OMG & You
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- For a walk through of registering, installing, and using the War Control Panel see Getting Started.
- For general information on the modification see Operation Market Garden.
This guide centers on features that are a unique part of the Operation Market Garden modification. It is divided into three sections. The first, Concepts, describes the idea and meta game behind the modification. In-Game Features covers the changes we've made to vanilla Company of Heroes. Other Features describes policies and systems that work in tandem with each other.
Contents |
Concepts
Operation Market Garden is based around a persistent war between the regular Company of Heroes factions. These include the Allies, US and British, and the Axis, Wehrmacht and Panzer Elite. You pick from the four factions that are available in a role playing campaign that adds depth to the the titanic struggle. Alongside the WAR accounts OMG will also offer a skirmish mode, or FUN accounts, in which you can play as any army. This allows you to try out different company builds, strategies, or just wish to play a game with no strings attached.
Persistence
The persistent war is the never ending struggle between Axis and Allies. Your OMG games impact the conflict and its ebb and flow. Every War battle counts. In addition to your battles impacting the bigger picture you're troops carry over from battle to battle. If they survive the engagement any experience they gain carries over into your next skirmish. Additionally, you gain victory points from winning battles, which are used to customize your army.
Veterancy
In OMG there are five levels of veterancy. The first three improve your unit's fighting capability. At the fourth level you can custom name your unit, and at the fifth you can add a custom skin to it. This system promotes smart game play as it urges you to conserve your units, use them wisely, and make sure that they retreat off the field when worn down.
Experience Points
You're units gain experience as they defeat enemy units on the field of battle. As a persistent modification these carry over from battle to battle and provide minor statistic increases with each level.
An experience point is a unit of measurement used in many OMG to quantify a player unit's progression through the game. Experience points are generally awarded for combat experience, defeating opponents, and for destroying enemy units. In OMG, units start as off as inexperienced and at a disadvantage when fighting experienced units. To counter this and aid new players we've added rubber band systems. When a sufficient amount of experience is obtained, the unit "levels up", or gains a superior level. Such an event usually increases the unit's statistics, and may permit the unit to acquire new abilities or improve existing ones.
In OMG, and in most games, as the difficulty of the challenge increases, the experience rewarded for overcoming it also increases. As players gain more experience points, the amount of experience needed to gain new abilities typically increases.
Victory Points
You get these for winning games. Victory points are the common currency and one of the main features of OMG. They are used to further customize your army in the many systems described below.
Players gain victory points by winning games. A player may never gain more than 100 points, and companies are reset at the end of each WAR, about every eight to ten weeks.
War & Fun Companies
We only allow you to have one war account. Having multiple War accounts negates the availability systems, damages the integrity of the persistent war, and promotes poor game play. As a result, we strongly enforce a one War account limit. Violator's punishments including removal of secondary accounts for the first offense, deletion of all accounts for the secondary offense, and temporary IP bans for following offenses.
If there are multiple players in your household you can hop on Ventrilo and ask for an IP exception.
However, to allow you to experience all that OMG has to offer we've created Fun accounts. These are not linked to the War system and allow you to experiment with different strategies and company builds.
Army Customization
There are multiple facets of OMG that you can use to customize your company.
Doctrines
As in vanilla Company of Heroes you can chose doctrines to specialize your company. Each company can have its own doctrine. These are the same three doctrines per army in Company of Heroes, but each doctrine has three trees; each tree has 4 branches, and each branch has five tiers. Our plan is to have players' companies constantly evolving, and getting to pick and choose from each of the five tiers available.
The doctrine system allows a commander to specialize in a specific area of the battlefield. Unlocking doctrine abilities allows access to new units developed for the modification, abilities, and other bonuses. Each faction has three different doctrines available to them which are split into three different trees. Trees are split into a number of different columns, as well as split into five different rows or "tiers." Abilities must be unlocked in tiers, you must unlock the bottom tiers before the later tiers. These abilities are all intertwined, some with prerequisites, and allow for more varied builds and specialized companies. Each tier increases in power from the lower tiers, making it often wise to aim for a highest tier ability and base your doctrine around that. We will have about 50 to 60 abilities per doctrine with a total of about 600 to chose from.
Resource Bonuses
Resource bonuses allow you to invest in your company's resources to make it larger and more powerful. However, their only cost isn't Victory Points. Each investment in one resource subtracts a small amount of the others as well.
New Units
- For guides on new units see our New Unit Guide.
Operation Market Garden features new doctrinal units for use in your company. You buy these like any other unit in the War Control Panel. OMG's new units are designed to fit custom niches and roles in your company.
Expansion Pack Units
You get these when you've bought the expansions, and you can not play with content you do not own.
Game Mode
There are three game modes in Operation Market Garden. Map Control Points or MCP and Victory Point or VP determine how your population gain or loss is calculated, and Spectator mode is for live shoutcasting of your games.
Systems
Operation Market Garden has a number of other systems in place to enrich game play, reward success, and improve your overall OMG experience.
Availability
This system's purpose is to prevent spamming of units in game. It doesn't effect base units like Riflemen. Each unit has a supply pool it is drawn from, and every game it is resupplied by a unit specific amount.
Challenge System
Challenges add extra competition into OMG game play. You can see the current list of challenges in the War Control Panel. They are purely for fun and at this point in time do not effect your company or account in any way besides receiving a challenge medal.
Challenges are auto opt-in so you do not need to sign up. You play as normal game and it will send your challenge results to the website with the battle report. There are two main types of challenges. The two types are easily distinguishable by the timer on the right of the challenge page. If it has a timer then its a highest challenge and will end when that timer hits zero, if there's no timer it will end when a user meets the conditions of the win.
Incremental Reporting System
This system ensures that even if someone drops or the game falls our of syne that your veterancy gains and unit losses will still count.
Rubber Band Systems
These systems help give a boost to new players who not being familiar with the intricacies of OMG are already at a disadvantage. These systems exist to help balance new and experienced players. They exist to help provide a somewhat level playing field and good OMG experience. Generally they apply modifiers based on the player's leader board position. The calculations takes place after a battle has reported, but before it has processed.
Please note that at no time do the rubber bands interact with each other and form a rubber band ball.
Momentum
Momentum is a system within OMG to determine who attacks and who defends in the War Campaign. Momentum exists to help the losing faction gain a footing and even the playing field by increasing the initial deployment time on the attacking faction. This buys the defenders valuable time to dig in and steel themselves for the oncoming onslaught.
Only the faction on the attack can gain territory, you gain as many territories as the players on your side. For example, if your game is a 4v4 you will gain 4 territories if you win, and nothing if you lose.
Momentum determines who is on the attack or who is on the defense. It works similarly to territory gain, only you gain or lose momentum based on the number of players in the game. No side will ever go above the maximum (50). If the attackers momentum goes below 20 the games will turn to meeting engagements, and will stay that way until either the defender causes the attackers momentum to drop to 0 to turn the attacker into a defender or until the attacker gets back above 20.
If the defenders bring the attackers momentum down to 0 they take the offensive and the momentum meter resets to 50.
Wear and Tear
In Operation Market Garden repairs work a little differently than you're used to. In order to keep tanks and vehicles from staying on the field indefinitely, we utilize a system called Wear and Tear to simulate decreases in the effectiveness of armor as multiple repairs are made to it.
Wear and Tear is a system of diminishing returns for repairing your armor pieces, for every second you heal the hit points of a unit, it loses a small amount from its total maximum health
In-Game Features
Operation Market Garden centers on the combat that makes Company of Heroes such a great game. There is no base building and no economy to manage. It is just you and your troops against your opponent. The concept is simple, but the game play is deep and complex. We work hard to make sure we keep as close as possible to regular and familiar Company of Heroes game style.
Deployments
Instead of building your troops from a base there are multiple ways to deploy your units onto the map in Operation Market Garden.
Walk
Your units will walk onto the map. This is the most common way for units to enter the battlefield. They enter at your spawn point and then you can proceed to order them as you wish.
Paradrop
Only Airborne and Fallschirmjager can parachute onto the map. Units parachuting onto the map gets them into the heat of battle quickly, surprises your enemy, and can allow you to catch them off guard.
Half Track
By adding infantry, a half track, and selecting half track deployment your units will come onto the field in the vehicle. This is useful if you want to get your men into battle quickly or use Clown Cars.
Glider
British Commando players can buy this upgrade for infantry, support teams, Tetrarchs and Stuarts and they will arrive in a glider. All you have to do is select the unit and the deployment in the War Control Panel similar to half track deployment. This is useful if you want to get your men into battle quickly and catch your enemy off guard.
Spawn
Luftwaffe Panzer Elite players have a doctrine ability to allow their Fallschirmjager to deploy from buildings. This allows you to deny important building to the enemy, catch them off guard, and bring your units into combat quickly and right where you need them.
Heavy Crewed Weapons
We also have some new ideas on heavy crew served weapons like the Flak 88, 25-pounder, and Bofors. When you build it a truck arrives and constructs it. However, you will have two new options. You can quickly abandon the weapon, getting your crew get out of there, and leaving the weapon in place. This prevents your crew's experience from being lost. Alternatively, you can have the weapon pack up and move. However, this takes a while, and you'll have to plan ahead. By clicking the pack up button a new truck comes and the weapon packs up. Then you can move it to a new area, build the weapon, or take it off map.
Light Crewed Weapons
As on heavy crew served weapons lighter ones, mortars, machine guns, and anti tank guns can retreat in the same fashion with normal retreat, in which the crew packs up the weapon then run off the map, and fast retreat where the crew just abandons the weapon and runs off map.
Other Features
These extras have been added to enrich Operation Market Garden and add important additional facets into OMG.
Maps
- For map specific guides see our Map Guides.
As of December 2009, OMG supports 53 custom maps, with 38 of those being exclusive to OMG. We have an active and busy mapping community working to create fun platforms for our Company of Heroes modification.
Be sure to check out the Mapping Forums for the latest news.
Company Management
OMG features an easy to use website based launcher that will functions as your War Control Panel in which you can do everything relating to the management of your account. You can design your company's layout, create and join games, change password options, choose what map you want to play on, and has a real time chat function.
Community
OMG has an active and hard working community who are dedicated to improving OMG through communication, testing, humor, and friendliness.
OMG:Wiki
The OMG:Wiki is a Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project centered around the Operation Market Garden modification for Company of Heroes. OMG:Wiki's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information. The OMG:Wiki is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world; anyone can edit it. Since its creation on December 29, 2008 it has grown to contain 5,509 pages, 535 articles, 3,193 files, 19,168 edits, and has 84 registered users.
We're here to help improve and expand upon your overall OMG experience by openly and clearly disseminating information related to World War Two, Company of Heroes, OMG, and other related information.
Forums & Ventrilo
We also have an active forums where you can talk about everything OMG. On it you can post replays of your best battles, look for feedback from the community, and critique the mod, and provide suggestions to help improve the OMG experience.
One way that we've found improves the OMG experience significantly is using our own Ventrilo server. This make much easier to communicate with other community members, find and play OMG games, and talk about the latest news. If you ever have any questions you can just hop right on and ask away. We're sure that you will find someone who is able to help.
Operation Market Garden Video Replay Reviews
Our tireless shoutcasters provide you with your OMG fix wherever you can plug into the world wide web. We've had Gamestah's Glimmer and GameReplay's Cadmus join our community and have each produced several episodes in addition to our mainstay program, In The Foxhole With Andy & Nick.
