DoW 2 beta
 

I got Soulstorm just to get in it, and it's a bit of alright.

One thing to watch out for is the fact that there's no tutorial and you will absolutely suck until you figure a few things out. Lucky for you, I will tell you what they are!

Reinforcement: Remember how you would always auto-reinforce all your squads as soon as one member died in combat? Well now there's no auto-reinforce, and you can only reinforce when standing next to special "you can reinforce here" structures and transport vehicles. To actually reinforce, you have to push the top of the green button, where the + is. It's confusing but the bottom half, with the little indicator thing, isn't part of the button in the UI. Reinforcing is important because buying new squads (and vehicles, repair if you can!) is maddeningly expensive and if you lose squads regularly it'll cripple you. And that's before you take into account experience and per-squad upgrades.

Emplacement Squads: Certain units, like shuriken cannon teams and devastator squads, must set up before firing. These units have a limited firing arc - once they've set up, they can only fire in a limited arc in front of their facing, and changing direction or moving requires them to "setdown." Giving an emplacement unit a move order carries an implicit setdown order, but not an implicit setup order. To set up, hold down right click and move the mouse - you'll see an icon showing the arc of fire they'll have when you issue the set up order you're about to give. Note that if you have multiple squads selected you'll only see a directional arrow and not the arc of any emplacements you may have selected, but your emplacements will set up.

This is important because the early game emplacement squads will kill entire infantry squads before they can escape, which as I mentioned earlier is very expensive. There are four counters to emplacement squads: Flanking (forcing them to set down and up gives you time to maybe win out against their superior damage), infiltration, grenades, and vehicles. Note that vehicles are only available in tier 2, and tier 2 also grants access to anti-vehicle infantry (typically these are also emplacement squads, i.e. brightlance team and plasma devastators) To use grenades, you should have an emplacement squad of your own set up in range of their already set up emplacement to draw fire for the squad that has grenades. Ideally, your grenadiers will approach from outside the firing arc but often this isn't possible. When a set up squad is disrupted (such as by grenades, or some other explosive weapon) they have to set up again, and will automatically do so while facing whichever direction they happen to be facing when they stand up. Plus, grenades do a lot of damage, so you can typically wipe out the squad if you've already damaged it a bit (such as with your own set up squad). Infiltration is self-explanatory - you can just march your stealthed units behind them and chew them up. Space marine scouts with shotguns are very dangerous. The downside to this solution is that a single squad of detectors, who are typically also infiltrators, is a hard counter. You can't see them until they see you, and then it's too late.

Turrets: They're like anti-infantry emplacements, except only certain heroes can build them, they're always set up in the same position and direction as they were first placed, and they have vehicle armor. Can't be disrupted with explosions. They're much more expensive than emplacement squads, but if you get a resource advantage (captured most of the map) you can use them to make your position effectively unassailable. (Not literally unassailable - vehicles can charge into their blind spot and chew them up - but if you have the resource advantage you can afford enough vehicle killers to stop them after losing a few turrets and they can't afford infantry to follow up)

The "Withdraw" Command: The hotkey is X, and you push it when things go wrong. A withdraw order cannot be rescinded once issued, but withdrawing units take less damage and make a bee-line for your base, which allows you to reinforce and heals damaged heroes pretty quickly. If someone throws grenades at a setup squad of yours, moving is futile - by the time the set down time is over, the grenades have already gone off. Issuing a withdraw order, on the other hand, gives the reduced damage buff immediately. Even so, the best you can hope for is that the tattered remnants of the squad will make it to base where you can reinforce them, but that's a damn sight better than having to purchase a new squad.

Reviving Heroes: If you're playing a team game and an allied hero goes down, you can revive him with 50% hp for free with your own hero. This gives you a hefty xp boost and saves them 250 requisition. If your hero goes down, you'll see the price to revive him (which will teleport to your base and give 100% hp) count down from 1000 to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 before suddenly dropping to 250 and staying there. Never pay more than 250 to revive your hero and never pay at all unless you fell behind enemy lines or have useless teammates.

The Avatar of Khaine Will Wreck Your Shit: Look out for its AOE moves - if you see the earth crack open before it, tracing a line of fire, that's the game telling you to GTFO or die. If you see him stop attacking and strike a pose, get out of melee range.

I wanted Dawn of War II not Company of Heroes: Even Less Units and Firepower Edition.

It's kind of fun in its own way but it's nothing like Dawn of War and I wish Relic had just made a sequel to my goddamn favorite RTS.

I wish there was some way to spend my goddamn power without being choked by the requisition bottleneck. In fact I think requisition in general is a bit too restrictive, losing like 2 or 3 squads to mistakes means you are forever behind and there's never enough req to catch up, even if you're on a team with 2 other people and they don't screw up.

Also I wish there was a tutorial so that half my teammates aren't as clueless as I was during my first few games. Watching my commander languish in friendly territory while a friendly commander walks right past her to go get himself killed made me cry.

It would also be nice if not every vehicle in the game was a bulldozer that wiped out all your cover as you move it around. Your first vehicle can wipe out all the cover that an enemy would use to get around your emplacements, but if you're not careful it'll also wipe out the walls that stopped them from getting around behind you.

Oh and hey we should be windows live friends and play together, I'm gonna put the info in my profile.

I played Dawn of War 2 for the first time this weekend (and also for the last time for a while, sadly...) and I'm already addicted. I know it's really, really different from Dawn of War 1, but I honestly think it's an improvement. I liked Dawn of War's mix of squad-based strategy gameplay and, umm, 40k, but DoW2 just seems to make it so much more... strategic.

I played Company of Heroes a bit too, which I found fun, but I like how DoW2 took the company selection element and replaced it with Badass Commanders (TM), then followed up by shifting the gameplay completely over to the "units" side from base management. Seriously, the unit selection buttons on the right of the screen are my favourite RTS innovation since RA3's secondary abilities. (I know RA3 is recent but secondary abilities were my favourite innovation since Starcraft's unique faction structures, so it's still saying a lot!)

My favourite commander is the Lictor Alpha, which is odd because the Nids and their in-your-face gameplay style totally doesn't normally suit me, but the Synapse system is great and there's no better commander hunter than the Lictor Alpha. Seriously, this guy goes invisible, suppresses by attacking from camo, pulls them back with Flesh Hooks when they retreat, and then tie them up long enough for your 3 Hormagaunt squads to get in the guy's face and make it impossible for him to escape. Plus, he's got the Pheromone wargear, which allows for automatic Gaunt reinforcement if he decides to use it.

My few gripes about the game mostly revolve around the vehicles. They also bugged me in CoH, how they smashed all the walls and terrain, making chokepoints and entrenched positions useless, but now they're also nigh-unkillable except by two or three units on each team... one of which being another vehicle. Units being their own best hard-counter takes a lot of the fun out of the game for me, but even then, I find that people don't spam vehicles because they know how easy it is to make a good anti-tank force. This game feels superbly balanced to me, especially compared to the imba-travesty that was Soulstorm.

Of course, now that I've said that, people will probably start screaming about how overpowered the Lictor Alpha is...

At first commander hunting seems really powerful, but in team games you can revive commanders for free and even if you pay the cost, it's actually cheaper than rebuilding basically any squad except some of the really cheap Tyranid squads.

Also Tyranids don't get any emplacements as far as I can tell, so I'm not sure how they're supposed to make up for that - admittedly I'd stopped playing random before I worked out how the game works, but what do you do to counter a shuriken cannon push?

True, but commanders also net you tons of experience and Biomass/Zeal/what-have-you. In addition, they're usually the focal point of a player's army, so if they perceive trouble for their commander they'll usually try and back him up somehow - this allows you to get the upper hand in other areas, too. When I play I like to use traps within traps because it makes me feel clever up until they fail.

Things that stop shuriken cannons (and indeed, other emplacements):

1) Lictors, including the Alpha. You just infiltrate up and take'em out. Or, if you have 3 (why would you?) you can just use Flesh Hooks 3 times.
2) Suppression. Barbed stranglers are great for this... and the Lictor Alpha can do this, too, with Scything Talons.
3) In theory, Ripper Swarms could do this with synapse (which makes Rippers immune to suppression) but I've never tried it.
4) Raveners. They can tunnel and pop out to take out the emplacements... though by that point you're probably better off with...
5) Carnifex. Duh.

Emplacements don't really suit the Nids' playing style, but you sure as hell can take them out. Barbed Stranglers are beasts for suppression though, which you can put on your Warriors, and you'll need warriors ANYWAY to spread Synapse...

Looking at the list again I realize that the only Tier 1 option is Rippers (not counting the commander) and I'm not even sure if they work. I dunno if this will result in the Lictor Alpha being the only reliable choice for a Tyranid player, or if the Rippers are actually better than I give them credit for. I mean, a 14-unit squad that costs 200 requisition... not too bad, I must say.

One more thing: I have no idea how to take out turrets short of a Carnifex. That's literally the only way I know to get through a good Techmarine/Mekboy's defensive line. I can reliably get PAST it with a few units if they have anti-tank, but the Nids have a depressing lack of anti-vehicle weaponry.

I just want to let you know, I hate you guys (read: I'm really jealous because I have to wait till Wed.). But I must ask a few questions. How does synapse work with the Nids? How good is the ai about auto grabbing cover? How in-depth is the squad customization?

I don't know about synapses since I never played Nids, but the AI is really good about finding cover, probably better than CoH. They'll change what cover they take based on your directional order and for the most part they'll adapt to a changing battlefield on their own, ie if an Ork comes up behind them and their little sandbag wall, they'll hop over to the other side of the wall and fire on him from safety.

Squad customization is basically maxed out at "Give them a plasma gun or a rocket launcher", but Hero customization is pretty in-depth gear-wise with a lot of combinations.

For Nids, you can still use guys outside of synapse range but they will suck ass in general. Within synapse, your 3 basic infantry types (rippers, hormagaunts, termagants) each get special abilities applied to them (suppression immunity, increased damage/leaping, knockdown respectively) as well as reasonably increased unit AI (they will seek cover and avoid grenades) and another benefit depending on which unit spreads the synapse usually.

So in summary, synapse makes Tyranids a billion times better.

Sounds about accurate to the game.

I'm terrible at RTSes but I am very very interested in DoW2, though some of the things like Requisition being too restrictive intimidate me a bit.

On the other hand, I loves my bugs, and everything O said about the Avatar makes me happy.