In past RTSes, my solution would have been to try to create one or two strong defensive points that I hopefully wouldn't have to babysit while pushing forward with my main group. Leading an assault as the Deutsches Afrikakorps, there are always several things going on across this large, wide open battlefield once the action gets going. The other mission where I found the feature to be a game-changer was Tobruk, one of the largest and most complex battles in the North African campaign. And as the enemy pushes forward, pausing can allow me to coordinate an orderly retreat, rather than just spam-clicking to get everyone the hell out of there. It's just too much to reasonably keep track of. When I tried to play this mission without Tactical Pause, there were always some stragglers somewhere I'd forgotten to give orders to. I can make sure everyone knows what they're doing, too. With Tactical Pause, though, there's so much we can get done before the assault hits us. If you look at the amount of ground we have to hold here, and the number of different defensive options we have – from engineers setting up fieldworks, to aiming all of our big guns the right way – we would quickly run out the grace period before the attack comes if we had to do all of this in real time. We'll use Salerno as an example here, as one of the first towns you'll liberate in Italy and one of the first places you're likely to face a counterattack. The first is defending a strategic point against an enemy capture attempt. There were two kinds of missions in particular where I found it particularly critical. With Tactical Pause, you might actually get your guys out of there before it goes off. Grenades in Company of Heroes 3 have a pretty short fuse, so unless you spot it right as it leaves the enemy's hand, you probably won't have time to get out of the blast area.

But it's also really useful for lining up abilities like air strikes and, especially, avoiding enemy ones. Setting up an assault or a flank, or reacting to an enemy advance, are two of the most common times I'll smash that space bar. But most commonly, I take advantage of it as needed when I feel a bit overwhelmed and need to get a grasp of the battle. Sometimes I'll still go through whole missions without it, while in others it feels practically essential. But I honestly haven't found that it makes things too easy. With Tactical Pause, that second advantage is taken away. In turn, the computer is capable of split-second calculations and can issue many more orders at once. I, as a human, am much more intuitive and capable of abstract thinking. In the past, playing against the AI in an RTS has always been a bit of an asymmetrical warfare situation. I was a little skeptical about this idea at first.

Will there be a company of heroes 3