Company of Heroes 3: How to Master Tactical Pause First

ign.com:

For ages, real-time strategy has been a genre where the number of things you can physically do per second has a major impact on how effectively you can play. And while there's something to be said for that, Company of Heroes 3 is trying to expand the appeal of its tactical gameplay to those who would rather sit back and think through every move carefully, perhaps with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a mouse in the other. Tactical pause, as they call it, isn't any less harrowing of an experience for your soldiers who are being sent to charge a machine gun emplacement. But it is a much less chaotic and, dare I say, more luxurious experience for a commander.

Pausing a single-player mission in Company of Heroes 3 will bring up an action queue for each of your units, which allows you to issue a series of sequential orders that will all be carried out when you unpause. So you could tell an infantry squad to run to cover, throw a grenade, and then continue advancing without missing a beat. Issuing a complex chain of orders to several units at once will see them march off like a well-conducted orchestra of destruction, making it possible to pull off some maneuvers that might only have been possible for an esports pro before.

I was a little skeptical about this idea at first. In the past, playing against the AI in an RTS has always been a bit of an asymmetrical warfare situation. I, as a human, am much more intuitive and capable of abstract thinking. In turn, the computer is capable of split-second calculations and can issue many more orders at once. With Tactical Pause, that second advantage is taken away. But I honestly haven't found that it makes things too easy. Sometimes I'll still go through whole missions without it,