Initially this was provided by a member of the Allied forces, but having a liaison isn't quite the same as having one of the partisans on your team. As well as an American and British representative, the Italian partisans also have a voice. Thanks to its cultural consultants, Relic's also changed one of the subcommanders-characters who serve as advisors, and who you can build relationships with by taking said advice, unlocking handy new bonuses. Multiplayer mayhem: Hands-on with the chaotic but incredibly fun multiplayer North African operation: A deep dive into Company of Heroes 3's second campaign The new MVP: Don't sleep on the brilliant recovery vehicles "We relied on players to tell us how they wanted to play the game," says Littman, who admits that it was "really hard to get right". The UI has also been given a rework to improve its clarity, with Relic putting each change in front of players first, until they finally got to a place where there was a consensus. Systems that are "simple to use, but still have a big impact" is the goal, says Littman. Of course, you can still surround them before that happens and wipe them out. And if you hold most of the hubs, the enemy can only stay in your territory for a couple of turns before they start running low on supplies and have to leg it back to their own territory. And it opens the door to new strategies, like cutting the enemy off from their supplies to force them to rout. It seems like it should be a great source of friction-another objective to fight over instead of aimlessly painting the map. You really can't win the war unless you have the supply hubs. "You just won't have enough resources to do all the things you need to do." "You really can't win the war unless you have the supply hubs," says Littman. If you have more than the Germans, that means you have more movement points, and the caps on your ammo and manpower will be bumped up. Keeping hold of these hubs is vitally important. And you and the Germans fight over them." So now we have about 15 supply hubs across the map. Having a supply line that you had to keep moving up roads was just impossible for a player to keep track of. There are so many territories: 150 capture points and cities and towns and airports and seaports. Supply lines didn't really come together "until recently", Littman notes, but now the team has built a system that it feels is easy to use. With the latter comes added complexity through features like supply lines-you can't expect soldiers to win a war when they're starving, out of ammo and none of their vehicles work-but it's taken time for Relic to figure out how to make these things work. Even though it has dabbled in turn-based campaigns before, like in the smaller, dynamic campaigns of Dawn of War and Ardennes Assault, Company of Heroes 3's Italian campaign is a very different beast, with shades of both Total War and grognardy war games. It's been a learning experience for a studio that is best known for real-time strategy. Now the star of our show is still the RTS, but the strategic map still has to have depth to it and strategy behind it." "We want them to see that the depth is there from those other strategy games. "We want players who love Unity of Command and who love Panzer General to come here and have fun," says Littman. What Relic didn't want to do was risk the campaign's depth. And since all the tactical choices they opened up remain, it doesn't feel like anything is missing. I actually liked the micro-management wrinkles the detachments created, and found their flexibility made the cost worthwhile, but I can't deny that the campaign feels a lot smoother now that they've been bundled into companies. While the change was settled on a year ago, only now have I been able to see the impact on the campaign. The star of our show is still the RTS, but the strategic map still has to have depth to it and strategy behind it. "We were like 'Where there's smoke, there's fire.' We were starting to see people not enjoying themselves." "Right there and then, we knew," Littman says. The feedback regarding detachments came in a survey in July 2021.
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