Company of Heroes playing tips

[Tricky]

I thought I'd put together a quick tips page for the fantastic game that is Real Video Strip Poker - er, I mean Company of Heroes. There's bound to be a gazillion things I've missed so feel free to add them below.

Game Setup:

A quick guide to AI opponent strength versus the level of challenge of an online game is:

2 humans vs 2 Easy AI - a reasonable fight but you should win fairly easily within 30 mins
2 humans vs 1 Easy and 1 Hard AI - a hard fight but doable if you get your front line established. Eventually you'll prevail but it might take an hour to 1.5 hours.
2 humans vs 2 Hard - forget it. The game will go well for the first 5 minutes then 5 minutes after that you'll get steamrollered.

I'm sure as we get better that will change slightly. After all, a fellow Hamster and I can usually handle 2 hard AIs in DoW - a game that works on the same principles as CoH.

General Tips:

Certain flags give a lot more resource points than others. To quickly see which these are use the tactical map (large round icon above minimap on left). Build observation posts on these flags first before doing every flag. Only infantry units can capture flags (with one exception - see 'using your command points' below). You can build observation posts on your allies flags to help out. (Don't think you can transfer resource points between players in this game like in DoW - haven't seen a way to do it anyway yet).

To the right of that icon are icons for 'pinging' the map - with attack, defend and capture orders. Useful for multiplayer.

Queue movement or build orders using the Shift key.

The Alt key and mousewheels are useful for changing views.

Defensive stuff:

Mines - they seem to be particularly rubbish at stopping tanks. Also, they cost a fortune in munitions. AT guns are far, far better.

Bunkers - they are superb at stopping infantry attacks and annoying things like motorcycles. Make sure you build them to protect your important flags and also all roads into your territory. If you leave a gap and let the enemy rampage behind your lines with one or two annoying squads it takes a lot of troops and also your time to track them down and stop them. By which time the AI has probably crashed a task force through your front line and nicked all your fuel points.

Tank traps - I have never used them but in the tutorial they looked very handy. Seal roads with them.

Sandbags - They provide heavy cover for infantry (see below for explanation of cover and icons)

Barbed wire - used to stop infantry. Might be a good idea to seal back roads from maurading enemy engineers. Not sure of cost.

Dealing with tanks using infantry - Tanks are very powerful in this game but luckily they can be dealt with by infantry. If you are the Allies then the Germans will send Stug self-propelled guns your way early on in the game. Make sure that you build the sticky bomb upgrade and send your rifle squads to attack them from the rear. If ypu get in close the tank will rotate to face your squad but they can easily run to the other side to avoid being shot at. If you get the Ranger squad upgrade then they are also good at dealing with tanks - attack from the rear where possible.

Dealing with tanks using your tanks - if the AI tank is attacking a flag and your tank bursts out of the hedgerow behind the enemy, the enemy will rotate to face you and attempt to fire. You have the jump on it so open fire then reverse back behind cover. The enemy will lose sight of you and so turn back to fire on the previous target. Then go forward and attack again, repeat until done. Keep a squad of engineers or two to repair your tanks. If you set a squad to repair a tank and the tank moves off they will follow it. Tanks costs a lot to build but not much to repair so it is much better to pull a tank back from the fight rather than lose it.

Dealing with the Axis Tiger tank - this tank makes mincemeat of Shermans - just like it did in real life. Don't try the frontal assault. Do attack from behind with several tanks. If you do that then prepare to lose at least 2 of them. Frankly, these guys are scary. The Allies have the Pershing heavy tank which is about as much use as Julian Clary at a mass brawl.

Dealing with infantry using tanks - upgrade your tanks with the better machine guns and stand off the infantry while firing at them. Should be an easy win...

Dealing with Axis AT guns - AT guns are more evil than IKEA. If you must do a frontal attack on one use at least 4 tanks. Preferably use infantry, mortars or arty. Don't even think about using jeeps. Oh, I almost forgot - use grenades. You have to purchase an upgrade for your riflemen to use them but grenades are really good against MGs, AT guns and infantry. Really very, very good. Indeed. Use them.

Smoke canisters on Shermans - they give your tank a defensive bonus but use up 50 munition points per go which is a hell of a lot and not really worth it unless you're in a tight fix. I once made the mistake of telling all 6 tanks in my battlegroup to pop smoke which cost 300 points in less than 10 seconds. That isn't good considering it can take a long time to earn those points back.

Snipers - they are evil. They can destroy whole engineer squads in about 10 seconds. The AI sometimes builds 3 at once and sends them out to kill your squads trying to take flags. The best counter to these are jeeps. Don't bother trying to rush a sniper form a distance with a rifle squad.

Cover:

Click a squad and move your cursor over some territory. You'll see either amber (light) or green (heavy) dots on the ground which denotes how much cover they'll get at that position. The shield symbol above a squad denotes how much cover they have in their current position - red being none, green being heavy cover, and amber being light cover. The more cover they have the less casualties they'll take. If a point on the map needs defending but the cover is bad then build some sandbags.

Using your command points:

Choose a specialty - infantry, tanks or air support early on and spend your command points. I tend to like the defensive specialty best. The tank specialty can be useful, especially the ability that allows vehicles (like fast moving jeeps) to capture flags.

Buildings:

Can be upgraded to barracks which is great for getting troops to the front line quickly. Unfortunately buildings tend to be death traps when being pounded by tanks so it's usually better to leave the building and attempt to use sticky bombs on the tank if possible.

General strategies:

"Contain, seige, destroy": For this to work (indeed to win any game perhaps) your team needs to control 2/3 of the map. That means a race from the off to get forward and capture all the flags across the map two-thirds of the way up (or down). The best way to do that is usually build engineers and send them off to capture the flag, then build a MG bunker to defend it, and then an observation post on the flag. Careful, the AI is good at flanking bunkers so watch that placement and if necessary build another to protect an exposed flank. Once you've captured the forward most points and have MG posts covering the roads and hedge gaps then you can take all the flags behind your lines. If you can hold all those points then you will be gaining far more points than the enemy and be easily able to beat off his attacks and then counter-attack at your leisure.

Building your base: Bear this is mind - get tanks as quickly as possible. You will stand a much better chance of winning if you do. To do this and still have anough fuel to actually build some tanks be careful which upgrades you buy. Spend as little fuel as possible and spend it all on tanks instead.

Base defences - don't bother. Use the resources on your frontline and defending key flags. Your start position usually has a few pre-built bunkers anyway.

Build fast and don't faff around. The AI builds at high speed and you'll soon have your hands full dealing with multiple contacts with the enemy so spend the first ten minutes getting established as quickly as you can.

That's about it more now. Will add more later if I think of anything.

[Tricky]

Supply Yard - a useless building?

I finally found out what the two upgrades you get with this building do. As you may know, you get 3 types of resource. The first is manpower (then munitions, and fuel). Each resource has a gather rate which increases as you capture more flags. Apparently, it also decreases as you build more infantry units - which is called 'unit upkeep'. By selecting the upgrades from the supply yard you can reduce unit upkeep and therefore keep the manpower resource gather rate high. These upgrades do use a lot of fuel so are possibly only worth using if you are on a map with loads of fuel flags and therefore short of manpower points.

Super Maginot line (TM)

The name is based on an idea from Paul and this extension to the "Contain, seige, destroy" strategy is to take the 2/3rds of the map and then build a huge defensive line across it, with bunkers, tank traps and AT guns at regular intervals. This works best as Axis because they have the best kit. You want to build something like a ratio of 2 machine gun bunkers for every medic bunker and repair bunker. If you have a large tank force place several repair bunkers together somewhere central where you can easily pull your tanks back to if they get beat up. Tank traps are very handy because the AI won't go through them. But you can box yourself in. But long lines of tank traps are ace for keeping the enemy tanks off your lawn. Be careful when placing AA guns because the stupid AI will attempt to fire through your own bunkers to hit the enemy. Axis repair bunkers placed to your guns will keep them automatically repaired.

The AI will use howitzer barrages to effectively destroy your defences and create a big hole that they can run through. So keep a mobile reserve on a hotkey, ready to react to any breach, keep your engineers to the rear so they can rush in to repair or rebuild after a barrage, build defence in depth (multiple lines of bunkers) and build machine gun bunkers to cover the rear approaches to your front line because if not the AI will outflank them through any breach.

Allied Howitzers

These are a load of rubbish against Axis tanks. You're better off spending the points on 58mm AT guns instead. Or tanks. Lots of them....

[Tricky]

Our resident crime fighting superhero and I have been playing this game again recently. Since these tips were posted way back when I started playing the game I thought I'd add any new tips I'd learnt. I'll leave you to judge whether I've learnt not very much, or if it's just that my tips were so excellent that they stood the test of time well:

You can put engineers into allied Halftracks and they'll operate the machine guns. Mobile HMG platform!

Resources - they don't work as I first thought. Any flags you cap give both you and your ally extra pts over time. You can't give your ally some of your points though and they can't spend yours.

Mines - ok so they don't destroy tanks but they are good at destrying parts of tanks (like engines) leaving them very vulnerable to being finished off. Also, don't plant them in long chains - leave gaps between each set of 3. That way, when one set of 3 explodes they won't trigger all the others.

Multiple engineering units can be used to build the same building/structure quicker.

0 on the numeric keypad opens and closes the tactical map - a very useful quick view of the whole battlefield!