Does Company of Heroes 2 give players the feeling of being a glorious commander? Find out in our review.
For example you will have a building you need to defend from an incoming enemy force coming from the East and West. So what you can do is position snipers in high buildings, set up machine guns to watch the street and have engineers plant mines in the road to prepare for the incoming assault. There are two possible outcomes to this situation, either you’ve made a flawless defense and the enemy doesn’t have much of a chance which is fun, but gets boring once you’ve found the best tactic, or you get absolutely out gunned, maybe the enemy has snipers of their own, maybe they have outflanked you, maybe there is just too many of them. If that is the case you have to command your troops to retreat, while retreating you cannot control them but they become harder to kill and gain a massive speed boost as they run back to the nearest friendly command post, unfortunately this is not the best idea if Stalin’s Order 227 is in effect. Order 227, for those unfamiliar was an order issued by Joesph Stalin in 1942 that ordered any retreating Soviet soldiers to be shot on sight.
So, in CoH 2 when Order 227 is effect any unit that makes it back to base when the order is effect is shot on sight. So while the commander is out patrolling the base you can either allow a squad who is in a bad way to be killed by the Nazis or his own countrymen. While this is obviously horrible part of history it is also a very annoying part of Company of Heroes 2. Because the order alternates being in effect or not based on a timer, I’ve often sent high level veteran troops to retreat to heal and regroup at base using the retreat command only to have Order 227 start once they got there and I’m completely out of control of them while they got shot by a high ranking officer. A counter argument to this would be to manual walk them back to base but then they risk being shot on the way back.
