Working away in the leviathan's guts, with the famous motto of the SAS in mind - “You’ve got to at least have a go, even if it's really hard” - Relic learned from their fellow strategy Jonahs at CA, and set about applying the knowledge to their landmark WW2 strategy franchise, Company Of Heroes. “Turns out,” says Littman, “it’s because it’s really hard to do”. But then along came Sega, gulping down strategy studios like a big mad whale, and Relic ended up in its belly - right next to Total War devs Creative Assembly. I'm not alone in this: David Littman, executive producer at Relic Entertainment, always wondered the same thing. It's a tasty formula, and I've often wondered why more games over the years haven't adopted it. It scratches a slightly different itch and, as lead campaign designer Andrew Deneault says, it has a great payoff.The Total War series are the Kinder Eggs of strategy gaming: a layer of delicious, map-based strategy, with a dramatic RTS toy hidden inside. It might make Company of Heroes 3 more inviting for new players, certainly, but I also just found it to be a fun way to play, even as someone experienced in RTS battles. It's not something that's exclusively for training, either. With that done, you can go back to your first battle knowing that your other soldiers have a fighting chance. With things frozen, however, you have room to analyse the situation, see what tricks your troops have, and then come up with a killer plan. When you're duking it out in a high-stakes battle, having to jump to an entirely different battle with a set of troops that might have completely different capabilities is a bit of a mindfuck. That's where the tactical pause really shows how useful it can be. If you've been getting your fix in games like XCOM or BattleTech, you already have the tactical mindset, but it can be rough trying to apply that to a game where, in a few seconds, you could lose a whole squad on the other side of the map. People have grown used to having time to make tactical decisions. Strategy and tactics games are as popular as they've ever been, but for the most part they're all turn-based or encourage use of a pause system, like Paradox's grand strategy games.
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