I don’t like sand. It’s rough, rough, stimulating, and everywhere. Company of Heroes 3 North African Campaign fighters seem to tend to agree with me. Far from the refreshing Italian beaches we saw in IGN’s previous preview, the other side of the Mediterranean theater is dry, oppressive, and sparsely calm. To succeed here, you need a sturdy army with the ability to keep your tank tread running much lower than ideal. And a new German-African corps that can be played in multiplayer as a roster separate from the already revealed German corps will carry out the mission.
The mission I had to play was to break through the British front and occupy a nearby town to cut off their retreat. This is part of a linear Axis campaign set up early in the war and will help complement the open-ended Total War-like Allied campaign in Italy that we saw last year. It certainly added to the workload, but Relic wants to provide a single-player experience for fans of old-fashioned RTS campaigns who are more interested in tactical combat than managing the entire theater at the strategic level. I was thinking.
DAK seems to be designed as a sophisticated, accurate and carefully tuned direct counterpoint to the Wehrmacht. If the German army of Italy is an expensive pocket watch, the army of North Africa is a potato watch assembled with what is at hand, hoping that it will run even after passing through some dunes. is. Maybe bombardment. They are well adapted to the harsh conditions they were forced to fight, with an emphasis on improvisational tactics and returning tattered armor to battle.
Do it yourself
This philosophy of war is illustrated by the fact that even basic DAK infantry have the ability to repair vehicles. They are much slower than a dedicated team of engineers, using scraps, spit, and tapes that happen to be lying down. However, it’s especially useful if you need to replenish Panzer III during a wave of enemies, or if you need to ambush with anti-tank infantry when there aren’t really qualified people nearby. DAK infantry can also participate in battles in tanks. This is a great mobility option that doesn’t rely on vulnerable trucks or half-tracks and can take your repair team anywhere.
They also have access to dedicated repair trucks that are lightly armored but can repair other vehicles very quickly and can rescue ally or enemy equipment destroyed from the battlefield. This turned out to be very useful for creating a mobile repair area just behind your line, where you can use cliffs and ridges to move away from the enemy’s line of sight.
“”
Another new friend who participated in this battle was the giant 88mm anti-tank gun. This is so big that it needs to be towed by truck. This absolute unit, if properly placed, is like a delete key for an enemy tank. Even in a frontal assault, they just melt when this happens, as their heavy frontal armor protects them. And with good spotting, it can fire with something that feels almost like a ridiculous range. But how tedious and time-consuming to set up, it’s imperative to support it with a more mobile army. And if it is placed on the side, or if the enemy is within its minimum range, it has little chance of surviving. Overall, we’re hoping to see more of these towed big guns as new and interesting dynamics of escalation, risk-to-reward, and map control are added to the official Company of Heroes.
Castle in the sand
The overall atmosphere of the battle in North Africa is also quite different from the missions I played last time. As an ally of Italy, you sneak through lush vineyards, blow up beautiful Renaissance churches, literally destroy the past and save the future. The melancholy remains, given the fact that all of these places would be spectacular vacation places if there were no horrific wars. The baking dunes here always have the feeling of being a hostile land that doesn’t want you around. I’m a little disappointed that the sand and heat don’t really affect the unit. I think I was a minority in that I had to really enjoy the weather system at CompanyofHeroes2 and keep the unit from freezing. Lighting and architecture definitely tell a rich story.
“”
My first job was to break through the trench line in England. This was done somewhat historically by Tokyo by drifting tanks to take full advantage of the new directional armor system. The tactical pause of COH 3 also allows for choreography suitable for the Fast and the Furious climax scene. With DAK’s talent to quickly bring the tattered Panzer back to the forefront, even fairly expensive units can afford to take more risks.
In the next phase, we’ll set up a chewy 88mm, but we’ll also focus on you and highlight your weaknesses if you’re forced to relocate in the middle of a battle. Smaller, more agile field guns can be instructed to manually attack anywhere on the ground within range without visibility, simply by having the enemy quickly peek at where the 88 is deployed. It can be very dangerous. It turns out that this leads to scouting and scout hunting is very important, especially in multiplayer.
you shall not pass
The final stage of the mission was given a very short time to set up a defense line in the town to prevent the British troops from retreating at full speed. Their troops barely stopped engaging me here, so it was really a problem to have enough firepower to prevent anyone from slipping through. In my first attempt, some infantry units passed me, but my big gun focused on enemy armor and trucks. Or regular infantry will be posted on the window.
It is certainly ambitious to include in the Company of Heroes 3 two very different single-player campaigns covering a large area of the Mediterranean and a completely different era of war. The developers told me, for example, that if the DAK is technically years behind the other three, you obviously need to think carefully about how to balance these factions. In multiplayer, the remaining playable troops represent the German, British, and American troops in the second half of the war. The idea is that they should be able to hold themselves and succeed on any map and not be tuned to be superior, especially in the desert, at the expense of other environments.
But if you don’t want to accept my words, you can try the mission yourself from today to July 19th.
