yeah the freetoplay was awesome! But they canned it during beta and reverted back to retail. It's still fully supported with ongoing patches ect... You only need to get Tales of Valor for the full armies and play online. The other two (company of heroes and opposing fronts) have additional campaign content but net games are the same.
I've bought the entire pack (gold pack or some such), then installed from CD and hit the patches after that. Sure the patches took a couple of hours to download/install and there's like 10 of them the game relaunches after each... but it is certainly in full swing again.
Company of heroes died back when company of heroes online was up, and then when they canned the online many people weren't bothered to uninstall COHO and reinstall and re-patch the retail (myself included I was PISSED OFF when they canned COHO it was the best thing ever to be released hands down IMHO), tho now the retail version is up and running with tonnes of players again.It's also avail from steam.
Perhaps when DG goes F2P or DGII were to be created I'd have a bash; when perhaps the support and player base is there.
