elaborate

>>2115552
i thought it was fun. just wish i had friends to play it with

>>2115563
It's easier to think of anything it does right or well. About the only thing I can think of is the deployment is well streamlined and the information for individual engagements (i.e. hit prob, penetration, los) is well presented. I know some people like the smart tactics things but I only use defensive fire and counterbattery for laziness.
>division system to add unit and gameplay/tactic variety
>add divisions that have everything, while others are lacking so you have zero incentive to play them and it's just a stomp if you have the wrong division
>add historical divisions
>completely make up unit compositions and numbers anyway
>set it in 1944 eastern europe
>add dozens of allied divisions and western front divisions, completely power creep base eastern front divs
>also refuse to add western front maps
>add moral system to prevent rambo
>also add fanatical and commando
>have module damage for tanks
>but only on certain penetrations and it's quite rare, you'll basically never see a tank throw a track lol
>have staged deployment phases
>it's completely arbitrary which divisions get what in different phases
>set game in period of soviet offensive
>give german divisions more units, tanks, and unit variety
>the absolute state of anything HE
>the entirety of crewed weapon damage/suppression mechanics

>>2115611
My hot take is that SD44 was better than SD2. They gutted the division system because wargame fags didn't like it and ended up making a game for nobody.
SD44 divisions were much more restrictive, units were more strongly tied to phases and you couldn't choose your income like in 2. This meant that there were a few obvious things to do and relatively little variation but it also gave the decisions a stronger identity.
There were also unicorns in powercreep divisions in 1 but it probably wasn't around for long enough to fuck up even more so that saves it a bit.
When it comes to general gameplay I also preferred the smaller ranges and scale of the first game. It was fun fighting treeline to treeline. More mid range engagements than IU experienced in 2.

>>2115650
>My hot take is that SD44 was better than SD2
This is true
I played a lot of SD44
Barely any SD2 despite having a hard on for the setting

SD44 was infinitely better purely because the scale wasn't retarded.

>tfw no friends to play eugen games with
feels sad man

>>2115552
Damn man I swear I wanted to get into this game so bad, it seems like on paper everything I'd like in a strategy game, but let's be real okay steel division 2 fucking sucks.
and i really cant put my finger on why, it just somehow is way less than the sum of its parts. every 6 months or so I'll try to boot up an army general campaign, imagining my hours-spanning rts strategy delight, but then immediately Im just underwhelmed and bored as fuck. The tanks are completely random, might tank 10 hits or your Panther might get one shoted by a shitty T-34 from across the map, the battles are all the fucking same, the infantry fights are boring slogs, artillery and machine guns don't actually do much except "pin" units. It's like they focused so much on realism that they forgot to add the fun

>>2117788
Same. I reached 500 hours recently and it's just the realization I come back on. It sets up logic, breaks it, and feels like a balancing mess. It ends up feeling deeply unsatisfying doing anything, like you're luck shittering or the enemy didn't even have a chance or you lost only because you didn't have the magic counter unit or a dice roll on penetration/suppression. They add so many divisions, but let's be honest, there's literally zero reason not to just play LSSAH, Lehr, or Fallschrimjager or 1st SAS or 4th Armored. It's so incredibly undynamic for a WWII rts at this scale. A weaker division will rarely punch up using tactics because basic shit like infantry to infantry engagements can be so comically imbalanced. I vaporized four fucking soviet squads with one fallschirmjager unit. And I already know there's no counterplay for them because I've had it happen to me. Your infantry just lose, there is no infantry counterplay tactic, you stop and run away. You have to fall back on artillery or a fire support weapon. The cost is now imbalanced, you need to spend twice the amount to counter, which means they have a point surplus over you. And the commando infantry decks are all spam decks, they get waves of elite infantry that requires no skill to use. The same applies to tanks. A Panther or Tiger will absolutely lock out any enemy armor at 2km. Everything except IS-2 and Firefly, but Firefly is always a dice roll. Elefant is even more of a joke because IS-2 can't even front pen it, there's like 3 fucking options for destroying those, the only reliable one is AT rocket planes. Then there's offmap in. Literally zero counterplay to it. Just ~100 pts for free saturation. The Brits have absolutely baffling offmap.

SD2 manages to make CoH feel coherent and polished, which is incredible.

>>2117788
idk there are much more realistic games (graviteam) that are more fun so it's not that. It think it's just down to how badly their engine handles combat is one of the main issues. Also the devs just suck.

>>2118309
The division system worked best Airland Battle and Red Dragon campaigns, and it should have stayed that way. Aside from greed, there was literally no other reason to change that. Just look at DLCs for Red Dragon, and then DLCs for SD2 or Warno.
Red Dragon: ~$50 total
SD2: ~$300 total
Warno: $114 total
It looked like that because in RD you had country DLCs, like Israel, South Africa or Finland. If you paid once, you got all units from that country. Meanwhile, in newer games you have shit ton of DLCs, with copypasted units.

I played this game for hundreds of hours but every time get bored of the map design so quickly. 2KM ambushes and the way mountain/hill elevation is implemented in floors is so stupid. Love the large scale infantry fights but shit like satchels and flamethrowers just vaporize everything so you got to micromanage like crazy or get rolled over. And sometimes having 20-man rifle squads get instantly destroyed/demoralized by 5-man elite squads.

>>2115552
>all of the right ideas
Not that many right ideas IMO, I realized very quickly that most Soviet divisions are largely different assortments of the same units, especially on release. This is kind of inevitable when one nation occupies an entire faction on its own, but I felt that the Germans in SD44 had more variety.
I also never understood Eugen's strange hard-on for all the pseudo-map painter campaigns. They all keep reusing the same 3-4 maps turning every campaign into a slog, I couldn't bring myself to finish even a single one of the OG release campaigns. At least the WRD campaign was kind of fun in a silly way since the AI had no brains and would mindlessly charge columns into your defence line. SD2 is just boring.
A genuinely think a linear campaign like WEE and SD44 is a better choice, focus on just one division or group of units at a time, giving you a persistent group of units across a series of properly constructed and scripted missions to get the player attached to that ONE unit that you're always using before it gets destroyed or something is always neat IMO.

Division system is a straight up downgrade from WGRD's nation system and exists solely to nickle and dime you

File: 1724914388659668.png (19 KB, 803x809)

19 KB PNG

>>2119583
It is what it is.

>>2115552
i don't like the way deployment in quick and ranked play is handled

units just racing to the middle of the map feels pretty retarded
i don't really know how it could be handled better, guess being able to place some defensive structures close to the middle (like in the "Close Combat"-mode) would maybe fix it?

also i feel like you never actually get to use realistic textbook tactics, part of it is because while the maps are huge they are covered with chokepoints
(also fugg western front divisions)

all of this is 1v1 POV btw. Don't really play 10v10 since it doesn't involve any skill whatsoever, literally had games where I sat back for 30 minutes doing nothing then bombed the enemy to death earning us the victory

I like it :/

>>2124654
what do you like about it

File: sdII ach.jpg (21 KB, 487x220)

21 KB JPG

>>2126003
That it's set in WWII, engagement ranges are realistic, weapon stats and performance are reasonably realistic, focus on combat not base building, low APM is fine so you're not sweating your ass off, ability to adjust speed/pause, the graphics are good, the voice acting is good, division building is fun, armor battles are fun (but I get why they can be BS), the (shorter) campaigns are fun. I just play single player though.

I don't like the DLC system and how money grubbing the devs are. and the larger campaigns become a slog pretty quick. autoresolve is also completely broken, you could be cleaning up 1 MG company and a few supply trucks with a full strength battalion, and autoresolve will delete like half your tanks sometimes. so you have to load the whole god damn map and battle if you want to avoid that.

I understand all the criticism ITT but I've had a lot of fun playing it. I also have never played SD44, so sounds like I am missing out

>>2126570
i wish they wouldve fulfilled their mapmaker promise, but it's the french so what can you do.
at least warno has a mapmaker.

>>2115552
>>2117788
>>2118309
>>2118677

Steel Division is a game that on its first impressions looks and feels like it 'should' be a great game, but it's actually pretty bad.

There is a reason that (unfortunately) the Steel Division series (along with Act of Aggression) were collectively such sales flops it started the dominoes falling for Eugen falling apart (They got dropped from Paradox as a publisher...couldn't pay wages...employees went on strike...had to fire people on top of that...etc.)

The main thing is that, despite how much content it seems to be stuffed with, how much authenticity they seem to try to put into it, with how 'slick' some of the look and feel of it is ... it is just not a fun game.

>AI is not good enough to make the skirmish maps fun
>Army General is an idea that sounds great on paper but is just a gigantic, horrific, never-ending slog of the same battles over and over again
>(Both are worse than just a normal scripted campaign, if we're being honest)
>Once you 'figure out' the game the AI is completely trivial and cheese
But more importantly than that -
>The division system is a horrific, bloated mess, with so much redundancy and overlap
>The phase and income systems are just needless complexity and absolutely toxic for any newer or more casual player
>The basic combat mechanics are really pretty irksome, just like with SD44 they really got into the idea of 'losing control of your troops' as somehow fun, infantry combat is pretty underutilized, RPG ranges are so damn short, weapons like AT are such a bitch to set up

It's pretty sad that not only with this but with Warno, it's really clear they really 'lucked into' Wargame's mechanics being so much more fun to play with, and really didn't understand why that game was so good (and had so much potential that was never fulfilled)

However with the dumpster fire that is the overhyped and utterly disappointing Broken Arrow, I guess we can see that it wasn't so easy, I guess

Honestly what killed me and my group from playing this game is that you had to memorize like 20 stats and 200 units in order to make effective counters to stuff. It's a game where you can be managing a huge army across a massive front but every single engagement simultaneously requires your constant attention but does not allow you to input any real micro.

>>2127160
> and 200 units
having a shitton of unicorn units is imo ok when it's tanks, artillery, armoured cards or planes - but with infantry it's just such a chore

> is this double flamer unit good or bad?
> Should I pick the one with 9 SMGs and a Grenade or 8 SMGs and a molotov
> ... wait ... aren't those units the same? Oh ... one has semi auto rifles instead of bolt action which makes it 0.3% more effective

>>2126698
RPG range is fine imo, also (for the most part) pretty realistic
phase system is ok imo, allows for some interesting strategies and tournaments. Maybe a little of of tweaking is needed

agree with the rest dough. The AI and Singleplayer are just straight up sad
especially frustrating because one of the reasons for there not being more maps or a map maker is that they AI is "optimized" for each map individually so one would at least expect better AI

>>2127344
Yeah you're right, it is easy to understand that a Tiger is stronger than a sherman, but its annoying trying to remember of Rslkhgoys Strelki are better than Sodngsik Strelki

are any of the US divisions from tribute to normandy '44 divs fun/good? i've been playing 3rd armored and love it, and playing some 2nd indianhead and enjoy it slightly less than 3rd armored but it's still fun (highly dependent on the map though.)

>>2115552
Game went to shit when they rebalanced all tanks due to Multiplayer drama, tanks where no more fun afterwards. Next big thing was the constant DLC power creep.

>>2127913
4th Armored is top tier. People like 101st but it didn't click with me much, maybe cause I'm not a plane nigger.
>>2127160
It's really annoying how you can't preview divisions in the armory. So if you don't have a DLC you'll never know wtf you're going up against until it rolls over you. Also not having the armory in immediately lobby is so stupid. You have click out like 5 times to get to it.
>>2119583
In another universe, it was good and each division was unique and had a unique playstyle/tactics. We are faaar from that universe.

The concept of having real units but then having you pick a subset of them is retarded

>>2128127
whats the 4th armored deck look like? i like 3rd since it has a lot of m4s to spam and all their infantry can come in halftracks and a lot of them have bazookas. i'd love to have more infantry slots and options.

>>2115552
Yeah making germans wildly overpowered in both games was a big mistake.

>>2128486
More recon, more infantry, similar tanks but no jumbo, M18 spam. Artillery is similar but no mlrs. You'd probably like it more. You get the AP rocket fighter which is a big help.

>>2128898
>no jumbo
sad, but it sounds like everything else more than makes up for the trade

>>2115552
I really didn't like the game. Any game that focuses on multiplayer first is going to go to shit.

>>2129593
> Any game that focuses on multiplayer first is going to go to shit.
you people always claim that but then you have games continuing to get updates for a decade+ thanks to a multiplayer while games that focus on single-player are forgotten within a month

>>2115730
this is partially correct, partially because the number of units are dictated by the game settings, its up to the lobby master to set up settings to have a number of units similar to sd44 that was managable.

but yes, the standart settings end up with extreme spam after mid game that makes the game disgusting, loved sd44 and bought sd2 but never really got into it because of that reason

>>2115552
What I played of steel division 1 was better. More unique divisions, much more tactical terrain and unit ranges and no off map call ins.
SD2 mp was pure faggotry in comparison.

holy fug. playing shitty decks 1v1 vs a friend is a lot of fun.

>>2129698
AoE2 has immense SP content

>>2115552
81mm, 107mm, or 120mm mortars?

>>2131546
120

it da biggest

>>2131560
thank you gork or mork. if only i could paint it red to go faster.

My entire PC keeps crashing if I'm in the armory/making divisions for too long in steel division 2 and warno. Fucking french coders.

>>2131546
whatever is radio or mobile (or both. 120mm are pure luck but they can be brutal. Non-radio 81 is really meh, radio 81mm (the US ones) is literally god tier King Tiger slayer.
>>2126698
>the idea of 'losing control of your troops' as somehow fun
As the French typically are, this is a poetic statement about controlling an army of soldiers who want to do literally everything but fight. It's almost nihilistic watching your tank get panicked, turn his ass around immediately and get shot. Or watching a 12 man squad surrender to one guy with a flamethrower because the red surrender bar above his head got filled up slightly faster than the other guy. Your men are nothing but inefficient robots that you send to the slaughter. No personality, no heroism, just a number and a stat card. A 1 man squad is no different than 15 man. They have those random unique units that get named? Yeah, those guys spawn first and almost always die first and there's no replenishment mechanics so they're nothing more than expendable. Soldiers don't even vet, they only get vet when they stand in the right spot within the circle of the other guy whose purpose is to make them fight better.
>>2130552
SD1 has a decent looking UI too. SD2 just looks unfinished and actually fucking illegible in deployment phase.

>>2115552
Play Graviteam or Combat Mission instead

>>2133345
are the radio US 107s inferior to radio 81s?

>>2134235
Not necessarily. I still stick with 81s because I prefer the higher rof and cheaper cost but the 107s get an extra man, more firepower, and still fill the same role. I think they get same amount per card/phase too.

>>2133345
SD2 UI is so weird. I thought it was a placeholder when the game was first revealed and it was in early access or something, but no, they just kept the flat grey boxes when first game had much better ui

>>2134807
i works, i like it, the game has bigger problems than ui to be honest like spammy gameplay at standart settings