for Annihilation
- Theater of War
- Mods and World Builder
- Players can now Favorite official channels
- Various Bug Fixes Including:Mod and Map Making Updates
- German Opel Blitz Truck “Disable Lockdown” works again.
- German Ambush camouflage ability now applies properly to reinforcements in cover.
- The Russian Victory & Defeat Speech lines can now be heard when the locale is set to Russia.
- Faceplates are now updated if the user purchases them by entering the store from the game. No longer need to restart client to see new faceplates.
- Addressed an issue preventing the cancelling of unbuilt mines – mine construction can now be cancelled.
- -Dev mode enabled:Closed a LUA exploit to increase in-game security against potential cheat hacks and exploits.
- When a user turns on -dev mode (by adding -dev to the launch options), they get access to the in game SCAR console (Alt+Shift+`) and a number of additional Lua functions. They can use these Lua functions to:When -dev mode is turned on, players cannot automatch or earn progress, but they can play custom games against other players who have also have -dev mode turned on.
- Cheat.
- Debug their custom scenarios.
- Create art (e.g. fullscreen screenshots without the HUD (Taskbar_SetVisibility)).
- When a user turns on -dev mode (by adding -dev to the launch options), they get access to the in game SCAR console (Alt+Shift+`) and a number of additional Lua functions. They can use these Lua functions to:When -dev mode is turned on, players cannot automatch or earn progress, but they can play custom games against other players who have also have -dev mode turned on.
- World Builder Updates:
- Updated the orientation of the _mm_low.tga to be consistent with the _mm.tga and _mm_preview.tga (it is no longer flipped vertically). Any user generated maps should be updated to reflect this change.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the export feature of the World Builder from working for users who had non-ascii characters in their user directory.
- Steam Workshop IntegrationFree Content
- Allows the sharing of custom player created maps easily from within the game itself
- Steam Workshop featured in the main menu
- Currently limited to sharing maps
- Multiplayer Maps:Official Leaderboards – Select “Leaderboards” from Game Setup to go to new leaderboards site.
- Hill 331 (6-8 players)
- Don River (2-4 players)
- Mud Tech – included in new Theater of War missions and on map Hill 331
- Premium Content
- Southern Fronts Theater of War PackAI Improvements
- Spring Rasputitia – Challenge
- Occupation – Challenge
- Retreat to the Donets – AI Battle (Soviet)
- Panzer Crossing – AI Battle (Soviet)
- No Retreat, No Surrender – AI Battle (Soviet)
- Breaking Lines – AI Battle (Soviet)
- Storming the Donets – AI Battle (German)
- Heavy Rain – AI Battle (German)
- General Mud – AI Battle (German)
- Kharkov Divide – AI Battle (German)
- AI will no longer attack destroyed HQs or invisible targets.
- AI on easy and normal difficulty should clump their units together less.
- AI will no longer try to get a damage vehicle repaired by a squad inside a vehicle.
- Command Point System Overhaul
- Command Points are now earned at twice the rate as before
- Commander abilities have had their Command Point requirement doubled
- The net effect is that the timing of unlocking Commander abilities should be mostly the same, and players should not expect to see much change from before.
- Overall the command point changes are intended to give more variety in when things are available. We previously worked within a 7 point range and have increased that to a 16 point range to allow us more control over this sort of timing. The main driving force behind the change was allowing some units to come out earlier without having them be available immediately at the start of the game, specifically some of the new units. There were some other abilities that also tend to come later than we felt best, but where moving them a whole point sooner would have had to large of an effect on the game’s flow. Examples of this are the weaker tank call ins and economic abilities.
- Additionally, we broke up later game abilities a bit more to add variety in when they come out and distinguish them from each other. In general, unit Call-Ins are available sooner than global abilities and upgrades as these are more often gated by resource cost.
- Balance
- Commander Trees
- Soviet Industry
- No longer decreases the build times of Soviet buildings
- Soviet Repair Station
- Building health reduced from 600HP to 300HP
- Tiger AceGeneral Gameplay
- CP increased to 16
- Income penalty now only last 10 minutes
- Ambient Buildings
- Building Cover bonus reduced from 50% reduce damage + 50% reduce accuracy to 35% reduce damage + 35% reduce accuracy
- Moving PenaltyGermans
- Moving vehicles now receive a 2x scatter penalty in addition to the 0.5 accuracy penalty
- German Pak 40 AT Gun
- Cost reduced from 360 to 320
- German MG42 HMGSoviets
- Suppression value increased by 10%
- Soviet Sandbag
- Build time reduced from 120 seconds to 80 seconds
- Soviet Maxim
- Rotation Speed Reduced from 225 degree/sec to 180 degree/sec
- Soviet Dshk 38 Sokolov
- Damage reduced from 16 to 12
- Soviet Z-iS AT Gun
- Cost reduced from 360MP to 320 MP
