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Company of Heroes Business School

By warhawks - 6th August 2009 - 18:48 PM

Have you ever heard this? "It's just a video game." "You'll rot your brain." "Why can't you spend as much time studying as you do playing that stupid computer game?"

Foreword by Knightstalker, MBA, Director of Company of Heroes

Most of our players are learning valuable lessons about economics and basic decision making while playing Company of Heroes. Those of us who have had years of higher education and training in management, business, and decision making are able to recognize the most basic concepts in an economy-based, RTS game and apply our training and education without much thought.

Here at GameReplays.org, we have published several articles that reference military strategists from Sun Tzu to Carl von Clausewitz. Though the strategies are applicable to war games like Company of Heroes, they fail to recognize the most basic fact of war strategy; War is economics, resource management, risk evaluation and decision making. All great Generals are great managers first. Jack Welch, regarded as the greatest General Electric CEO of all time, would have made a hell of a battlefield commander and history and biographies have shown us that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, a.k.a. "The Desert Fox" could have been CEO for any company in the world. Rommel's management, planning and economies of force inflicted a far greater cost to the invading Allied forces in 1944 than would someone who didn’t understand basic theories discussed below.

The concepts covered in the following pages are brought to you by Warhawks, currently one of GR's CoH Game Admins but whose past responsibilities included Strategy Specialist and Sr. Strategy Specialist. With two advanced degrees one of which is an MBA from Columbia Business School, Warhawks' work can be seen throughout the GameReplays website. In his recent work titled "Company of Heroes Business School", Warhawks puts the principles from his new article into practice every day in both his day job and his approach to GameReplays.org management as well as his Company of Heroes play-style.

"Company of Heroes Business School" will teach you both how to be a better Company of Heroes player and also teach or reinforce your current knowledge of basic business theories. So, the next time you hear, "Why can't you spend as much time studying as you do playing that stupid computer game?" You can tell them that you are doing both.


Company of Heroes Business School

If you have taken business classes (finance, economics, management, etc) in college and/or earned an MBA you will learn to see several fundamental concepts of the business world translated to Company of Heroes; these concepts are very relevant when thinking about the inner workings of the game. In this article, I will attempt to explain/educate folks about these concepts and demonstrate how they translate to Company of Heroes.

Note: This article is not a strategy guide. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how sound business concepts apply to Company of Heroes and specifically how you can improve your game play by educating yourself to these business concepts and applying them in game.

Warning: This is a very long read and although not meant to be a truly intellectual article, it does require the reader to digest the information and read through the examples provided. I do think reading this article is well worth your time especially if you want to read something different but very relevant to Company of Heroes.

Professor Warhawks

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