how to play Company of Heroes with no enemies

Yeah, sounds mad.

What I mean is this: I'm a real RTS noob, but CoH has really hooked me. However, I'm having a really hard time getting to grips with game operations and mechanics.
It doesn't help that the tutorial has very little depth, and as I downloaded it from steam, I don't appear to have any documentation. I have read that the documentation isn't up to much anyway.


So, what I'd really like to do is set up a game with no enemy, or an enemy with a few units that don't do anything. This will give me a chance to learn how to use the units, figure out how stuff works. I keep finding, even with an Easy AI enemy, I get beaten before I get a chance to figure out what is going on.

Anyone know how to do this?

Thanks!
Mut.

Hello Mutley.

Company of Heros is a fantastic game. Which have you got the first one or the expansion?

The best course of action for you would be to play a skirmish game.

You can set the difficulty of the enemy so that they either stay in or around their base or so hard that you have little chance to get going.

The other option which is what I like to do, which is set up with a Hard difficulty computer player but also give yourself a hard ally.

This means that the action gets pretty thick and you just tip the balance in your sides favour.

Its an excellent game and I hope you enjoy it. Let me know if you need more info.

Tune the difficulty down in a skirmish match...I was utter rubbish when I first got it, played around in skirmish on Easy mode, got totally destroyed several times, but that helped me get the hang of it, coz i was looking at the AI's tactics. Also go into the campaign on easy, and just follow the instructions. Thats pretty much all I did and I managed to figure it out after that.

The other option is to pick a largish map, and one AI on easy in skirmish. If you pick a map with easy managed choke points (like bridges) you can cut the enemy off, have a play, skill up then obliterate them, the lyon 4 player map is easy I think, 3 bridges, just block them with barb wire first then with tank traps, u can blow two of the bridges, dont forget the footbrighe on the far left ;)

Thanks for all the feedback - very useful.
I've now started to get the hang of CoH, and am thoroughly enjoying it.

I can hold my own against normal AI on the whole, so I'm getting better!

I play 2 on 2 with a friend now - against two AI enemies. That has taught me a lot.