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Company of Heroes 3's Italy campaign needs more than better AI
3K View2023-03-09
After the unfortunate misadventure that was Dawn of War III in 2017, Relic has mostly returned to basics with this year's Company of Heroes 3, which resurrects the studio's signature squad-based real-time combat in bombastic World War 2 battles. While the combat is a refreshing return to form, Company of Heroes 3 arrived with one big new idea: a big, dynamic campaign map that lets players decide how they want to take Italy back from the Nazis.
The problem is, it doesn't work. Or at least, it doesn't work as a strategic puzzle to solve. The Italy campaign in Company of Heroes 3 fails to make much of a case for itself—German AI is limited, rarely attacking Allied companies and never even attempting to recapture territory from the player. That makes the entire affair feel a bit pointless, like wandering around a Total War campaign map without ever needing to actually strategize about where to place forces or making tough decisions about how to prioritize objectives.
Relic has taken this criticism on board, and has rolled out two hotfixes since Company of Heroes 3 launched. The latest, which updates the game to version 1.0.5, makes German AI a bit more aggressive. Now, German forces will venture outside their own territory and occasionally attempt to recapture points players have taken from them. The studio says further patches are planned that continue to improve the Germans' aggression, and I think the campaign will be a heck of a lot more interesting when this work is done.
However, there are other issues with the campaign that tweaking the AI won't solve. Company of Heroes 3 is fundamentally about its real-time skirmish battles, and these don't mesh well with the concept of a big strategic campaign. These battles have a certain rhythm to them: quickly pushing out from a starting position to capture resource nodes, building some early improvements, then pushing and defending on the front line that's established between opposing forces. Company of Heroes 3 does all this very well—it's largely the same gameplay that players like me loved in the first and second installments, and everything in it is built to suit that purpose.
To make the dynamic campaign work, changes would have to be made to the way battles work and the effects they have on the strategic map. A company that had suffered attrition from a machine gun nest would have to start at a disadvantage when fighting a fresh company, for example. Otherwise, we wind up with the situation we currently have: any one of my companies can weather repeated attacks by German forces and I know for sure that I have a pretty good chance of winning each skirmish, because battles have no automatic cost in terms of combat readiness.
This is a tricky design problem. Relic could hamstring battle-weary companies by limiting their resources at the start of tactical battles, but that would make for frustrating and sometimes hopeless engagements that likely wouldn't be very much fun to actually play. Who wants to load up a battle just to watch a couple of infantry squads get steamrolled by superior forces?
Other RTS games have wrestled with this, with varying degrees of success. Steel Division 2, for example, combines its large-scale real-time battles with an impressive "Army General" campaign that operates much like a traditional wargame. However, it lacks the exciting set piece missions that make Company of Heroes 3 so much fun. I loved the battle for Monte Cassino, but having it happen at all requires a specific set of circumstances, and the Italy campaign handles this by effectively railroading you into them.
I don't see a practical way to resolve the tension between the sandbox freedom of a strategic campaign and the highly specific engagements in Company of Heroes 3's key missions. The thing is, these missions are so good that I'd be happy just playing them in order, without the added busywork of the strategic map that adds little more than time to the experience.
Still, it's cool to see that Relic is addressing some of the concerns critics and players have raised about Company of Heroes 3. Again, it's a strong game at its core, and I'm sure I'll be jumping in for skirmishes with friends for years to come.
💬 Have you jumped into the Italy campaign in Company of Heroes 3? Let us know what you think about it so far in the comments.
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