It was an interesting and refreshing taste on the RTS “genre.”

And, shallow as it is, you pleasantly described what kept me at it. I played on Primarch, so it was even MORE satisfying to eliminate so much units (I’ve heard it’s more than on the other difficulties) with a small squad.

The game was brilliant, and yes, it felt much better than “attack animation x8, death animation x1″ like other RTS games. Your chainsword gets lodged in their skulls, their squad health goes down because one of them HAS A CHAINSAW LODGED IN THEIR HEAD, your Force Commander’s finishing moves are spectacular, regardless of the weapon he has equipped.

The destructible environment could have been more destructible, but I loved it anyway, and honestly, my scout squad was the most important until later on in the game when the dreadnought took its spot over (but even then, sometimes I would drop Tarkus’ squad for Cyrus on defense missions.)

On primarch, his snipe one-hit kill thing is very helpful, as is being able to use demo packs while cloaked. I once did an entire level using only Cyrus and his squad, and it was a pretty fun time, especially the end boss fight.

I do miss the orks. Nowhere near enough of them in the campaign. And the boss fights don’t really feel that amazing when all you do is whittle down a health bar by setting up tac marines and devastators and try to keep the dude occupied in their field of fire with your commander or whatever.

But damn. Cool!

My favorite unit is easily the devastators. I always loved the heavy bolters, tabletop, DOW, wherever. And watching those dudes set up and just hold a field of enemies down never gets old to me. SUPPRESSED SUPPRESSED. Hell yeah.

Top stuff. And the Dreadnaught reveal? Awesome.

Yeah, that’s right. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I’m a pretty big RPG and FPS gamer, and this is really the first RTS I’ve played since Rise of Legends. I loved the HELL out of the campaign. I LOVED having my guys mow down hordes upon hordes of little guys, then one big guy, so that I can get some stuff that lets them kill MORE of them. I am also a huge fan of the Warhammer 40K universe and my god they got it perfect. My problem was that I felt it was too short, I would have loved to see an Ork or Eldar campaign. Hopefully the inevitable expansion(s) will add more of that. I do feel like the missions got a bit repetitive at the end, but I was having far too much fun to care by that point.

Now one of the things keeping me away from the RTS genre was the way that multiplayer matches were determined not by who used their units better but by who made more units. Thus changing the game from a strategy game to an economy simulator where when you’re done you can throw your bits at the other guy’s bits and see who won. I am sure that there’s oh so much more to it and all that, but I highly doubt that more starcraft games have been won with brilliant tactical play rather than obsessive micromanagment.

Dawn of War fixes that. And it is beautiful. you get more resources the more of the map you control! You have one building! You upgrade it twice! the game becomes about countering your opponent’s strategies and maintaining a well-balanced offense.

There’s another thing I’m liking about this game: It seems pretty well balanced. Perhaps the community just hasn’t found the gamebreaker yet, but it seems like you really don’t want to find one or two units and make a bunch of them I also respect Relic’s decision to completely separate the multilayer and single player balance. preferring instead to have the races be equal in multiplayer, and having the space marines become walking gods in single player (Depending on difficulty.)

The complaint I do have about multiplayer is inertia. From what I’ve seen, if one player starts winning, they’re going to win. There are exceptions, but seems to be the trend. Maybe I’m just not good enough to turn the tide.

I do wish that Games for Windows had nothing to do with this otherwise excellent game. I suppose the hope is that Relic will compare their experience with Steam to GFW and make the decision. But that seems unlikely.

Also: The Orks are hilarious. Half the reason I play as them is for comedic value.

“We got it Boss! We got it! Wotcha want wit it?”

Also I look forward to playing multiplayer with my Solid Silver Hive Tyrant. It’s greatest weapon is it’s mighty BLOOM!

I think your insights about the multiplayer are extremely accurate. It feels tacked on, like an afterthought. What the game is really about is the singleplayer but the singleplayer model wouldn’t work online so they had to come with with something else. The inclusion of a castrated form of the rpg elements seen in singleplayer makes this painfully obvious

Correction:
The army upgrades given as you rank up in multiplayer are only visual upgrades.
Source: http://dowcodex.com/Info:Ranks

On matchmaking:
Source: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trueskill/

If you play a ranked game on Xbox Live, the TrueSkill ranking system will compare your individual skill (the numbers μ and σ) with the skills of all the game hosts for that game mode on Xbox Live and automatically match you with players with skill similar to your own. But how can this be done when every player’s skill is represented by two numbers? The trick is to use the (hypothetical) chance of drawing with someone else: If you are likely to draw with another player then that player is a good match for you! Sounds simple

But if you follow that link you’ll see that it talks about “the degree of uncertainty in the gamer’s skill”, which is apparently why it likes to put rank 1s up against rank 24s (because it doesn’t have suffficient trend information to rule out the possibility they might draw, even if it looks highly likely the new guy will get shat on). The system doesn’t seem to have any cutoff to protect rank newbies from being forced to play battle-hardened veterans. A bit of a glaring flaw in the Microsoft GfW TrueSkill calculation, I’d say.

That interview mentions that they will be adding 2 more maps soonafter release based on the reception of the multiplayer Beta. It’s also quite a good interview.

System Requirements
I ran the demo fine on lowest settings (which still look pretty good) on a single-core Athlon 64 3800+ (2.4GHz), 3GB Corsair paired (i.e. good quality and solid performance) DDR RAM and X1900 GT. There’s a LOT of pretties to be had with a better GFX card, but it seems to do ok on a single-core.

I can’t guarantee that’ll run single-player, but it did fine for multiplayer. I even hosted a few 3v3 games.

“Most of the time it seems most everyone idiots who I try to stay away from in multiplayer is playing the same one or two maps in most games (dust in Counterstrike is what comes to mind), so isn’t making more kind of a waste of time if very few people are going to play them? I can’t remember where I saw this, but some developer has used this argument before.

Valve used this argument before with TF2. And their argument -in my eyes- failed. If you look at the ones they released initially, half of them are detested by most TF2 players (2Fort, Hydro and to a lesser extent Granary). Only the maps they brought out after the initial poor release have kept TF2 alive (the Payload maps, Badlands and the community maps), and 3 of these maps are made by non-Valve employees and cost Valve very little to add into the game. Even after the initial maps were released not all of the new ones have been crowd-pleasers (just look at the CTF version of Well and the Arena maps, that barely anyone plays). So what this proves is that it is nigh-on impossible to cater for everyone, and it’s still very difficult to predict what will be a popular map at the point of conception. So make more maps to keep players occupied during the honeymoon period, learn lessons from which of those get played and design more in that style.

For DoW2. there were 5 maps in the MP beta; three 3v3 maps and two 1v1 maps. You could play 1v1 on the 3v3 maps but you couldn’t play 3v3 on the 1v1 maps. All of the maps played very well and had clearly been tested well, although most were more or less pure mirror maps. I couldn’t see great evidence of them being particularly difficult to construct, and I think the community will be able to produce a lot of good content very quickly. That still begs the question why only 8 maps made it to release. It’s pretty pathetic, imo – considering these maps are easier to make than FPS multiplayer maps.

That means the full game has only 3 more maps than the beta. I preferred not to play the 1v1 maps in Beta because the matchmaking system would consistently pair me up with godlike players while I was still trying to learn the game.

Alec clearly hasn’t played much of the multiplayer in this or he would have mentioned the matchmaking system. In the multiplayer beta, I’d be kept waiting in excess of 5 minutes just to get put into a 3v3 ranked match (it would frequently take 3 minutes or more just to find a single opponant). So after this wait you’d hope it’s worth it, but you’d still get lumped with retarded teams like:

ranks 1/3/5 vs. ranks 2/4/18

Then when I tried 1v1 (which is a lot tougher because every mistake you make is a small victory for the other player) as a rank 1 I was getting put up against ranks 5, 12, 14, 19, and 24.

So you were often destined to lose your matches before you begun, which is fine if you’re not a competitive-minded person and you’re just there for the fun, but if you choose to play a ranked match instead of a custom match, it really should be making things fair, or at least attempting to find a suitable ‘match’ for you.

There isn’t even any way for you to tell the rank of the opponant you’re playing in ranked games. So it’s only after the first 5 minutes where you realise you’re getting completely obliterated no matter how hard you try, that you realise the other player is simply better and more experienced than you.

This makes a complete mockery of the ranking system because it’s all down to a diceroll. There is no evidence of any attempt whatsoever to match players of equal ability.

Furthermore, every few ranks you will gain a persistent upgrade for your army (e.g. Rank 5 for Space Marines is some armour upgrade). This means not only will a rank 10 be better than a rank 1 in terms of knowledge and ability, but in terms of raw resources at his fingertips. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if there was absolutely no way for a rank 10 to be set loose on a rank 1, but sadly this was not the case with the matchmaker in the Beta.

But there was one part it could have got right for matchmaking and it still failed on that count. There was no consistency regarding pairing up players from similar geographical locations to decrease the average player latency in a game. This clearly isn’t a functional matchmaking system, and I won’t be picking up DoW2 until they put some effort into making it work.