Hmm. Netgear router working perfectly fine, a 10mbit, secure and non-shared Virgin Media connection based very close to the exchange and that works better than fine for every other game and a Tech Support forum full of people complaining about exactly the same issue.

No, I think it’s a problem with the matchmaking system somehow. You should thank yourself lucky for being in the minority.

PS for players having trouble with nids early on. The problem is that 3 squads of basic nids plus a hero is better in a straight up fight than what most other armies can field that early. The advantage disappears later on, but if you lose too much in the first fight you are in trouble. One recommandation is to find and use buildings. Most nid players get rippers and hormagaunts and they have no capability at all against buildings. So even if you are out-powered you can dance in and out of buildings, racking up casualties all the while.

I just can’t get into it. It lacks the ‘40K come to life’ feel of the original, the campaign is tedious and the skirmish mode far too limited to hold long term interest.

I seem to recall one Alec Meer hearkening back to Space Hulk. And I quote:

Much as I’m fond of it, I’ve always had one major complaint about Dawn of War. It doesn’t feel very Warhammer 40,000. It certainly looks pretty Warhammer 40,000 – fans are well-serviced by grisly animations and the army painter tool – but I never got much sense of the universe’s character. All that colour, all that cartoonishness, all that replenishing lost troops… I want DARKNESS and FEAR and EVERY MAN DOWN IS LIKE A PUNCH TO THE STOMACH.

Definitely sounds like Dawn of War II to me.

Also, I like how “streamlined” suddenly means “shallow.”

Really? I think the only game I’ve played based on 40k table top that feels like it is DoW2. I’m not saying that’s good, but it feels much more like the tabletop than past DoW, etc.

That said, I agree that they think that the nids are ok. And they may be – it could be that at the higher echelons of playing, Nids fall behind.

But for casual players, they often find the Nids hard to counter. I myself can never figure out what unit to build to counter their melee/ranged/explosive/artillery combos. You know, 4 minutes in…

If you control resources and keep your units alive, it’s very easy to gain back those VPs and hold them. If you watch the higher-skilled players in head-to-heads you’ll notice they usually spend the first couple of minutes securing resources before capping any VPs.

This is because
resources + unit preservation = army strength = map control = VP control = victory

It still takes a monumental age to get into a 3v3 Ranked Match and, once there, you will often find yourself ‘matched’ with people from across the globe, who subsequently get kicked for lagging the game and are replaced by an AI-player who, although improved in this patch, still can’t hold a candle to an average Human player, crippling your team in the process.

1v1 and 2v2 matchmaking are much faster, but you still end up with TrueSkill 27 & 24 vs. TS 1 & 6 whitewashes.

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Re: The VP argument

It’s perfectly doable to come back against someone with only 50 VPs left to your name. What will lose you games is poor unit preservation and not controlling resources. If you control resources and keep your units alive, it’s very easy to gain back those VPs and hold them.

The main key is never letting the enemy get 3 VPs. Always keep it so they have at most 2 more active VPs than you. This means it will take 4m10 seconds to tick down instead of 2m45s.