Dawn of War II Beta Thread

I quite like the sound of it personally. I hate building bases and things and personally like the idea of smaller troops to manage. Plus I am sure that someone will create a no cap mod for it like every other game out there after a short while for those that like bigger battles.

If you dont like it I will happily have your key and play :)
 
Right, so I've been playing some more of this Beta... And I like it. I've played DoW and CoH to death and enjoyed them immensly... However! This is more representative and true to the table top game. I don't recall having many more than 5 or 6 squads of Marines and a Force Commander and Term squad in a standard 2500/3000 point game (I'm going back to 1995 Codex Astartes). Sure there are squads missing that I would like to see, and the ability to upgrade more than 1 member with a 'special' weapon, however it seems to capture the eb and flow of the table top game better than the 'epic' style base building game of the first.

Edit: To be honest, they couldn't do much more with DoW 1 but simply update the engine and physics and add more units, so I think they had to change it to make it worth while releasing!
 
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Right, so I've been playing some more of this Beta... And I like it. I've played DoW and CoH to death and enjoyed them immensly... However! This is more representative and true to the table top game. I don't recall having many more than 5 or 6 squads of Marines and a Force Commander and Term squad in a standard 2500/3000 point game (I'm going back to 1995 Codex Astartes). Sure there are squads missing that I would like to see, and the ability to upgrade more than 1 member with a 'special' weapon, however it seems to capture the eb and flow of the table top game better than the 'epic' style base building game of the first.

Edit: To be honest, they couldn't do much more with DoW 1 but simply update the engine and physics and add more units, so I think they had to change it to make it worth while releasing!

Except a squad of space marines isnt made of 3 men.....10 is more like it.

I cannot believe they have introduced the biggest and most impressive horde army in 40k into a small tactical bore fest.
 
Anyone who wants a game feel free to add me as well - gamertag same as my forum username! :) I played a few games vs. the AI and lost to anything above easy though, looks like this is a whole new game to learn! :(
 
Except a squad of space marines isnt made of 3 men.....10 is more like it.

I cannot believe they have introduced the biggest and most impressive horde army in 40k into a small tactical bore fest.

Yeah I went to bed and then realised that I forgot to mention this point. Orcs/Imperial Guard where always 20 man squads, marines where normally 5 up to 10 max... So I'm not sure why they've dropped down so low.
 
It's a computer game, not a recreation of the tabletop. It's fun, and you can have large, hectic battles. It's far more strategic, and far better than the old method of building a load of good units, pressing a, then right clicking down the other end of the map.
 
I finally got round to try it last night. I can see why people are calling it CoH in Space. Personally I don't think that it's a bad thing. :)

My tag is Tunney if anyone wants a game. I'm still getting to grips with the basics though!
 
People who think they can just build what they want and send it in on the original DOW, clearly only play CPU. Do that to another player online and you will get wiped out.

The CPU is useless at targetting units dependant on the damage they will cause, and making the tactical decisions to take out commanders, or tanks before other less damaging units.

I don't think this new game is like COH, I really enjoy COH and this game I cannot get to grips with. Back to playing the old DOW now, it's still got the charm. Seeing a massive war party of orcs running at your base is always a "oh ****" moment.
 
I've been playing this a bit over the weekend and overall I'm enjoying it, even though I lose almost every game. Resources always seem so desperately short, and I never seem to be able to deploy enough forces to stop what inevitably is a larger enemy force.

I can see why people would make comparisons with COH, and I have myself - in many ways it is fundamentally similar. There seems to be greater emphasis on the early game initial fire fight though I've noticed. The first fight seems more "game deciding" than it does in COH. Not to say you still can't win if you lose the initial fight, but the benefit seems higher with the initial fight won than in COH.

Also - loving Assault Marines with veteran sergeant. It's almost exactly like COH's strafing run. Enemy squads seem to just vanish :D
 
Relic are on to something by moving the economy to the front lines. You never have to look at your base anymore; your attention is solely focused upon managing troops on the field.

In my opinion that is not a bad thing.

The one thing I dont like at the moment is the map design. It almost encourages individual battles during 3 v 3 matches, with each player trying to hold their own 'sector', instead of collaborating on a mutual front line.
 
This thread confuses me, i dont understand why people care that you can no longer build base buildings.. what did they do that i obviously didn't get other than build your units?

1 building or 5 buildings it makes no difference if they build the same things

Same thing with the squad sizes, in the total war games you can raise or lower the size of your armies, but it has no actual effect on the game, your units still die just as quickly, it just gets more messy

Ps. add me to gfwl i also love the assault marines they are just brutal
 
Apologies if this has been answered already, but anyone know where / if I am eligible for this, I bought Soulstorm when it first came out on Steam. But I do not appear to have any form of CD key to use for DoW 2.
 
The beta should be in your games list available for download, I haven't ever had to input a CD key for it, although steam let me know what it was and warned me I would need to input it.

As for bases, it's not literally missing the actual buildings themselves, although a nicely guarded base with decent defences is good fun. It is more to do with the economy side of the strategy of war. They have removed this. Not only is part of war making the correct battle decisions, but it is also deciding how to spend your money and what to upgrade etc.
 
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This thread confuses me, i dont understand why people care that you can no longer build base buildings.. what did they do that i obviously didn't get other than build your units?

1 building or 5 buildings it makes no difference if they build the same things

Same thing with the squad sizes, in the total war games you can raise or lower the size of your armies, but it has no actual effect on the game, your units still die just as quickly, it just gets more messy

Ps. add me to gfwl i also love the assault marines they are just brutal

Buildings did add more tactics to the game. With DoW you can scout an enemy base to see what tech level they are at and what units they are capable of producing and which they are not, and depending on how you build structures you could rush for fast high tier units of one type, but at the same time you would lack buildings to produce other units until later in the game.

In DoW2, there is no tactics involved with the bases at all except the timing of the unlocking of the next tech level units. There is no rushing for early vehicles, or anything like that, all units of all types become available together.

As for size of the squads, why not have more units? The game simply feels too small, if they doubled the squad sizes and added larger maps and bigger unit counts, the game would be more exciting. Even if they allows 5 man space marine squads but kept the total HP the same as it currently is (meaning lower HP per space marine), then that would be an improvement. It may not make much difference directly to gameplay, but the extra units will just make it more interesting and fun to play with IMO.
 
In older games where u could pick what buildings you wanted specifically for the type of units they created then i can understand the idea of bases, but in this day and age with tiered units you build the first building, followed by the second, followed by the third... and so on so what is the point really other than to waste your time making your base pretty?

Yes i understand in coh as the axis you could skip buildings to build the higher one slightly quicker but you still have to pay for the upgrade to climb the tiers, the actual buildings in coh were fairly cheap and it didn't matter too much if you skipped one or not
 
As for size of the squads, why not have more units? The game simply feels too small, if they doubled the squad sizes and added larger maps and bigger unit counts, the game would be more exciting. Even if they allows 5 man space marine squads but kept the total HP the same as it currently is (meaning lower HP per space marine), then that would be an improvement. It may not make much difference directly to gameplay, but the extra units will just make it more interesting and fun to play with IMO.

It may make the battles more epic, but it would also make the battles more squashed.. the maps are designed to be small and condensed to keep everyone fighting constantly and keep the focus on the action, were they to up the squad sizes you would just have a huge pile of units attacking their huge pile of units with little in the way of micro

The game is hard enough to pick units as it is without having even more units crowding the screen
 
It may make the battles more epic, but it would also make the battles more squashed.. the maps are designed to be small and condensed to keep everyone fighting constantly and keep the focus on the action, were they to up the squad sizes you would just have a huge pile of units attacking their huge pile of units with little in the way of micro

The game is hard enough to pick units as it is without having even more units crowding the screen

The problem is though is that the game doesn't feel like a war. To me the small map sizes make it seem more like an arena then a battlefield. The limit to the ammount of units forces me to have just one force that i move arround, maybe slightly spread out arround different routes as i advance but mostly sticking together. I would rather have much bigger limits that would allow me to have a main army, with additional units standing by to advance should the be needed, and be mobile enough to protect team mates if needed, while also having entrenched units in buildings or heavy cover with heavy bolters and such that allow me to fall back safely without being pushed all the way back.
 
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