You can only take the Advance Wars reference so far, it being turn-based and this being real-time strategy. I love Advance Wars (Dark Conflict, or whatever the US name for it is), I’ve poured over 260 hours into it and made 5 maps using its excellent map maker to boot. Its simplicity is its strength, the way your units’ health % modifies your attack and defence power (and how quickly you capture) gives it an amazing amount of depth.

Base building isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in most games it’s intrinsic to the resource management side of the game; do you spend cash on repairing a unit, producing a unit, building a structure, repairing a structure or researching a technology? But if you are removing it from the game the combat really needs to have enough depth to justify it. You need to have such depth in combat that you can’t just do what we saw happen in the video: two teams standing in the open doing chip damage to eachother.

To be honest I don’t know why they released that video in particular, it’s a poor reflection on what we’re hoping they aim to achieve with DoW 2.

Is there going to be an Imperial Commissar called Cain? If so, I’ll buy this game within a heartbeat.

Game itself is for Spring 2009.

“Combat engineering” — placing sandbags, MG nests, med stations, barbed wire — is suitable for the battlefield commander. CoH has some of the best point defenses of any RTS, and they’re enjoyable to build and relevant to each particular battle.

Resource gathering and unit production should be handled separate from battlefield operations (Total War). In this way, logistics remains an important aspect of the game, but not while you’re commanding armies in battle.

So reinforcement points? This might be interesting because I quite liked the way the British worked in COH, you can have reinforcement near the battle line it will make things more interesting than traditional base building. I guess the amount of reinforcement and their power will be decided by what you control on the battlefield, seeing that eurogamer talk about power/reinforcement and victory point to control.
This could be quite interesting as you will have to choose what to go for at first….

I’m also not really into Warhammer, so, for me this game holds little direct interest, but I am curious as to what relic are doing with WAR II in case the new CoH follows a similar trend.

I’ve been loving playing CoH online a lot recently, especially since I got Opposing Fronts, but if they make it any more small squad based or remove any of the current resource management, I don’t think I’ll be interested. In fact I think it’s kind of too bad that they aren’t adding another faction, especially for the Axis power, playing as the Japanese or perhaps the Italians might have been fun (ok who am I kidding the Italians would have sucked).