I enjoy real time strategy games. When I play them I can't think about anything else so it is the great escape. I stick with the good ones long after others get bored with them. I also do no online gaming so that further limits what interests me. I like my games like my movies, things need to blow up and people need to get shot.
I started with Civ2, which is turn based, but after finding Rise of Nations, a real time based, I lost interest in turn based. Rise of Nations and its successor, Thrones, are terrific and I love everything about them. There are so many variations that I never got tired of it. Company of heroes is similar and I have been playing it to death for months. Good news is you can buy Company of Heroes Anthology for around ten bucks and it has all the upgrades. It has a strange install sequence so Google how to do it. Basically you need to use two serial numbers (provided) and install them separately. I muddled through it. You need internet access to play it which freaked me out originally but was really not an issue so don't worry about it.
Angoville is the first battle and a great place to learn and try new tactics. I feel like giving a few hints so here goes.
Build order is important with strategy games. This involves resource building and unit building. You start with an engineer so normally you send your engineer to the far reaches of you territory and build a barracks. While you have your engineer selected and after giving the build command, use the shift key and give your engineer future commands. Normally you send him out to capture future points. Which points will be discussed later.
Build a second engineer and send him on a capture mission also. I use my 50 munitions to upgrade this second engineer with a flame thrower which makes him battle capable as well as a bunker killer.
After barracks is built, build infantry, jeep, infantry, infantry, infantry, bar rifle. You will almost never build more infantry so it is important to retreat infantry when they reach 2 (or one if watching closely). Replenishing a squad is cheaper than building new. If you lose an entire squad don't panic and build another. You may be in a position to not need more because vehicles are now more important.
A jeep is very important because of their sniper killing ability, range of sight, ability to confuse machine gun teams and speed of travel. I build one infantry first because they are stronger than jeeps and snipers are seldom built fast because they are expensive. If you have infantry with no jeep against a sniper, he will chew them up. With infantry alone against sniper, charge the sniper and chase him off, one shot will do it. Be ready to retreat. Jeeps will reveal a sniper far out and are fast enough to chase him down and kill him. Jeeps are easy to kill and need micro but when used with infantry they can be effective even against infantry. Charge motorcycles with infantry and stay behind them.
I let the engineers capture my resources and use the infantry to capture the enemy's resources. Sometimes the enemy's most desired resource is obvious and it will normally be oil. In Angoville it is the oil left of their camp. Other maps it is harder to determine what the AI can't live without and you end up running around more, but you can bet it is oil close to the camp. There are various ways to win but keeping the enemy from resources is always involved. You can allow them to get the two resources left of the camp and still win easily but it is good training to keep it from them. The more difficult it is to take it the better because they will throw everything at it and allow your engineer on the other side of the map to build untroubled.
I had an aversion to capping resources originally because of the expense and this is a mistake. Once I found that four infantry was enough, I found that oil is the next most important resource. But don't go crazy because you will not need great amounts of it. You just need it early. So grab high yield oil early and cap one of the highest yields to increase the yield. Look for the 16 on the strategy map and cap that one. Some maps have nothing but 5s so on these you will use more ground troops longer. I try to get close to producing 50 oil and 80-90 munitions. This will allow building my armed half track and maybe the armored car. Sometimes I will build a second half track instead of or in addition to the half track, thus making life easy.
Munitions are the next important and you will want to produce more of this than oil so cap two 16's if you can. The reason for this is off map artillery strikes. With the jeeps long range of sight, an off map artillery can take down a building in one round. I normally keep blowing up the building for making anti-tank guns. You will probably take down a couple of these before being able to send in an armed half-track. Anti tank guns are not that big a deal but make things harder for light vehicles and I don't want them taking down my machine gun bunker I plan on building close to their camp. If the anti-tank gun wanders out of camp and away from the protection of bunkers, they can be easily charged and taken by infantry. Angoville does not need tanks to will easily. Actually few maps need tanks unless you get behind and need more fire power.
Angoville is a good example of effective bunker placements. Protecting the area just north of the enemy will shut them down from that side of the map. Bunkers are not free so two or three of them is the max.
Send your half track around to replenish troop while building its guns. Then, if nothing better is happening, send the HT into the enemy camp. There will be no anti tank guns to bother you because you have been busy blowing up the motor pool.
Now you have several ways to go. I like building a couple artillery half way to the enemy and take them apart while ripping up their infantry with the half track. Another good way is to call in a squad of Rangers and arm them. Ranger's bazookas are great at taking down buildings. They are not as good at fighting infantry so keep them out of harms way. But you have the half track to replenish your Rangers if need be.
I like setting annihilation and high resources. There is no great advantage to high resources except for cutting down on the micro of selecting troop builds in the beginning. Just key up your 4 troop builds and let it go. You will need to add another infantry and the bar as resources allow.
Healing my vary with versions but in Anthology forget building medical buildings and healing, ignore it completely. By the time a unit would heal, if it would ever heal, the game would be over. Maybe if you have a machine gun setup backed up with sandbags and infantry, you could throw up a medical building but don't expect much. Losing health does not seem to reduce effectiveness.
This is a great single player game and I would expect it to be great in multi-player for those who play online.
If COH asks for your CD suddenly don't panic. Their server is probably doing something and not letting you on. This is irritating but give it some time before you screw up the install by trying to fix it. It could be a problem but maybe not either.
