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KickStarter Iron Harvest - RTS set in alternate reality of 1920+ from KING Art Games

Alpharius

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The inbuilt problems (for me) of DoW2 MP were:

- retarded "merry-go-round" points capture;
- Retreat abuse;
- too many "clean-up" abilities

CoH2 was crappy compared to CoH1 due the entire commander retardation.

How does IH approach the fucking thing? Killing fantasy Poles could be good, but if it's stupid running around a post until someone unlocks a GG ability I won't even bother with the demo.
Victory points are the same as in coh2 and dow2 (it looks like it counts down points with dow2 speed or so).

Retreat is weaker than in coh2 it seems, its not much faster than regular walking and damage reduction while on retreat is hardly noticeable. Managed to kill like 3 squads of infantry on retreat with one mg mech in one go, then parked it in the enemy base until the other dude quit.

Not sure what you mean about "clean-up" abilities. In this game, other than grenades, it seems like each unit gets one special ability after reaching vet 1. For infantry its mostly "remove suppression", for mechs - some kind on special shot.

Other than that, what i don't like about this game is:
Cover barely functions (units constantly run out of it, or even go into melee if the enemies are close).
Only two resource types and not possible to build generator\listening posts. Edit: its possible to upgrade resource points.
The two factions present in the demo are almost like reskins of single faction. Only mechs are somewhat different.
Infantry units take forever to kill each other, like two basic units shooting each other while not in cover will take about 2x the time it takes for two coh2 units to do the same while sitting in green cover.
Heavy mg being attacked in melee continues shooting at the attackers at point blank range. :hahano:
Most weapons seem to have 100% accuracy (including anti-tank guns shooting infantry) and there is not such thing as armor deflecting a shot, so mech vs mech combat is nowhere near coh2 tank vs tank combat.
etc...
 
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Alienman

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game looks nice. I wish a game like this would release one day with a fucking speed scale because most of these games end up that you have all these cool units but you can't really control them in any realistic manner, things happen too fast and not in a realist way. Real war does not take place at the speed these RTS games do, and the issue is you are supposed to be a commander, but you can really only concentrate on giving one or two units orders so you either ignore the rest of the units who sit around doing nothing or you can draw a big green box around all your units and click on the enemy.

And honestly its this last point that might be most annoying. The fact is that in many many RTS games concentrating on building units really fast and then just drawing a big green box around them and clicking on one enemy strong point after another usually works..sometimes you might have to leave a contingent of guards behind or something--but it really does seem to work very often by just mass select and attack and not bother with combined arms or tactics or even worry about if you might be attacking with non combat units like nurses or farm animals or something, it simply usually does not matter..and its sadly at this point I often will exit out and never play whatever game in question this might be.

There have been a few exceptions to this, like the close combat games which is one reason that series was so much fun for me; you could attempt to apply actual tactics like a patient and well placed ambush of a tank using a bazooka team or maybe combined arms assault against a fortified church and church steeple.

This games visuals look awesome. But watching the game play video makes me think its just another one of those RTS games without much actual strategy, more just random clicking. The main issue is almost always that units just move way to quickly across the battlefield. The men are moving about 30-40MPH at all times it appears at least, everything is going at a way too unrealistic pace. I understand an actual realistic pace might be too slow, but there is something in between.


edit: I have wish listed the game. Perhaps there is a speed slider and I just don't know about it. Or maybe it will have mod support and somebody can mod it in. actually if the game had mod support that would be awesome, I bet people could come up with all sorts of good ideas.

You should give Men of War series a chance if you haven't. It got a nice balance between arcady RTS mechanics and "realism". If you wanna go full commander mode though, I recommend you testing out Graviteam Tactics: Mius-Front.
 
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game looks nice. I wish a game like this would release one day with a fucking speed scale because most of these games end up that you have all these cool units but you can't really control them in any realistic manner, things happen too fast and not in a realist way. Real war does not take place at the speed these RTS games do, and the issue is you are supposed to be a commander, but you can really only concentrate on giving one or two units orders so you either ignore the rest of the units who sit around doing nothing or you can draw a big green box around all your units and click on the enemy.

And honestly its this last point that might be most annoying. The fact is that in many many RTS games concentrating on building units really fast and then just drawing a big green box around them and clicking on one enemy strong point after another usually works..sometimes you might have to leave a contingent of guards behind or something--but it really does seem to work very often by just mass select and attack and not bother with combined arms or tactics or even worry about if you might be attacking with non combat units like nurses or farm animals or something, it simply usually does not matter..and its sadly at this point I often will exit out and never play whatever game in question this might be.

There have been a few exceptions to this, like the close combat games which is one reason that series was so much fun for me; you could attempt to apply actual tactics like a patient and well placed ambush of a tank using a bazooka team or maybe combined arms assault against a fortified church and church steeple.

This games visuals look awesome. But watching the game play video makes me think its just another one of those RTS games without much actual strategy, more just random clicking. The main issue is almost always that units just move way to quickly across the battlefield. The men are moving about 30-40MPH at all times it appears at least, everything is going at a way too unrealistic pace. I understand an actual realistic pace might be too slow, but there is something in between.


edit: I have wish listed the game. Perhaps there is a speed slider and I just don't know about it. Or maybe it will have mod support and somebody can mod it in. actually if the game had mod support that would be awesome, I bet people could come up with all sorts of good ideas.

You should give Men of War series a chance if you haven't. It got a nice balance between arcady RTS mechanics and "realism". If you wanna go full commander mode though, I recommend you testing out Graviteam Tactics: Mius-Front.
I did try men of war and liked it, but there was not much of a single player campaign. OTOH, I own both Mius Front and Tunisia and like them. Took awhile to learn to play them, still don't do artillery correct all the time, but there are some good videos on youtube that help explain it. Graviteam is awesome.
 

Van-d-all

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I did try men of war and liked it, but there was not much of a single player campaign
I remember playing several good campaigns, but can't really tell in which game since there are also Soldiers: Heroes & Faces of War games and some of them were remade in several games by devs and modders alike. Noticeably Soldiers had a great PzKpfw VI crew campaign, years before CoH. But indeed vanilla MoW1/2 were mostly just engine platforms for said campaign remakes.
 

Alienman

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I did try men of war and liked it, but there was not much of a single player campaign. OTOH, I own both Mius Front and Tunisia and like them. Took awhile to learn to play them, still don't do artillery correct all the time, but there are some good videos on youtube that help explain it. Graviteam is awesome.

The older games have campaigns, Men of War: Assault Squad 1 & 2 don't. Only skirmish and multiplayer, but there is a lot cool user made missions to download. I love the GEM engine, and I really wish someone else would pick it up and make a game. Think there was a Stalker like game in development for a while, but I assume it got cancelled.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamer.com/iron-harvest-let-me-destroy-a-giant-mech-with-a-bear/

Iron Harvest let me destroy a giant mech with a bear
Another thing scratched off the bucket list

Iron Harvest developer King Art Games knows what's good. Mechs, of course, are very good. Plonking those mechs in an alternate 1920s is even better. Bears? Also good, especially when you get to charge into battle with one. And an RTS with a cover system, weapons that can be picked up and a focus on singleplayer? Call the undertaker because, friends, I have died.

There are shades of many classic real-time strategy romps evident in Iron Harvest, but none have provided such clear inspiration as the oeuvre of Relic, most notably Company of Heroes. Calling it Company of Heroes with mechs is a slightly reductive description that I'm still absolutely going to use because there's no escaping its presence.

One of the first things that the tutorial teaches you is how to hide behind stuff. That's something you'll be doing a lot as you try to keep your troops from being riddled with bullets. Hover over some cover and you'll see green pips representing your units, and once your troops are behind the wall they can start exchanging fire without getting mown down straight away—at least until their cover gets blown to smithereens.

Enemies will try to do the same, obviously, necessitating tactics slightly more advanced than just clicking on stuff you want to kill. Chucking a grenade over the wall will help with any entrenched foes, but more often you'll want to flank them. If the AI or another player sees your troops moving in from the other direction, they might be able to fight off your attack, but that's where stealth comes in. As well as being able to sneak through bushes, you can hide behind anything that breaks line of sight, making it easier to get the drop on your target.

With even just a small number of basic troops, engagements have several tactical considerations and, in all the explosions and smoke, plenty of drama. It's rare that you'll just have bog standard riflemen to play with however, as Iron Harvest gives you plenty of opportunities to specialise them. You'll be able to recruit engineers, grenadiers, anti-mech units and the like from your barracks, but you can also get access to them out in the field by ordering your soldiers to pick up equipment from caches or fallen foes. Every encounter will invariably drop something, so you can be agile, shifting your tactics and reforging your army on the spot.

These features immediately evoke Company of Heroes and don't represent the full extent of the—welcome—similarities, but they've not been lifted wholesale. All of them feel different from Relic's approach, for better or worse.

Getting into cover, for instance, can be pretty fiddly. Frequently, I found my gormless troops walking to the wrong side of the wall, essentially marching into a firing squad. This happens a lot when you've selected multiple squads, because there's no room for them all, but it can also happen when you've just got a single squad selected and they've got nothing but space. The addition of melee combat throws more issues into the pot. When a squad behind cover gets into a melee brawl, some of the individual soldiers will remain in cover and ignore the attack, even if you've ordered the squad to fight back. Melee fights are also a lot harder to parse than ranged encounters, and generally just feel less refined.

The looting has been more successfully implemented and seems more central to Iron Harvest than it did in CoH, to the point where there's almost the whiff of an RPG. It feels great to be able to just grab some heavy weapons or make someone an engineer instead of waiting for them to appear back at the barracks and then hoof it all the way across the map. The campaign missions can be lengthy, but they always seem brisk because of their constant forward momentum.

Assisting the masses of infantry are hero units, a trio for each of the three factions, like Ana the sniper. Each of them brings animals into battle with them because why not? In Ana's case, it's a friendly (most of the time) bear, but other heroes are mates with tigers and wolves. Rather than being separate units, the pets follow their hero around everywhere, and their abilities are found alongside the hero abilities. This cuts down on micromanagement and lets you treat the pair like a single character with loads of utility. It's great, but the pet AI isn't. Unless you stay on top of them, it's anyone's guess where they'll end up. I lost count of the times I had to ask "Where the heck is Wojtek?" because that blasted bear had once again run off to attack some distant enemies who weren't even part of the fight.

Then we've got the mechs. Oh boy, what a treat. They come in lots of different shapes, sizes and roles, but compared to humans they are almost all behemoths. And sort of terrifying. Everything is squishy compared to a mech, and they laugh at cover. Sandbags ain't going to protect you against a machine that can smash its way through a building. The real bruisers can make mincemeat out of tough, fortified bunkers, and even the lighter ones can dish out and take a major beating. Chuck just a few of them into a fight and you're in for some carnage. Once the dust settles after the really big scraps, it's like looking at a wasteland. Buildings turned to rubble, trees uprooted, the ground pounded until it's just holes and mud—it's impressive and a bit horrifying.

Despite this, mechs are far from unstoppable. I was surprised, actually, to see just how quickly even the big bastards can be taken down with some concentrated fire and a good position. If you can get the mech facing away from your troops, it won't take long to dismantle, especially if you've got some heavy weapons and artillery. This glaring vulnerability doesn't make them any less deadly, but it makes fighting them less of a slog.

When everyone brings the big guns out and dukes it out until the bitter end, Iron Harvest becomes a glorious mess. One of the campaign missions ends with the desperate defense of a train as wave after wave of mechs and men rush at you. It's around 10 minutes of near constant, exhausting fighting, and with every wave things get bleaker and bleaker. All that handy cover starts vanishing and the trainyard becomes this open space where everyone is just kicking the absolute shit out of each other. It's hard to make considered, tactical decisions when the apocalypse is happening all around you. I just kept flinging more meat into the grinder and plugging up gaps with as many bodies and guns as I could. At one point, with nary a rock to hide behind, I ordered my engineers to construct more sandbags right in the middle of a firefight. To their credit, they managed to fill in half of the wall before a mech—my mech—destroyed it with its massive clown feet. Thanks, bud.

I mentioned the singleplayer focus earlier, but there is of course still multiplayer, along with skirmishes that you can play alone or with pals, and special singleplayer challenge missions. It's the campaigns, though, that sit at the heart of Iron Harvest. I've only played a portion of one faction campaign, but at launch there will be three. Those I took for a spin all boasted unique wrinkles and objectives, both primary and secondary, that left plenty of room for different approaches, though not to the extent that I was ever left wondering how to get ready for the next explosive clash.

Campaign missions are interspersed with conversation and bookended by cutscenes, usually following a memorable set piece battle. Personal stakes and family drama shrink the war down and make it less abstract, offering a greater sense of the world without heaps of exposition. This also makes it potentially a good entry point into the 1920+ setting, which it shares with Scythe. There's more than a bit of Warcraft 3 in it, in both the structure and character-driven narrative, and this taster has given me an appetite for more.

There's not too long to wait. There are seven weeks to go until Iron Harvest launches, but based on this preview build there are still quite a few rough edges that need buffing out in that short space of time. As well as the cover and melee niggles, there's the UI that hides a good portion of your troop list and inconsistent pathfinding. With its foundations built on some of the best games in the genre, however, and the spectacle of the mech and infantry combat, there's still a great deal of promise. You can make a bear fight a mech—that counts for a lot.
 

Alpharius

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Btw, they added two heroes and call-ins (called reserves in the game) for each faction in the new beta. Some heroes are OP as fuck while others are meh, but each of the early-game infantry heroes is easily capable of killing 2-3 infantry squads all by themselves, then retreat to base to instanly get back to full health for free. :decline: Vehicle heroes at least require repairs by engineers.

Call-ins are like: before the start of the game you get a certain amount of "call-in resources" which you can spend on 3 t1 slots and 3 t2 slots. Then during the game you can use these call-ins to get units much cheaper than they would have been otherwise available (but only once). Heroes are also part of the call-in. t1 ones require barracks or workshop and t2 ones require upgraded barracks or workshop.This allows to, say, call in the heaviest mechs without builing the workshop or spend everything on t1 call-in for early game advantage (which 90% of the people in 1v1 MP would do).

This sort-of improved the game in short term until everybody figures out the most OP combinations, but not sure its a good idea in long term seeing as coh2 suffered from call-in meta for a long time. Also this made investing in fast mech workshop questionable at best.

Also the devs organized a toureny https://play.eslgaming.com/ironharvest/global/open/pre-season
The first qualifier was on Saturday, most players picked rusviet and spammed the local assault space marine replacement (melee troops with jet packs and exo-skeletons).

Imo, the game still largely sucks though. :(
 
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Alienman

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Shit. "Dumbed down Company of Heroes clone". It's not that CoH was that advanced to begin with. Not good.

Edit:

Haha, 15 minute games for multiplayer. What the fuck.
 
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jebsmoker

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i tried the free mp demo a month ago or so. it felt completely lifeless - the only good thing the game had going for it was its strong art style. its otherwise completely unenjoyable
 

Van-d-all

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This game is geared towards becoming the largest disappointment of this year. Except art-style based on Różalski's paintings, pretty much everything is an unbalanced, dry copy of CoH, so much so they didn't even give mechs unique pathfinding and they move like regular vehicles.
 

Alpharius

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Art-style looks cool in the pictures but in game the setting looks kinda ridiculous imo.

Giant mech equipped with claws and jump-jets? Even warhammer 40k orks don't have anything like it afaik. (There are two hero mechs like that and one regular unit).
A spinning conical mech that attacks its enemies with exploding wheels, woot? (thats actually the only wheeled vehicles present in the game).

Maybe things like that are traditional for steampunk genre?

Though stuff like regular infantry being ineffective against support weapon teams, even when flanking, while bears and wolves are a hard-counter, or the melee exo-skeleton troops that look like they are armed with two giant dildos are certainly not.
 

Darth Roxor

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You goyim must be very fabulously optimistic to be disappointed now, because this game has looked like ass to me since day 1.

Though maybe that's because I never liked CoH in the first place.
 

BrotherFrank

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I always like to read previous game journo articles and previews once a highly anticipated game turns out to be disappointing to have a laugh and remind myself exactly why game journos cannot be trusted.

And here is no exception, I want to ask the pcgamer journo what version of iron harvest he was playing considering how many details and impressions just don’t match what we got in the end.
 

Ninjerk

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You goyim must be very fabulously optimistic to be disappointed now, because this game has looked like ass to me since day 1.

Though maybe that's because I never liked CoH in the first place.
I'd like to see the appeal in a sort of dieselpunk game, but walking trashcans are just not that interesting to me.
 
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i tried the free mp demo a month ago or so. it felt completely lifeless - the only good thing the game had going for it was its strong art style. its otherwise completely unenjoyable

me too, I played it for like 6 minutes and uninstalled. It just felt like any other RTS game I have ever played, you could not really control your units with any tactics because you had too many to control and too much was happening too fast and they had too many skills, so you could really only manage one at a time meaning the others just stupidly did random stuff or nothing at all and after 10 minutes you could easily have 10 units who were randomly wandering around doing god knows what.

It was just as effective to draw a giant box around all of your units and point them at the enemies unit building bases and have them destroy them one at a time, without any attention wasted thinking about useless things such as 'tactics' or 'strategy'. Its all an illusion that your choices mean anything really. Even accidentally rounding up the non-combat pure builder or nurse units does not matter, who cares...it will still work itself out fine. Most RTS games seem to work like this.
 
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Phinx

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I'd totally forgotten about this game, then randomly decided to check up on it yesterday and gleamed with excitement when I saw it was open beta. Now I want to forget the game altogether. I got more enjoyment out of DOW 3..........
 

Alpharius

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The finals of 5000€ tourney the devs organized are currently on. First play-offs were yesterday, second ones are today and the final finals will be tomorrow. The pro Starcraft, Warcraft, etc. players that devs invited (for some cash apparently) to compete against the dudes that beaten the qualifiers have quickly gotten rekt after two 10-minute games, because they apparently didn't bother to play the game for more than a few hours before the tourney. :hahano:

Stream is here if anyone is interested. https://www.twitch.tv/taketv
 

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