To help mark the 70th Anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, Relic Entertainment’s Quinn Duffy sat down with Military Consultant and Historian Dr. Peter Caddick-Adams to discuss this pivotal moment in World War II history.

Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault is Relic Entertainment’s latest standalone single player expansion in the franchise, and is based upon Battle of the Bulge events.

Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault is available now on Steam. Learn more about the game at www.companyofheroes.com

The Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault standalone campaign places you in the heart of the Battle of the Bulge, arguably the greatest American battle of World War II. Watch the action-packed launch trailer and witness the courageous US forces respond to a surprise attack under heavy fire.

Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault was released on November 17th, 2014 for PC. Grab your copy on Steam

For your PC Master Race purchasing pleasure, click to add the game to your glorious Steam shopping cart. 

For the very first time in the Company of Heroes franchise, players will be able to choose between three different Companies, all with their own unique abilities, to forge their path to glory. Customers who pre-order will gain access to a fourth company, “Fox” Company, led by Captain Monte Durante.

This video details some of the many exciting new options that Fox Company will bring to the game including, their devastating M83 Cluster Bombs, Pinpoint Accurate Artillery and their main weapon, the Fox Company Elite Infantry who will do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Pre-order Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault today to receive Fox Company free of charge and then look forward to the game’s release on November 18, 2014.

Company of Heroes: 2 Ardennes Assault is scheduled for release on November 18th, 2014 for PC. Pre-order your copy on Amazon.com, and Steam

For your PC Master Race purchasing pleasure, click to add the game to your glorious Steam shopping cart. 

All seems great in the CoH world tonight, unless of course your a poor bastard like myself (or this guy) who waited until the last day to pre-order the game. In this specific case, a surprise early release actually screws potential last minute buyers out of the pre-order bonuses. While it’s somewhat fair to blame the consumer for waiting until mere hours before the release to pre-order the game, it sure would have been nice of Relic to offer more than the 2 hours notice given on Twitter and the official CoH blog

Amazon still has Company of Heroes 2 – The Western Front Armies available for pre-order, though it’s unclear if you’ll receive the bonuses even then. If you don’t care about playing the game until tomorrow and really wanted those bonus skins, Amazon might be your best chance at this point.

This isn’t the first time Relic has had to deal with something like this in recent years; the original Company of Heroes went through a conversion to Steam in 2013. Philippe Boulle, Design Lead for the Dawn of War franchise, announced on Steam just moments ago upcoming patches to convert both Dawn of War games to Steamworks. Both titles will be updated to use the same system that was implemented for Company of Heroes 2.

On May 22nd, the original Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and its expansions underwent a major update in order to preserve multiplayer gameplay for all these titles.

Since their launch, Dawn of War and its expansions (Winter Assault, Dark Crusade and Soulstorm) have relied on the GameSpy service for multiplayer matchmaking. Since they are about to shut down their services for good it would otherwise leave these games without any way to play multiplayer. That is not an outcome anyone at Relic would want to see.

Dawn of War II and its first expansion (Chaos Rising) also rely on other external servers so we also intend to take this opportunity to migrate them over to Steam in order for a consistent multiplayer experience across the entire portfolio. This migration is in progress and we’ll have more details soon.

So, all titles in the franchise are being updated to use the same matchmaking and backend developed for Company of Heroes 2. This will not only mean multiplayer can continue on these titles, but the matchmaking experience will be improved. Matchmaking/login and so on will thus all be through Steam.

In the short term, there are likely to be some technical issues with the new setup. Recreating the multiplayer infrastructure for seven titles is no small feat, and there will be bugs. Ultimately, we felt that it would be better to get the update out in a slightly imperfect state in time to prevent an outright interruption in multiplayer play. So, bugs.

We are committed to tackling these bugs and getting all titles to be fully Steam enabled.

This update – and continued further support for DoW and DoW2 – is a big step for us at Relic. It’s a concrete signal of support for the Dawn of War franchise from us and from SEGA as a whole. Ever since SEGA acquired Relic we’ve been working on continued support for the Dawn of War back catalogue. It’s great for some of this to see the light of day at last.

I came to Relic in 2005 to work on the product that became Dark Crusade and went on to run narrative and campaign on both Dawn of War II and Chaos Rising. To be working on these titles again is a joy, and on behalf of all of us, I’d like to thank the fans who have continued to keep DoW in their hearts. You guys rock.

For the Emperor!

Philippe Boulle
Design Lead, Dawn of War Franchise

Today’s patch is quite lengthy and includes a huge amount of changes to both sides, though the Soviet side does seem to benefit from more of the changes than the Germans. Relic’s aim is to better differentiate the mid to late game units and offer Soviets better opportunities to defend in the late game phase.

The changes are so lengthy that it’s probably best to check out the official changelog on the Relic forums.

Click the headline to check out the trailer for the Company of Heroes 2: Elbe Day Update.

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)).
• 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

Turning Point – free update

• World Builder: This highly requested community feature enables players to design their own epic multiplayer maps for Company of Heroes 2
• New Multiplayer Maps: Two free multiplayer maps ‘Rails and Metal’ and ‘Lazur Factory’ added to the multiplayer rotation for all players to enjoy
• Four New Multiplayer Commanders: Four new Commanders, two per faction, are introduced into the game’s multiplayer and skirmish modes as part of ‘Turning Point’. One Commander from each faction was created by members of the Company of Heroes 2 community and will be available via registration at www.companyofheroes.com

Theatre of War – Victory at Stalingrad:

• Co-Op Scenario: Kalach Pincer – 70 kilometers west of Stalingrad, Soviet forces must move rapidly to secure key locations and resources about the town of Kalach before mounting the final attack on the vital bridge across the River Don
• Solo Challenge: Tatsinskaya Raid – The Red Army’s 24th Tank Corps is headed deep into enemy territory to take the German airfield at Tatsinskaya and destroy the aircraft that keeps trapped German forces supplied in Stalingrad
• Solo Challenge: Bridge Defense – Forced to wait for air units to be ready, the Red Army has had to delay Operation Uranus at the last minute. Irregular and Partisan forces have already moved to secure a key bridge across the Don River and must now hold out against determined German attacks
• AI Battle: Winter Storm – The Wehrmacht has launched Operation Winter Storm in an attempt to relieve their Sixth Army in Stalingrad. Soviet forces must block this attack to prevent the fascists from escaping the city
• AI Battle: Stalingrad Resistance – The Soviets defend the blown out Stalingrad inch by inch, all the while looking to the skies as the German Luftwaffe drops bombs on any target they can find
• AI Battle: Stalingrad Encirclement – Months of bloody close-quarter fighting have led to a decisive turning point for control of Stalingrad. Most of the German 6th Army has been left cut off and surrounded in the city. The Red Army must repulse a breakout attempt by the exhausted German forces

Miscellaneous premium DLC

• Three new Soviet skins: Bi-Tone Red Guards, Two-Tone Spring, Makeshift Sand
• Two New German Commanders:
  – Elite Troops Doctrine: Utilize Germany’s most elite companies, using stronger base troops with added abilities
  – Luftwaffe Supply Doctrine: Using the power of the Luftwaffe, keeping your troops on the front lines as long as possible, even if cut off!
• Two New Soviet Commanders:
  – Soviet Industry Tactics: Using the built up soviet industry, making use of more and stronger vehicle units at the cost of infantry numbers
  – Partisan Tactics: Making use of the Soviet Partisan network to harass enemies from behind the lines while destroying them with the soviet main army