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I want to spread this news around, as I find it a very interesting idea.

THQ/Relic have released a new version of their highly acclaimed RTS Company of Heroes. It's basically a slight upgrade of the original release, with some ability tweaks, new hero units and a persistent levelling mechanic for commanders, designed to be played online (though still having the single player campaign, skirmish tutorials and AI opponents etc.)

The twist? It's free. You can spend money if you wish to gain points to buy new stuff for your commander, but nothing you couldn't earn in-game anyway, so for the sensible people it costs zero.

The model has already been tried in Asia and was apparently successful enough for them to try it out here as well. It's just gone into open beta, so stuff may change, but... I mean, wowsa- the whole game for free... that's a good deal.

Check it out- a new model like this deserves support.

www.companyofheroes.com

****ing awesome!

It's almost too good to be believable, isn't it? Ok, CoH is a few years old now and I am sure the unit purchase/upgrade system has some imbalance, but who cares? Play with friends and you aren't forced to use the custom units if you don't want to, or use them all to play against the AI on expert mode... plus the campaign is there... yeah. Good stuff.

I have the original and subsequent expansions, plus cool mods so I won't be downloading this, lol. COH though is a fantastic game I've been playing it for many years and it still has a large and loyal fanbase. I strongly recommend anyone reading this post to get the game.

They have plans to add the expansions over time, and apparently they'll hand out some freebies to people who have valid cd keys of the originals...

Originally posted by Ushgarak
They have plans to add the expansions over time, and apparently they'll hand out some freebies to people who have valid cd keys of the originals...

Last bit is awesome, but with micro-transaction I foresee balancing issues, more-so than already present in vanilla COH, so I would much rather just stick with what I got.

I'm not interested just because I played the original for its SP. Didn't bother with skirmish.

But this is my favourite RTS.

I think the difference any micro transactions make is rather small- gameplay is at least 9/10ths of it. The bigger hassle is levelling up your commander so he can use more abilities.

Anyway, a good choice to get with some like-minded friends and play together with; you can junk all the extra stuff if desired.

Well..I decided to download the game and install it cuz one of my friends plays it, so if anyone wants a really good player for 2v2 games let me know.

Irritatingly it has been down for a little while now. Their three hour service maintenance from yesterday seems to have gone badly enough to actually take out the website.

Originally posted by Ushgarak
Irritatingly it has been down for a little while now. Their three hour service maintenance from yesterday seems to have gone badly enough to actually take out the website.

That and the fact that people are still complaining that nothing has been fixed. They also supposedly added an operation dynamo mode..any idea what that is?

Actually it turns out it's not that the servers are still down- it's that a lot of players, especially from Europe, have been locked out the system. I was one, though right now it seems to be working again. They aren't sure what the common link is; they seem to be looking into it.

'Operation Dynamo' is just the name for the new patch. People are often unhappy at new patches, but it does look like they are making a lot of effort. The front end has been tweaked, especially the friends list, and they've finally added in AI players replacing dropped players (dropped players' units used to just disappear; pretty odd in a modern day RTS). But it also came with a bunch of balance tweaks, and as ever people are moody about what is and is not in there.