Nameless Voice on 30/4/2017 at 00:53
I didn't really like the first map - units only, no base-building, and strangely difficult for a first level (admittedly, I am playing on hard)
Your small fixed group is put up against so many foes that I had to to cheese down the enemy troops a bit before fighting (e.g. with snipers out of range of their foolish AI.)
The game picks up in the second mission where you actually get base-building though. Plus, Gorgutz still has his proper voice actor, unlike Gabriel Angelos.
There's a single interleaved campaign, where you play first a mission as the Space Marines, then one as the Orks, then one as the Eldar, and then repeat the cycle.
Right now I'm in a state of being a little confused over all the different units, each with different abilities.
Units in general seem a bit fragile, and the AI is smart enough to use special abilities like grenades to quickly decimate clumped forces. A moment of inattentiveness can easily lose half of your army.
Most units have at least one active ability, while the heroes (called "elites" here) have 2-3 MOBA-like abilities and are much stronger than any other unit (and also much bigger, in contrast with the original Dawn of War where they were only slightly larger than normal units.)
Gabriel Angelos loves to leap around the battlefield with a ridiculous flip-and-slam move which will certainly need meme videos made about it in short order.
The game seems to want you do a fair bit of redundant micro, too. For example, Ork Boys have a shout ability that buffs them up briefly, but activating it with a group of Boyz selected will not make all of the Boyz use it - instead, you need to tab through each squad of Boyz and hit the key.
One nice thing in the interface is that there are buttons to select each of your production buildings, directly on the UI above the command card, so you can quickly select on to start building units (though there's no guarantee of which one will take the build order if you have more than one.)
The resource acquisition rate feels really slow compared to the original Dawn of War, especially the Power resource (which is now generated by captured points, the same as Requisition), which takes absolutely forever to fill up enough to build a big unit like a tank.
