Unity of Command Forums

"The problem is that it all feels too random when you get down to it. Whether you get any objective is often down to whether or not the RNG will come up in your favor when using air and artillery. Did you manage to suppress every enemy step? Good, you can have the objective! Did the enemy maintain an artillery step because that's just how the dice rolled? You're out of luck, prepare to still have 3:0 combat odds, even though you outnumber the enemy 2:1 even without suppression.

The original UoC felt like 80% skill and 20% luck, this installment feels like 80% luck and 20% skill. Whenever I win a scenario, I don't feel like I accomplished anything, but just that the dice came up in my favor enough to eke out a victory.

Another issue is that defense is way overpowered. I had a 6 step british tank with 3 extra support steps sitting next to 3 step german infantry entrenched in a city. The combat odds were 2:0 against me. Seriously? In UoC 1 I could blast him in one go, as it should be."
"

It seems to me a review of someone who is not able to cope with the fact that he has no skills higher than playing at the Easy level ...
I finished the entire campaign on level three (classic) during testing and I don't think I'm lucky - it was a very satisfying, difficult, logical puzzle
IMO the person who wrote the text above cannot use all the possibilities offered by UoC 2 at this moment
It's all, so don't worry, buy this game and be happy...

EDIT. Wadi Akarit & Tunis scns accomplished perfectly, even got "Masters of the North African Shores" badge

Yes, they are wrong, this game takes skill. Just there are more weights that influence battles than UoC1.

slippr wrote:"The problem is that it all feels too random when you get down to it. Whether you get any objective is often down to whether or not the RNG will come up in your favor when using air and artillery. Did you manage to suppress every enemy step? Good, you can have the objective! Did the enemy maintain an artillery step because that's just how the dice rolled? You're out of luck, prepare to still have 3:0 combat odds, even though you outnumber the enemy 2:1 even without suppression.

The original UoC felt like 80% skill and 20% luck, this installment feels like 80% luck and 20% skill. Whenever I win a scenario, I don't feel like I accomplished anything, but just that the dice came up in my favor enough to eke out a victory.

Another issue is that defense is way overpowered. I had a 6 step british tank with 3 extra support steps sitting next to 3 step german infantry entrenched in a city. The combat odds were 2:0 against me. Seriously? In UoC 1 I could blast him in one go, as it should be."
"

Where is this review from?
OTOH, I get it, sometimes the RNG is frustrating. OTOH, urban combat is a b*th for a good reason, there are tactics you can use to swing the odds in your favor if you know how to use them (Feints are my new favorite tactics), you can often encircle or bypass strongpoints with creativity, and, well, Lady Luck was a no good cheater in real war, too.

The negative comment is not a fair critique of the game, in my opinion.

I know what he's on about. More than once I've found myself on the last turn of a battle, with a single shot at the objective at a 70% retreat chance...and I fail to take it. But the reason I'm on the final turn, with just this one last shot at the objective, is that I have made strategic and tactical errors earlier on.

The game provides many ways of handling difficult situations, and there are usually several ways to approach a scenario.

Yes, every once in a while the RNG will pile up against you. A few turns of unseasonal mud in exactly the wrong places, some outlier combat results, a string of failed air attacks, a city in ruins from just one tiny little artillery attack. In my experience these sort of RNG clusterf***s account for a small minority of my losses. The rest are all my fault.

One other thing - if you play the game expecting to take all the objectives on time, you'll get frustrated. Some of the "optional" objectives are really hard to get, and are more RNG dependent, and they are sometimes mutually exclusive. That's why they are optional. And missing a primary objective by a turn or two is often not that big a deal. So take the corkscrews of warfare in stride, keep slogging ahead and accept that your whole campaign run will never be perfect!

When I focused on 1 extremely difficult additional task, then it will almost certainly affect the quick completion of other tasks, both main and additional
When planning the mission, I define what is my minimum goal, e.g. completing all main objectives plus 60-80% extra tasks

Slippr, have you ever consider how it is to attack the city (where soldiers are fortified), or even worse the ruin, with tanks?

Just check on Cassino, and you will see what kind of nightmare this is. Several months of it, to be precise.

So 2:0 is pretty generous. It could be even worse.

It is good to think a bit about the situation the game wanna simulate in historical on-the-field terms. Something this "reviewer" failed to.

slippr wrote:"The problem is that it all feels too random when you get down to it. Whether you get any objective is often down to whether or not the RNG will come up in your favor when using air and artillery. Did you manage to suppress every enemy step? Good, you can have the objective! Did the enemy maintain an artillery step because that's just how the dice rolled? You're out of luck, prepare to still have 3:0 combat odds, even though you outnumber the enemy 2:1 even without suppression."

It's true that an attack works way better if the enemy are suppressed. Whether they're suppressed has very little to do with RNG and a great deal to do with player skill.

slippr wrote:The original UoC felt like 80% skill and 20% luck, this installment feels like 80% luck and 20% skill. Whenever I win a scenario, I don't feel like I accomplished anything, but just that the dice came up in my favor enough to eke out a victory."

That's just wrong and suggests he hasn't played UoC1 or UoC2 much. UoC2 is way less RNG dependent that UoC1.

slippr wrote:Another issue is that defense is way overpowered. I had a 6 step british tank with 3 extra support steps sitting next to 3 step german infantry entrenched in a city. The combat odds were 2:0 against me. Seriously? In UoC 1 I could blast him in one go, as it should be."

That's because the infantry unit was entrenched in a city. Using tanks to attack entrenched infantry in cities is a bad idea in real-life too. For one example: Arnhem. A single parachute battalion held Arnhem bridge for four days against two armoured divisions. The remnants of the division held Oosterbeek for 10 days!

Overall, the review doesn't show much, other that the reviewer doesn't know how to play the game.

My take on this, which I will be sure to include in my review, is the exact opposite.

I found the RNG much more frustrating in UoC i - getting all brilliant in Black Turn, which I am playing in parallel, is far harder (although I am in Normal not Classic difficulty yet on UoC ii) - and that is despite many more restarts.

Many of the things that lead to RNG frustration in UoC i (aka real-life battlefields) are far better modelled and under your control in UoC ii (Supply, Battlefield assets, and a deployment phase). As a result, it is a puzzle with slightly more dimensions, but far more rewarding when you learn to master it.

There are of course a few new aspects that the increased abstraction levels bring it: occasionally you can get the wrong side of the RNG in a card drop, which can make things like Pola or Arnhem harder, but having played 150 hours so far, you learn to plan and solve these situations.

My recommendation to the OP reviewer would be to start on easy, see the good online tutorials already out there, and repeat until they have the system down.
Of course, it might be that the OP reviewer was looking for a more casual experience than this game could provide, which can't be helped.

/A

The reviewer is wrong - dumb luck played a far bigger role in UoC1 as people are saying.

Among other improvements I like how a patch of bad weather in the wrong spot isn't the kiss of death any more.