The strategic map has some elements that are supposed to influence the shape of these engagements. For instance, when you attack the monastery and Monte Cassino, you play an incredible mission that begins with a street fight in the town below, then a long ascent up a series of switchback mountain roads held by German strongpoints, and finally culminating in an assault on the fortress-like monastery itself. Some of these are just AI skirmish battles, but the more important locations tend to have an authored mission associated with them. The Germans mostly sit in their towns and wait for your forces to arrive and trigger a battle for control. There is an awful lot happening on this map, but disappointingly little of it makes much of an impact. Later, the Italian resistance will have side missions for you, and as you fulfill these objectives you’ll unlock theater-wide bonuses for your forces. After landing, you frequently face competing objectives from your two campaign advisors: the diffident British commander, Norton, and the blustering Patton-esque American commander, Buckram. The war in Italy was one of stalemates punctuated by nightmarish debacles when the Allies attempted to break them. This is an unloved campaign in the popular imagination. The campaign opens with the allied landings at Salerno and covers the great, bloody slog up the Italian peninsula that followed. It ends up functioning more as a meandering mission tree where you alternate between repetitive skirmish games that serve as filler and scripted story missions at key objectives that rank among the best in the series history.

Unfortunately, this signature feature is shot through with small bugs and glitches, and its entire concept is undermined by a passive AI adversary. Company of Heroes 3 also arrives with a dynamic single-player campaign built on the lines of a Total War game, one that promises the kind of variety and replayability that is often lacking in traditional RTS campaigns.

Company of heroes 1 vs 3