[miguel_marinheiro]

Importance Of Balance

Balance is one of the most important aspects of any game. If a game isn’t balanced, strategic thinking can quickly shrink down to a single, boring decision path.

This is even more crucial in RTS games. A single unit without a proper counter can do more harm to the competitive environment than an overpowered gun in a shooter.

I want to reflect on some of the decisions made during development — specifically, the guiding mantra behind Company of Heroes 3: maximizing strategic diversity. The aim was to move beyond the repetition of the same 1–2 build orders with only minor variations each match.

The Sandbox Trap

In theory, this sounds great. But in practice, it noticeably changed the moment-to-moment gameplay.

To make multiple build paths viable, each had to be equipped with tools to handle any threat. Otherwise, players would drop them immediately. But when every path has all the tools, decision-making seems in part to become less interesting. Choices no longer feel “wrong” — they become a matter of taste rather than a reaction to the opponent.

The silent dialogue between players — the reactive dance — is diluted.

By giving players everything they might need upfront, it unintentionally made adaptation less rewarding. This can result in the feeling that “No matter what I try, my opponent usually has a pre-baked answer, even if they hadn’t anticipated my move”.

Lessons from StarCraft II

In StarCraft II, we still see the kind of strategic flow that CoH1 and CoH2 also had. You begin on a critical path — say, opening with marines — and from there, you either set the pace (rush) or react to your opponent. Each option has strengths and weaknesses.

Pacing strategies often sacrifice flexibility. If you overcommit early and aren’t prepared for counters, you fall behind or lose outright. This kind of high-stakes decision-making opens the door for bluffing, risk-taking, and deep replayability.

But imagine StarCraft II letting you start with a factory instead of a barracks, or building marauders before marines. That’s essentially what was allowed in CoH3.

I believe that having a curated path that players are expected to traverse and at certain points diverge if needed helps narrow down the gameplay tree and focus on making those road forks as interesting as possible.

The Cost of Strategic Diversity

By embracing wide-open strategic diversity, it becomes harder to “hard counter” your opponent. Even if you correctly identified their plan and reacted immediately, the best outcome was often parity.

Instead of having a primary strategy tree with niche offshoots (viable only in specific scenarios, but that excel when deployed in them), you now have many paths pushed into the main tree. Niche builds became generalist, and as a result, often felt underwhelming when used to fight certain strategies.

Asymmetry is Fun

Another side effect was the flattening of asymmetry. Some strategies are just inherently less fun to play against, and previously, the faction design helped mitigate that.

Take Company of Heroes 1. Either by design intent or pure luck, the American faction didn’t start with machine guns, but instead had the rifleman squad — their equivalent of a marine. These squads were stronger than their Axis counterpart, the Volksgrenadiers, which meant Axis players had to play defensively, hoping to outsmart the enemy in tactical engagements or bring out an MG42.

That single asymmetry created incredibly dynamic gameplay. Americans tried to outmaneuver MG arcs and attack from multiple angles. Axis players, in turn, tried to set up smart defensive positions and protect their MGs during redeployment.

Both factions had clear, enticing early-game goals. The asymmetry was compelling.

But what happens when both factions start with similar tools — like MGs — and both rely on turtling and slow territory control?

The result is a slower, more passive game with fewer meaningful interactions. It raises the question: what’s more important — offering maximum strategic choice, or ensuring players engage in interesting interactions at every stage?

This can make the player feel like the game offers wide strategic breath but low strategic and tactical depth.

The MG Dilemma

Let me touch briefly on one specific case: machine guns.

In CoH1, American MGs weren’t very impactful. Players expressed frustration. So in CoH3, we gave them better access to suppression tools to handle unit blobs. On paper, it made sense — they needed a counter to grouped infantry, and without it in playtests we noticed that grouping units against a faction with no access to the MG resulted in more grouping.

Which is a problem given that seeing a blob of soldiers charge a point, ignoring cover, simply shatters any illusion of tactical authenticity.

Ironically, CoH1 had a hidden system that already addressed this: penalties for grouped units. It wasn’t obvious to the player, so it was removed in CoH3 for the sake of clarity and accessibility.

That subtle system punished blobbing regardless of faction, and in doing so, made room for more asymmetry in faction design. It might not have been immediately visible to new players, but over time it helped shape better gameplay.

It was no longer absolutely needed to give each faction an HMG (at least in the same phases of the game), if the game systematically can already help handle it.

Upgrade Decisions

Another goal Company of Heroes 3 set out to achieve was to move away from Company of Heroes 2’s widely accessible upgrades like grenades, weapon upgrades and tech upgrade choices. In Company of Heroes 2 many units naturally got grenades without any decision from the player.

Company of Heroes 3 moves away from this idea to give space to more interesting choices, grenades and browning submachine gun (BARs)  went back to being an actual upgrade for the Americans.

However another non-perceived natural side effect of opening more strategic paths is the more wide adaption of “low risk, low investment” upgrades and units, upgrades like the “Grenades Package” and “BARs” got toned down to give space for more strategies to emerge on the other side and as such their cost adjusted to match the new power level, which creates friction with the original goal.

This of course is not the case for all upgrades but something that had certainly to be taken into account due to the overarching goal.

Where I Land Today

While there were many good things that arose from more strategic diversity it also heavily affected the meaningful decisions that were presented before.

Of course, this is in hindsight. When rough timelines are presented when creating four full factions with unique identities, that leaves little time to explore faction interaction in depth.

I’ll save deeper thoughts on hidden systems vs. curated gameplay that arises from those imperceptible systems for another post. But for now, I just want to reflect on this:

Sometimes, fewer tools and more friction between choices leads to a more satisfying, reactive, and interesting strategy game.

Until next time!