Europe In Ruins is an award-winning multiplayer-only persistency mod for Company of Heroes. Choose a doctrine, build your company, and take command in a persistent warmap campaign. Lead your company into battle against other players, and take your troops from fresh recruits to hardened veterans!
An excellent idea for a new level of persistancy and depth of playing that could not be executed in a more poor fashion. In my fairly extensive tenet playing Europe in Ruins: Reinforcements, I frequently encountered frustration after frustration at several aspects of the game, which I will now detail:
Starting Out
The mod is indeed incredibly hostile territory to new players. The average user will be thrust into Europe in Ruins with little to no readily accessible information available to you. Your first game, perhaps even your first few games, will inevitably end in failure. Creating a proper company to suit the new playing environment provided in Europe in Ruins, no matter what you have read or watched prior to playing, will not affect your upcoming defeat. Barely any information exists on many of the new doctrinal units, so information comes from tedious and incredibly annoying trial-and-error, with many associated defeats and reprimands.
The Development
Development in Europe in Ruins is a case of "one step forward, two steps back". Update schedules are ignored to the point where they no longer seem to exist, and glaring flaws such as non-functional doctrine abilities and bonuses are blatantly overlooked in favour of implementing new and even more broken features. An example is the new "weapons cache" system, recently implemented at the time of this review. The idea was to create a system to reduce spam and create a new way to control and limit units or upgrades deemed as overpowered. Sounds good thus far? In reality, the weapons cache turned out to be an ugly mess which punished many players' companies for no apparent reason. The updates regularily conflict with other code, breaking units and abilities as others are fixed. At one point the entire Panzer Elite faction was unable to capture territory for almost a month. Great work, boys.
In Conclusion
There are many reasons why you should stay away from this poorly-made mod, just don't bother playing it.