I don't get why it gets so much hate. Yeah it wasn't the same as DoW 1 but it was still fun and had a kino campaign

I recently replayed it. Fun but repetitive. If DoW1 was 8/10, DoW2 is a solid 7/10.

the only people who 'hate' Dow II are secondary shit poster who didn't play it. These days they are also probably zoomers who never played I either, but have been told I is axiomatically good and as such II is axiomatically bad.

Further, II has no business being as good as it is since THQ cut Relic's dev time by 12 months and gave them a shoestring budget because THQ was going bankrupt.

last stand is dota for people who value their mental health and want to avoid the competitive grind rat maze that drains years of your life for some retarded MMR

you didn't have to sell me the game, I already love it!

That's a lot of words to cope with sucking at dota

It wasn't just different, it was different and mediocre
And when people say that they liked it, they say "well the campaign was fun" but as an RTS player, it was right click to the end and wait. Worse than an ARPG and not an RTS/RTT. And the MP was abysmally underdeveloped.

It is just undercooked in every gameplay aspect.

keep being a mazed nigger lol, you will escape MMR hell soon dear archon player!

the first felt like epic in rts form
the second felt like regular squad based play in rts form
the third felt like herohammer in the worst way

everyone who loved dota has basically quit since hours played > MMR

Dawn of War/CR

One mid as fuck campaign

Boring skirmish with extremely low pop limit

Piss tier. Only good for one campaign run.

Retribution

Dogshit campaign that's always the same regardless of your faction

Skirmish is still boring with low pop limit

Shit tier.

Because it's not even an rts. They removed literally everything good about the first game. If it wasn't called dawn of war nobody would complain about how it failed to live up against the original. I don't even hate the campaign.

cope and seethe

and had a movie campaign

Kronos, whatever happend there

the only one coping and seething here are u lmao, don't you have a ranked match to play? don't forget to double down your MMR so the russians/peruvians in your team have yet another reason to grief and throw the game ;)

The only thing DoW1 and DoW2 share is the setting, mechanically they're 2 separate games. Which is how DoW3 can be drastically different from the first 2 as well. People can like one more than the other because of that.

Exactly this. The only redeeming quality of the game is

Its W40k

It's kinda pretty

But still worse looking than CoH

I really like the idea behind the Campaign. Reminded me of Commandos. However, it has major problems:
Captain and Primarch difficulties are absurdly grindy timesinks with some absolutely horrible balancing.
Thaddeus is a liability at best since he tends to immediately enter crossfire and die when he drops.
Individual missions are essentially 6 different skirmish maps shuffled around and played forwards and backwards. They don't feel like actual single player progression missions. Angle Gate is the only one that mixes things up by having Guards, Orcs, and Tyranids all on the map, but they barely interact with each other.
By the time you unlock the cool stuff, the game is already over. I'm not super familiar with 40K "lore", but I think they could have done a better job mixing up kits and playstyles for each character. Imagine being able to level up the heavy weapons guy into some kind of melee bruiser, if you had the right gear.

cope and seethe

They removed literally everything good about the first game

Yes space marines building bases was the only good thing about DoW I

he lost and it's only recourse of action is to spam NO U NO U NO U over and over again

LMAO I accept your surrender dotard, go play pudge mid and have fun in 1k MMR :)

nobody wants to play your game when it's full of shit people like you

it's fun to build bases. I will never understand people that don't like base building

cope and seethe

I dunno either I fucken loved both games. From the kino campaign, to try handing the ladder to eventually just being stoned playing the last stand arena mode on repeat.

Great fucken times

Just RTS puritans policing their now dead genre. You’re right OP, DoW 2 is kino and has arguably the best series of RTS campaigns ever (at least since the first DoW). The only really shitty thing was the late game tedium

the dotard is mindbroken already

And DoW3 is different from DoW2 so why did you hate it? Oh? Oh? Is it because being different is not itself a virtue?

cope and seethe

based and factually correct

They somehow took the slow boring combat of the first game and made it even slower and more boring. You occasionally use an ability between waiting for shit to die. They didn't even learn from the first game just bloating health pools on higher difficulty.

RTSfags were so insufferable they killed their genre lel.

I replayed it recently. It got a ton of hate because of no base building but I wouldnt mind a small scale conflict campaigns every once in a while where you just lead a few squads/units and they earn experience that carries over.

I don't actually know anyone that purchased dow3 so I have no idea how bad it is. Nobody ever mentions the campaign or mechanics in any dow thread so I'm guessing nobody here bothered either.

Dawn of War 1 encourages you to play aggressively because of how resources are acquired. If you turtle, your opponent will take over the map and they will be the ones to get their ultimate unit.

RTS killed itself since the genre is so hard to make.

just make 3+ factions that are different with totally balanced armies

just do it

and make a campaign with easy/medium/hard difficulties too

they really did, the more time passes the more I realize RTS literally died because their "fanbase" was always dogshit and would complain about everything no matter what. I'm glad the genre is dead as fuck

It's because they keep trying to make stupid pve crap instead of focusing on pvp which is what more people want.

it was better than Dawn of War 1

BASADO

DOW 2 has the same mindset of grab territory fastest and firstest. But you build a lot less so you can concede areas a lot more easily without totally losing and just fucking dying.
DOW 2 is different and while DOW 1 was precious to its audience I think they saw that they weren't going to get another similar game ever and that kind of hurts.

dow2

Build

Lol

only the most obese smelly no life virgin fucks care about PVP in RTS. 90% of your sales are going to come from the campaign alone

You kind of built generators and shit on a few points, and there was upgrades for you base you could do. It wasn't just victory points you were after with the king of the hill gameplay.

Explain how sins of a solar empire managed to stay alive for more than a decade and even get a sequel with no campaign.

it's dead now

LMAO

Still more people playing the original more than dow2 lmao

RTSnigger needs bigger numbers or he can't play the game

kek

Thad needs to be jumping in and tying up ranged units, or cycle jumping, he and his buds don't have the staying power that the force commander has in power armor. In terminator armor, hes far better about beating the shit out of people in combat, but he's not a tank despite the storm shields. His guys exist to jump past the melee and tie up ranged units that can't outfight him, if you want a tank for ranged damage, that's what tarkus is for, using his abilities to mitigate ranged damage but be slowed. Thadd is high speed, low drag. jump/teleport, merciless strike, and then away to disrupt another unit, and repeat.

If you want high damage, he can do it, but avitus does it from range, and has better options vs infantry/power/mega armor or tanks.

tl;dr if he's getting shot up, putting him in a spot he shouldn't be in, more than likely he's being used wrong.

I didn't hate it but I liked it less than the first Dawn of War because the game feels like a worse Company of Heroes.
This extends to the campaign where you only get to control a handful of units at a time. An RTS with 4 units is just worse Diablo.
Skirmish has severe sound issues.
Chaos Rising is hopelessly buggy and the corruption mechanic in the campaign sucks.
Retribution has the best campaign and you finally get to control skirmish units during the missions. Also, the voice acting is hammier than ever.
Out of all of them I think only Retribution is above average.

Almost everyone I’ve talked to who were fans of RTS bought games like StarCraft and Warcraft 3 initially for the engaging single player campaigns and then engaged in the multiplayer. Designing games around competitiveniggers kills them

well put

Designing games around competitiveniggers kills them

NTA but you can really see this effect in every RTS over the last few years unambiguously trying to usurp starcraft 2's player base. They all get shilled by SC2 streamers/youtubers and they all fucking die and their companies go bust in or immediately after early access because their target demo all go back to SC2 anyway.

they are in the same hole as the fighting games community, the time and effort needed in order to be above average, let alone good in this genres are effectively killing them slowly to the point where either the genre simplify mechanics to make it more accesible to the masses and losing their core diehard fanbase in the process or simply becomeing irrelevant outside of very niche communities.

I played 3. It's fucking weird, and I don't mean in a way that it is a weird thing in regards to lore.
It just plays weird. I cannot understand the reasoning behind it.

The campaign is basically unloseable, only requiring time when you fuck up, and time to clear all the objectives.
The actual combat feels so very shallow and pointless. No unit feels fun to use. Things die extremely quickly or at an arthritic snail's pace, depending on power level. They're a combination of tissue paper and cement, and it's not due to counters. Everything is weak to anti-tank weapons, so the correct answer is the build a fuckton of wraithguards/lascannons and spam out an extremely shooty army, since melee sucks a fat chode in comparison to the other games. The only thing not weak to anti-tank options are hero units, who melt them, in turn.

The only entertaining part of it are the heroes, who have fun buttons on relatively long cooldowns. They're so overpowered that the entire rest of the game is effectively meaningless. In DoW2, hero units could handle one squad, maybe two if you invested heavily into them, and supported their army. In DoW3, you can send heroes off on a merry adventure to slap everything's ass in a radius, and unless you are an actual retard and stick around after 'fucking around' phase, you will never have your hero enter the 'find out' phase.

It all just feels so hollow. Even the voice acting in a Relic game felt phoned in.
On the plus side, if you are an Orkaboo, they got the best treatment, by far, in regards to aesthetics and attitude. The WAAAGH tower being a heavy-metal concert is cool, even if it lets your opponent know you're going to attack a full 30 seconds in advance.

is it true DOW3 tried to chase the dota/esports train? I've heard they really wanted it to be another MOBA like competitor but never played it myself to check it out.

Commandos is part of a different subgenre of RTS games that focus on stealth.
You should try Desperados and Shadow Tactics if you want more. Maybe Robin Hood too, but not the Steam version.

I loved the shit out of DoW2, especially Retribution (yeah, yeah, same campaign 6 times, I know). Then again, I am a massive Diablofag, so that may have something to do with it. There's also the fact that there are hardly any 40k games where you really customise your dudes. DoW2 scratches that itch.

I also loved DoW1, though for entirely different reasons. Never played 3. Should I?

you seem like a smart man with sensible takes, maybe watch some DOW3 videos before wasting money on it?

Anon Babble dwellers are absolute shitlords at RTS so they can't articulate the reason why but

DoW1 is fun. It is not a complex RTS game. It is in fact restrictive at a lot of things and held by its own age and technical issues. But it is made with SOUL and has a lot of content and love. So much it goes overboard. It is an excellent entrypoint for anyone both to RTS and w40k. It might not be the actual best game there is, but it is the best product it wanted to be.

DoW2 is a downgraded Company of Heroes. If CoH didn't exist you wouldn't have a point of comparison, but still it is still a let down. It is not a DoW sequel, and it should've been CoH in the 40k. But not only is different, it is a boring game by what it wanted to be. It is an RTT where there's little abilities and options. There are no buildings, which means no defensive options, no activated abilities but just very few, no advanced commands, not many map interactivity, and almost no content. The AI is braindead and the technical issues were plenty at release. It is a simpler game even by DoW1 standards. It is an adventure game though, and that's the redeeming part of it, but still very shallow outside that.

To be honest, it is just bland to play.

local man nearly gets quads

but ya didnt

That was spouted a lot, but it's not as bad as it was often made to sound.
But it's not hard to see what would make the logical leap.

You lose if your core is destroyed in official maps

Cores have a turret that must be destroyed first

Or up to three turrets, one for each lane of the battle

And your hero units can farm any lane for weak-ass troops

The lanes aren't nearly as restrictive as a MOBA, there are no real level up / items / last-hit analogies, and you can still win with victory points in most maps.
However, it does look like a fucking mobile game and feels like one too, sometimes.

It's fucking shallow, though, and MOBAs were already a shallow RTS knockoff, so the comparison isn't completely out of left field.

Never hated it, but it's different.
Then again, Company of Heroes had more base building than DoWII has and those two games share most of the mechanics.
Just wished the scale was bigger.

if you like turn-based anything like X-COM, try Chaos Gate/Daemonhunters. You get a squad of four grey knights and their power level is adequate

True for DoW 2, but Chaos Rising I'd say fixed the repetitiveness issue.

My brain is small so I don't really like base building and economy. If I wanted it I'd play a city builder. I kind of wish you picked your units at the start, dropped them in a big map, and then you and your opponents tried to take objectives and kill HQs knowing you had limited resources.

But I also don't want to play with dinky little squads, I want a big army to manage.

Don't forget that you can't buy techs or do rushes to your enemy so there's only one way to play

Thaddeus just never seemed to output the kind of damage to make it work in my playthrough, and gear that you can equip on him is just better served on Force Commander or Tarkus.

Screw you for reminding me. I've been repressing this game in my mind for years, with the exception of the Ork mission with the 'uge kannon, which was cool and still fucky since it always stopped like 4 feet shy from the turning point.

I liked the character dynamics, genuinely fun team even if at least two of them are played by Steve Blum

it has SOVL!

lmao what a retard

then go play total warhammer and enjoy the slop

How can you explain what soul is to an insect?

Why the fuck aren’t these on ps5 yet
AoE2 and AoM are on there

nice psychobabble

Yeah I mean as an adventure Diablo like game is ok
Imagine coming for an RTS and see it's nothing like that

OMG I CANNOT USE BUILDINGS SAVE ME NIGGERMAN I'M GOING INSANEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I physically cannot comprehend people liking a genre I do not and being disappointed when they didn't get more of it

Buy the sequel to the most acclaimed RTS

ItsTalladega Nights

I physically cannot comprehend the dogshit game I'm obsessed with was a one time only and will gripe about it for 15 years on the internet

Imagine coming for an RTS and see it's nothing like that

That's literally exactly how I experienced it and still enjoyed it a lot.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO U HAVE TO HATE IT BECAUSE IT'S NOT THE SAME SHIT AS THE FIRST ONE!!! I WANTED A CARBON COPY OF THE FIRST ONEEEEE!!! MOMMYYYYYYY!!!!!!!

the first one was mid iibhwu

I went into it with an open mind and found it dull as fuck and GFWL was an awful thing to handle
Not even the topic, it's just dildoes

I really liked it. I have tons of experience with DoW1 and 2. Never played 3 after the seeing so much bad press about it.

I guess the reason I liked it is because I liked Company of Heroes, and DoW2 clearly took a lot of inspiration and design from that game. The way it was much more tactical, with smaller number of units and emphasis on using cover and tactics to counterplay and outflank the other player, suppression, artillery, grenades, using buildings, flamers, all about countering what the enemy's strategy was. There was always a counter, if you build a turret the enemy gets a heavy weapon to take it out or flank it with melee units. Stuff like that I just enjoyed. Played so much of Retribution's multiplayer back in the day too.

its really good just 40k is really niche and people are already too stupid for RTS on average

we don't talk about DOW3

based

used to play mp all the time on this. liked spamming wraithguards and backdooring the enemy base with webway portals.

DOW3 is utter garbage. I was there when it released

absolute KINO trailer

hyper pumped after thousands of hours in DOW2 elite

gameplay comes out

it doesn't look good. where's the fucking cover

"oh there's cover look there's bubble shields"

you know what I mean you fuck

game releases

runs like shit. plays like shit. gets reviewbombed, campain is shit, multiplayer is shit

dead within a few months, support ends less than a year later

what a wet fart of a game. ever since then I've been like fuck relic

40k is normie as fuck and it's the most braindead RTS ever

Relic was GREAT and could have challenged Blizzard back then toe to toe if they didn't went tits up with retardation and cost cutting

DoW1 was incredible, well done and fun

CoH1 is DoW1 gameplay but insanely refined and better in every single way, just not Warhammer

The logical step to do? Make DoW2 a CoH warhammer reskin, this shit writes itself

Instead get the most dogwater release ever

Cut costs

Lose key devs

CoH director fucking dies

Design an abortion of a game that doesn't work on release and it's just lame overall

Make two expansions to make it passable, some dummies gaslight themselves that DoW2 was good (it was not by a mile) and swear that they had fun (they didn't)

Ok then, we fucked up, let's make CoH2, that we can't fuck it up right?

CoH2 is one of the most mangled and bungled RTS games ever produced, runs like shit, plays sluggy and shit, looks worse than CoH1 and all the gameplay decisions are ass backwards and clunky, Like a CoH 0.7

But expansions!

Meh

Ok we CANNOT fuck DoW3 up. It's gonna be a return to form we swear! big armies and base building

DoW3 comes out, it's got base building alright, but it's not an improved version of DoW1 gameplay, it's dogshit, 3 races and is actually a MOBA game

What the fuck m8

loading nobz on to a battlewagon and charging into the enemy army was fun too. good times

Relic gets Age of Empires 4 commisioned to them

The whole fanbase from AoE2 and Relic goes AW HELL NAW

They develop it in their engine as usual

Some rumours start that it's getting fucked up like Relic usually does

Silence for awhile

World's Edge announces that they're "helping" the AoE4 dev team

Game releases

It's... actually good

Like suspiciously good

Check interviews and dev blogs

Realize that Relic's director was mangling the shit out of the dev process and they realized they were deviating too much from AoE formula and just CoH'd my shit up

World's Edge comes in, throws the design away, and starts over with AoE2 but better, essentially 2-2

Relic director leaves

You can see some of the early alpha gameplay philosophies in the Campaigns, some mechanics that aren't in MP, and the disconnection between the two modes

So basically AoE4 is not good because of Relic, it's good DESPITE Relic because AoE2 devs intervened

CoH3 is announced

No pls god no.gif

Never followed, liked or tried it

Don't think about it

Don't ask about it

Don't know a thing about it

Just know they mention kikes in the campaign as the victims for goypoints

Instant mental oblivion from everyone for several other reasons

...

DoW4 rumours appear

I'm surprised Relic is still around trying to do RTS games. They suck at it.

For me it was seeing the awful screenshots that was my first sign it was gonna be bad. I remember people back then coping that that models were supposed to look like painted minis even though it was clearly a straight graphical downgrade from 2.

dow2 > coh1 > coh2 > dow3 > aoe4 > dow1

People usually drybrush their figurines. These models look too clean.
Also, if you look closely at squads you'll notice their idle animations are synchronized which looks very unnatural and it would be really easy to fix by adding a small semi-random offset to the animation.

Playing it now in fact after finishing the first one completely (though I need to reinstall and update to run a Unification Campaign with the newest versions). I know some don't like how it doesn't have basebuilding, but this works well - the new system is actually one of the best RTS-style command systems I've seen to date.

Relatively few units, controlled by their leaders, don't need a lot of meta and individually activated abilities across tons of units

Units act independently as soldiers would be expected to do so, instead of need to tell each one to fire each time. Even fires and moves when they engage enemies on their way to cover etc

Cover system works decently and shows what degree of cover and where

Its actually something many games should learn from - I'd like to see it done alongside basebuilding from DoW1 or other titles. That said I do have some questions

Playing DoW2 Campaign - Mission ratings

Is this shit accurate - breezewiki.pussthecat.org/dow/wiki/Dawn_of_War_II/Star_ratings - I've not done Chaos Rising or Retribution yet, still on the first one. If this shit is accurate it seems both really important you get 5 stars on everything or close to it, to unlock multiple deployments per day. Im 10 days in and only did it once on the very first defense mission It seems like

Fury

You need to kill almost everything? So branching mission paths means running around to places you don't need to go justto kill?

Resilience

basically its never get any squad knocked out. Kind of shitty, I thought there would be some leeway here or if you fucked up and they stayed down at the end, but no its apparently not the case. I mean this I've done without many issues thanks to my commander always having the health packs but still.

Speed

This seems to be mission type dependent, but needs to be fastish, at opposition with capturing a resource in every mission at least?

Also

Foundries

seem MOST important to capture

what about coh3, I never played that one either

The math is accurate, but there's one saving grace for it all.
As Tyranid infestation gets worse, more is removed with every mission. When you're getting near a game over, Infestation is cleared much faster.
Orkz breaking stuff is rough, but the Tyranids will be what ends the game if you're not careful.

Getting foundries is very important if you want to hit the triple deployment. It allows you to blitz through assassination missions like a bat out of hell, ignoring an entire third of the enemies to get the 5 stars for speed and resilience.
However, the triple deployment isn't really needed. Try to aim for two, and you'll be more than set.

it was a dogshit game they didn't know what they wanted to do. they should have just kept it as a squad based RTS there's not many good ones out there.

Thanks. So far I'm on like day 10 (the first mission where you go to another planet in the same system and have one ork mission and one eldar warp spider mission etc) and previously I didn't prioritize foundries and pretty much only got 1 deployment per day because I ended up with 2-4 star ranks in one thing or another. Should I just restart entirely or does it not really matter in terms of XP and the like at this point? Trying to figure out if I've gimped myself

I still desire a new Eldar game

Let's make a game

But

Get this

NO gameplay

Ok so you have rts games, right? and they have lots of gameplay

Well let's take out the base building, the big battles, the teching, the unit variety, the map interactivity, the AI, and abilities

And add NOTHING in return

Like fucking nothing! like playing with a single Age of Empires unit, but... well just that

So like, that's my Dawn of War 2 idea, what you think'?

...

How come Relic is almost out of money?

No, you're fine. It's fairly forgiving.
In fact, if you end up getting 5 stars on everything repeatedly at the start, you have to end the days with unused deployments, since there isn't enough to do.
You're not much behind the curve, at all.

it's shiny plastic starcraft 2 look, 3 is trying to hard to be starcraft 2 because that's all the relic diversity hires played

why is GW so fucking gay, bros?

it gets so much hate

It does? It's the only one of the series I've played but I had an absolute blast playing it, in regular multiplayer and in that mode where 3-4 players pick heroes and do a horde mode kind of thing.
Then again, I played it near release so idk if it's still active at all.
I haven't played 3, but my impression was that 1 and 2 are beloved and 3 was the one that got shit on.
I still need to go back and play the solo campaigns for 1 and 2. Anyone played 3 and can tell me if its campaign is any good?

It's a very good question, and no one has an answer.
They shoot themselves in their foot, often, to protect their IP from making them too much money.
Some would speculate it's because they don't want video games to overtake their tabletop option, which is quite profitable.

I thought it looked more like LoL than anything since they seemed to be going down the MOBA route and it released just after peak MOBA.

Weird that they went for this and not the one for MoW AS2

both good

rtsniggers seethed for 15 years straight at this game, they truly are pathetic

it's profitable but it will always be just a handful of boxes of plastic

For how long?
Their profits are driven by arbitrarily raising the prince of plastic.
Meanwhile, younger people have less money and 3D printing is becoming more accessible by the day.
They can ban proxies from official events but that didn't do Magic any favors.

If they haven't overtaken plastic sales by now they never will. If anything each video game has only increased their plastic sales.