A bit tedious. It has faults reminiscent of Morrowind
I played on the easy level as I usually do and admittedly the game was a bit too easy. Yet I was reluctant to ramp up the difficulty since most levels seemed too long.
The idea of taking over territories to gain more resources sounds good in theory but I found it a bit tedious. Levels frequently start with the player at the bottom of the map so that he can work his way to the top and conquer all.
Of course, there is a story behind why you're doing what you're doing but whether you are disabling a V rocket or trying to secure a road it is essentially the same process.
Once I took over more than half the territories I knew I had won. But I was forced to spend a long time on repetitive activities to secure my victory: attack the enemy to gain a territory, create more troops to replace the ones lost, defend my base against another attack, create more units, take over another territory, and so on. This tedious process continued for an hour or more on some levels despite certain victory.
Perhaps my strategy wasn't quite right or perhaps it would have been more challenging on a higher difficulty level. Just as I was getting sick of COH a timed mission became available which made me think that perhaps all missions should have been like that.
A reasonably tight time limit (perhaps slightly adjusted for various difficulty levels) would force the player to play more aggressivley. He would make strategic choices about which territories to link up to achieve his ultimate goal. The conservative, boring strategy of taking over the whole map would no longer be an option.
This lack of time limit means many levels are particularly boring at the start. For example, in one level you have to repair a bridge to gain access to the enemy. You "own" a small amount of territory on one side of the bridge that can not be expanded without repairing and then crossing the bridge.
The way the game works is that you accumulate resources at a certain rate according to how much territory you own. If you own a small amount at the start then naturally the accumulation process is very slow.
The player can spend up to 20 to 30 minutes simply building up their army before they can start playing at full strength: build this tank building than wait for the fuel resource to rise enough to build a tank, wait for the manpower resource to rise enough to create more troops etc. Also, the resources keep rising very slowly but don't seem to have an upper limit. A player can build up their army then wait another 30 minutes to get really high levels of all resources to enable units to be always replaced quickly when lost in battle. This fault basically defeats the purpose of the time based resource system and is apparent on many levels I played (The enemy does nothing until you attack so you may as well build up to full strength).
Yes, you can play as if this fault doesn't exist. Go in straight away to fight the enemy for a more challenging game. But somehow I can't bring myself to do that.
This is where the game reminds me of Morrowind. Like Company of Heroes it was lauded as a great game and in many ways it was. But if you spent half an hour jumping up and down you improved your acrobatic ability without any penalty except your personal time. It was boring, stupid and largely spoiled the game for me.
I enjoyed the game up to a point. I'm certainly glad I played. I just wish they had a time limit on every level.