If Haggis were a zombie...

For the past couple of months, the Red Army has been playing a weekly versus campaign on Left 4 Dead 2 against their arch-rivals of old, Lowstress. It was a tough, hard slog, and the Red Army picked up the bit exactly where they left off in playing clan matches, typically failing to impress at every turn. Nevertheless, it was for the most part a close-run thing and often a very tight affair, with everything to play for going into the finale.

The first campaign started with some early surprise victories for the Red Army, but eventually we lost on cans in the finale round. And despite technically levelling the series after the second campaign, our victory was only thanks to some splendid play by two temporary allies in the struggle. In the following weeks Lowstress trampled all over us to romp home very easy victories on Swamp Fever and Hard Rain, a combination of our disorganisation and their fielding a strong team. However, things returned to their original tight, tense equilibrium for the final original campaign, The Parish, which was again decided on The Bridge finale, albeit in spectacular style.

Whilst there are still a couple more campaigns to run through, the series has already been taken by Lowstress, so I’m popping this post up now before I forget about it (and whilst I have time on my hands!)

Thanks to Luth, Lütte, P, Rez, [CzR] Dave and [=LS=) Talarin for playing for the Red Army. Many thanks and fair play to our nemeses for keeping the gaming ever fun and friendly, and offering up sacrificial lambs to the slaughter (i.e. mercs) for when we were down a man. Finally, thanks again to Talarin and the rest for helping to organise the matches, and congratulations to all on the well-deserved series victory! We're pulling the Iron Curtain down for now, but it'll be up again for you to kick us in the goolies before too long!

Campaigns

Dead Center — Red Army 1386 - 1531 Lowstress (Match report)

Dark Carnival — Red Army 2464 - 2184 Lowstress (Match report)

Swamp Fever — Red Army 1012 - 2837 Lowstress (Match report)

Hard Rain — Red Army 1300 - 2354 Lowstress (Match report)

The Parish — Red Army 2003 - 2387 Lowstress (Match report)

Awards

The "Methuselah" Award for Longest Time Played

Comrade Lütte & Comrade Chez — For playing every minute of the series.

The "Aldrich Ames" Award for Best Spy

[=LS=) Talarin — For gallantly helping us to win our only campaign on Dark Carnival.

The "Black Sheep" Award for Most Willing to Play

[CzR] Dave — For assisting the Pink Army to victory on Dark Carnival, defeat on Swamp Fever, and turning up to play for Lowstress on Hard Rain before being asked to leave again.

The “Forrest Gump” Award for Most Unaware

Comrade Rez — For typing in after five minutes of play “Versus?” on Swamp Fever.

The “French Army” Award for Most Useless

Comrade Chez — For spending 4 minutes running around as a Jockey on The Park of The Parish, before finally jumping in and dying with 0 damage inflicted.
The Red Army — For dying before even reaching the Tank on Swamp Fever. Repeatedly.

The “Leave No Man Behind” Award for Rescuing Teammates

Comrade Lütte — For leaving the safe room in a valiant attempt to rescue teammates on The Highway of Dark Carnival (amongst others).

The “Jägermeister” Award for Best Hunter

Comrade Rez — For his valiant and failed attempt to jump across the river in the Plank Country of Swamp Fever.

The “Frankie Dettori” Award for Best Jockey

Comrade Luth — For her impressive early kill on The Hotel stage of Dead Center, with just 4 hours’ playing time under her belt, and the super cool call on comms: “Come on you, out the window!”

The “Light Brigade” Award for Best Charger

Comrade Lütte — For the spectacular charge down the narrow alleyway on The Park stage on The Parish, without grabbing a single Survivor.

The “T-34″ Awards for Best Tank

Comrade P — For whipping over the wall with a “Surprise fuckers!” on The Quarter of The Parish.
[=LS=) Talarin — For his sniper rock to finish the round on The Coaster of Dark Carnival.
Comrade Chez — For his CS-style hide-and-seek play on Town Escape of Hard Rain.

Videos [Incomplete]

A selection of videos from my perspective from the earlier campaigns.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you want to try it out for yourself, you’ll need the original Doom/Doom 2 WAD files, a copy of Skulltag and the requisite MW2 WAD files.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Download links:

Skulltag
MW2 WAD files

[Via FPSTime]

In other news, PBEM2 has recently crawled to a seemingly complete halt, and may disappear the way of PBEM1. Given the current lack of PBEM capability in the new Civilization V, and the gradually dissipating interest in PBEM for earlier Civs, these may well be our last.

Final scores:

1. Tesh – 2430
2. Outer Chezgolia – 1449
3. Benno – 99
4. Iroquois – 95
5. Carthage – 58
6. Ricia – 41
7. Steffia-on-Sea – 31
8. Greece – 12

Valve's Dark Carnival

Ever wondered where to get your inspiration for the apocalypse? There are plenty of abandoned places out there to choose from, but none perhaps so mordantly fitting as Six Flags, New Orleans. Check out the gorgeously shot video with its excellent background theme by Godspeed You! Black Emperor below.

Opened in 2000 under the name Jazzland, the park was taken over by Six Flags in 2002, only to be closed before the oncoming storm Katrina in 2005. The park was flooded, with damage to the majority of the buildings, much of it beyond repair. The only ride to truly escape the rising waters was the Batman rollercoaster, later removed to another site by its owners. Various plans and offers have come through to redevelop the site, but as things stand the park remains a closed reminder.

This is truly the real Dark Carnival!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: I should probably point out that The Hidden during this scene was being played by someone who actually knew what they were doing, i.e. not one of us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Someone set up us the bomb!

To celebrate the release of more sourcey update fun to that old favourite Counter-Strike: Source, we’ve gone ahead and dusted off our old server (i.e. reinstalled it) after many years’ absence. Currently a fairly vanilla set up, some admin rights for Red Army members, some stats enabled for—well, for the hell of it really—and a regular map cycle.

Feel free to join us for a laugh this weekend, as we relive some of the good old times… and doubtless plenty of the bad! Things should get hotting up on Saturday night, after the USA take on Ghana in the World Cup, and may continue on Sunday night where they left off.

Also, don’t forget to have your say about our potential random MOD night in the coming weeks! Have your say for the choice of MOD here.

Red Army |#2| CSS Fun Server |HLStatsX| IP: 94.76.241.67:27020

Click here to view the embedded video.

Files available for download here.

A common sight on my screen

After a splash of preparation, the first Red Army Company of Heroes Mini-League finally got underway last night, with three games in mixed teams on Ecliptic Fields.

Schlennsen and Unkraut vs. Chez and Fox

Getting the season off to a start with same-language partners was probably a good move; playing teams we hadn’t touched in several months, less so. The scores pretty much say it all, although there were moments when we felt to be putting up at least some resistance! Perhaps the most worrying point was when, several minutes into the match, Fox re-discovered how to construct buildings.

Final score: 500 – 49

Chez and Fox vs. Schlennsen and Unkraut

Not put out by our first loss, we swapped sides, this time playing perhaps our most comfortable side, the Allies. Things started better than last time, Fox setting up a respectable nut for the opponents to crack their troops against, Unkraut and myself playing a real game of yo-yos over the battlefield on the opposite flank. Unfortunately for us, Schlennsen found a gap in the defenses and moved in behind Fox’s position. Some depressingly inaccurate mortar fire couldn’t hold off the assault, and in the end the game ended even more drastically for us than the first! A last ditch attempt made sure we didn’t end up with a complete whitewash.

Final score: 12 – 500

Chez and Unkraut vs. Fox and Schlennsen

Exhausting our encounters for the season, it was time to mix the teams up a bit. This game was certainly much closer than the previous two, with the reduction in communication in no way hampering the level of play. Unkraut and myself took an early lead, despite losing one flank of the field completely to Schlennsen’s troops, whilst a real stalemate situation developed on the other flank as Fox and myself played tennis with the points. A few successful assaults by Fox and Schlennsen, however, sealed the deal, as Unkraut and myself ended up forced back to base to lick our wounds, whilst the other two had enough spare resources to call in a pair of Panthers apiece. The resulting blitzkrieg saw the first annihilation of the league so far.

Final score: 356 – 500

More information on sign-ups and any future leagues can be found on our forums, whilst matches results, details and demos can all be found on the under construction league site.

Five of the Best

Even the heaviest of armour needs its flanks covered

Realism

Easily one of its greatest attractions is Company of Heroes’ attention to detail and sensible level of realism. Units are bought as squads, which move cohesively across the battlefield paying attention to cover and reacting to enemy (and friendly) fire. If your men find themselves under mortar or heavy machine-gun fire, they’ll hit the deck and try to scramble out of harm’s way.

As a World War II game, there’s not much if anything in Company of Heroes that hasn’t already been seen before, but the developers did a great job of tying it all together. A well-laid ambush, using tank traps, mines and anti-tank weaponry can make short work of even the heaviest tanks in the game, whilst flamethrowers can be used to devastating effect against infantry in bunkers, buildings and trenches.

Resources

One of my personal dislikes in a lot of real-time strategy games is the focus on resource collecting. Whilst it can make for a fun element, and has been a feature of the RTS genre pretty much since the beginning, there can at times be little more frustrating than watching your well-laid plans go to waste, as your excellent tactics and strategies on the battlefield are defeated by the weight of sheer numbers, as a result of your opponent spending so much time on the resource-gathering.

Company of Heroes takes an interesting slant on this aspect of RTS games, by providing players with the basic resource at essentially the same rate. The Manpower resource is technically linked to positions captured and held on the map, but the basic income is far in excess, and troops on the field must be paid for via upkeep costs that keep the stronger sides in check. On the other hand, the supplementary resources of Munitions and Fuel are almost entirely determined by capturing, holding and defending key points on the map, forcing players to take ground and keep the supply lines to their bases open. Generally speaking more Munitions means more upgrades and battlefield abilities (such as mines, grenades and panzerschreks) whilst more Fuel means—quite obviously—more vehicles and tanks!

Balance

For a while, Command & Conquer: Generals was my RTS of the hour, a game that despite its many flaws and lack of innovation turned out to be a real joyride. But putting aside for a second the various unpatched bugs, the woeful multiplayer lobby system, the failed rank system, the lack of options for setting up custom games, the immature players, and the ease of mismatching the game, the ONE thing that C&C: Generals really failed at was balance. True, there were three very different sides, each of which eventually had four different flavours in the expansion, bringing the total to 12 separate teams (78 potential head-to-head comparisons!), but nevertheless the game had some very obvious balancing issues which left players refusing to fight opponents who chose team x, or quitting as soon as they saw someone playing team y.

Compatibility

Easily my favourite in this little list, and one of the things that irritates me with so many other games, is that the developers found a way to keep the game engine on the same footing irrespective of which particular version a player had. That is to say, gamers who had the original could play with or against players who bought the expansion pack—including those who only bought the expansion pack—and were simply restricted in their choice of teams and game types. There remains only one version of the game, instead of distinct and incompatible original and expansion pack variants, keeping the gaming lobbies and the community in general far more unified. And leaving players able to play against teams they themselves can’t choose because they haven’t bought the expansion can only help improve sales, or so I’d have thought.

Despite the small scale, there's plenty of variety to be had

Variety

Perhaps the greatest sin perpetrated by strategy games on the whole is their wanton inclusion of units that serve no purpose other than to increase the apparent diversity of the game, but on the field of battle prove about as useful as a pair of flip flops at the Antarctic. Company of Heroes, on the other hand, makes do with relatively reduced number of units per side, but for that makes sure that every unit serves a purpose on the field of battle. Infantry, mortar squads, snipers, anti-tank units, light vehicles, jeeps, tanks, all play a part in the field of battle, and potentially to great effect. Simply bursting through the lines with the heaviest tanks in the game, although a viable strategy, is no guarantee of success as it might be in other games. Cheaper mines, anti-tank weapons and anti-tank specialist squads can all create havoc for an armoured column when employed correctly.

At the same time, Relic managed to create diversity and distinctiveness with the various sides players can choose from. The various infantry groups might appear at first glance to all have much of a muchness about them, but in the field their strengths and weaknesses soon become brilliantly apparent. Each side has its own particular playing style, and deserves different strategies in part or in whole to be played with any measure of success.

Five of the Worst

Bases

Something I’ve railed about elsewhere, and something Relic felt they wouldn’t upset with Company of Heroes, is the seemingly obligatory inclusion of a base. The real-time strategy game formula has essentially from its early beginnings featured the base-building element, and as a result of this heritage, virtually every new game on the market includes bases as part of the package, regardless of whether or not that appears consistent with the game’s ethos and storyline. Training troops, building vehicles, researching technologies: hardly the things you associate with front-line warfare. Nevertheless, there they are in their ubiquitous and downright monotonous forms. Build yourself a barracks and train your troops on the spot: build a tank depot and watch your men weld together a Sherman tank out of a couple of yogurt pots and some sticky-backed plastic.

From the pragmatic point of view of the sales people, I can see why it’s here. People buying RTS games expect a base as par for the course. That’s what RTS is, isn’t it? Building a base, managing your resources, and controlling your troops. Except that this isn’t an RTS you can play like Sim City. The only thing base elements bring to Company of Heroes is essentially an extra Achilles heel targeted by those pesky players who enjoy planting mines in front of buildings and watching freshly produced infantry and vehicles blow up on the spot. In fact, Company of Heroes flaunts its own base-building requirements a good amount of the time, by having new units and reinforcements appear pretty much anywhere but at the base, with units parachuting in, being called in along main roads, or re-appearing at battlefield medical centres.

Portable flamethrowers and a Kangeroo escort

Flamethrowers

The inclusion of flamethrowers was really one of the highs and lows of Company of Heroes. Cheap and dirty to use, the makers at least avoided including common cliches such as flamethrower tanks exploding when randomly hit with small arms fire. Their primary use in the real world, against fortified positions, is also well represented in the Company of Heroes battlefield, with bonuses when used against troops in heavy cover, or against buildings in general (another potentially drastic downside to having a ‘base’).

For all that, however, it seems as if none of the real downsides to the use of man-portable flamethrowers was realistically included in the game. Relative to other firearms, WWII flamethrowers had a relatively short range (albeit not as short as often portrayed in the movies) which forced users to approach with caution and under fire before use. The fuel tanks were also pretty bulky and heavy pieces of kit, a fact that could easily have been implemented in the game mechanics. Indeed, flamethrowers were heavily restricted in their use by the amount of fuel that a man could carry around with him, and some models allowed for only a couple of bursts of fire. In addition, the operators themselves faced tough penalties if captured, due to the nature of the weapon and the horrific injuries and deaths it could inflict; summary execution was not uncommon.

In the real world, such downsides led to rather restricted employment of man-portable flamethrowers, instead with vehicular models rather successfully taking up the role, having few of the drawbacks. Instead, we often see Company of Heroes battlefields littered with groups of Engineers and Pioneers equipped with flamethrowers, decimating other technically more multifaceted troops.

The camouflageable (read: cloakable) M18 Hellcat

Invisibility

Whilst realism was one of my five best things about Company of Heroes, unrealism also sits happily as one of the five worst. The issue with flamethrowers above is a perfect example, but one which pales in comparison next to invisible units. It’s not that they don’t fit into the game ethos at all; having snipers able to move stealthily forward without being seen makes perfect sense, as does being able to infiltrate crack troops behind enemy lines. It’s rather the clumsy nature in which this often jars with realism that makes this feature such a drawback. A Pak-38 anti-tank weapon camouflaged in a hedgerow makes fairly decent sense; an invisible Pak-38 being dragged along an open road in full view of enemy units is frustrating as hell.

When they released the expansion, Tales of Valor, Relic also added a number of optional replacements for many of the vehicle slots in the game, an example of which was the M18 Hellcat, replacement for the M10 Wolverine. Aside from a number of differences in terms of armour, penetration and speed (oddly slower than the M10, despite the M18 being nicknamed the Hellcat on account of its speed), the M18 also featured the ability to camouflage, and benefit from a first strike damage boost.

Looks good on paper, but this has led to some of the most rediculous scenes I’ve ever witnessed in an RTS. In one replay, I saw a small line of M18s all parked in a row on the road, camouflaged and waiting for a target; along came a troop of enemy infantry, who had to squeeze themselves between and around the tanks to get to where they were going! And those 20 x 9 x 9 foot lumps of steel in the middle of the road… they passed them off as shrapnel I suppose?

Western Front

It’s an RTS game set during the Second World War; ergo, it’s pretty much all about the Western Front. How many times must we storm the Normandy beaches? How many times must we discover and destroy the Nazi Vergeltungswaffen? It’s fair point that western audiences will to a large extent be interested in the theatres of war in which their nations were to the largest extent embroiled, but then why do we have so much focus on this one? Fortunately not all games take the same track, and we do occasionally see games set in the Pacific, or North Africa, or the Eastern Front, but then there is seldom any coverage of the smaller conflicts or any attempt to acknowledge the wartime participation of any nations apart from Germany and the Big Three. Relic alone can’t take the blame for this, but it certainly doesn’t count in their favour that they decided to tread the well-worn paths into France. Whilst the expansion pack brought a bit of refreshment in the form of the British and a very distinctive German army, it wasn’t until the truly excellent Eastern Front mod released earlier this year that we got to see the German armies take on the Red Army.

AI

This is very much a nitpicky final point, largely since there aren’t actually that many areas in which the game can be faulted. The AI itself is pretty reasonable, probably average for an RTS game. It doesn’t do anything particularly smart, nor react particularly well to finding fortified positions, and occasionally gets itself stuck in a hole. I’ve seen the AI sneak behind enemy lines with a handful of troops, only to send them to the corner of the map to have a long tea break until the game was over! Nevertheless, whilst the AI doesn’t necessarily provide any particularly staunch opposition, it is very adept at providing hours of frustration, particularly when you’re just starting to get the ropes of the game. No matter how long the game drags on, it seems, the AI seems completely addicted to sending tiny squads of engineers behind your lines and capturing points willy-nilly. It doesn’t matter if the balance is in your favour, it doesn’t matter if you go around mopping up those squads in a matter of seconds before they even manage to capture a single point, the AI will continue to attempt to spread itself across the map, like some form of demented virus pretty much until the end of the game.

I'm a surprise...

As I have mentioned elsewhere, Steam has come a long way since its initial release, but there’s still swathes of potential to be unlocked if only the development team would make some steps in the right direction. So I’ll get ready to eat a couple of my words when I say that there are some very welcome changes being worked on under the hood.

If anyone’s been brave enough to try it, there’s a new beta UI* that was released a wee while ago, which promises various enhancements to the current look, as well as swapping out the IE-powered browser for a Webkit model (same engine powering Safari and Chrome). Aside from being faster, more standards compliant and generally more up-to-date, the browser engine is safely cross-platform. Along with some files hidden away in the new UI, and some leaked adverts and whatnot, the latest information is that Valve plan to port Steam to Mac OS X to be released some time this year, and that the upcoming Portal 2 will indeed be playable on Mac.

Some pretty decent news all round, in my opinion. There are already a number of titles on Steam that could potentially be played natively on Mac, if the service had supported it on release, and this news can only have a positive impact on the number of games sold and released for the system. And presumably if Portal 2 is released successfully, Valve may make it their policy to release games for both systems in future, just as id once did for ‘coding practise.’ Now the question remains, just how long will we have to wait before Linux compatible binaries are released?

*Quick word of warning, when I tried the new UI my fonts disappeared and I had to re-download some games that somehow went missing.