CoH is a great game, but one of the features it is lacking is a handicap system for home LAN multiplayer.
This is a problem because my brother is much better than me, and to play a casual game for fun I need a handicap otherwise I simply get crushed by him, which is not much fun for either of us.
Many games, like Rise of Legends or BFME2 have built in handicap systems, usually consisting of economic and/or military bonus to the weaker player voluntarily agreed to by all players. Dawn of War didn't have a handicap system, but it did have cheats so my brother allowed me to use cheats to obtain a higher starting resource level.
How could handicaps work in CoH??
Options that come to mind include (none of which are as good as an in-built handicap system):
1) Stronger player does not build observation posts on his strategic and resource points. Stronger player can control these, but only weaker player can build the observation posts to boost resource production.
2) Stronger player doesn't capture resource points mid-map, but only captures those in his one-third of the map, but he can build observation posts on those. This prevents the stronger player from achieving resource dominance (as the game is effectively over when the stronger player has resource dominance). However, the stronger player may block the weaker player from capturing these, in which case it does not provide a resource advantage to the weaker player.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
Pipper
Oh, also, a handicap system would help with the problem for some people of finding the right level of challenge versus the AI in skirmish.
So if you found an AI level is too hard (whether for you that is easy, normal or hard), you could give yourself a slight handicap, say 10% or 20% or whatever works well to fine-time just the right level of fun challenge for your skill at the moment.
It is also fun to keep improving your skill and lowering the handicap you need.
