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Has any one played this game?  I found it for cheep and had the extra scratch, so I made it mine.  Now I'm at work wondering how it is?  Yes, I know there are online reviews, but I wanted to see if anyone on Dakka has any experiance with it.

Thanks.

I've never even heard of this... What console is it on?

Thanks to anyone that can inform an ignorant fool.

LOL  It is for the PC.  But, I checked out GameFAQs and the forum is dead and the game site forum is rather dead.  So, I guess it was not that well recieved.  I guess I will give it a try and see what happens.

Oh, and they have a patch for it.  Don't know if it helps any.

I tried looking for it this afternoon at my local EB, the guys there love me, always making them look for obscure games :3

Anyhow I couldn't find it, I'll have to look on eBay.

Sorry.  I happened to come across it at Half-Price Books.  Kinda surprised me that it was there, but now I can understand.

Been to busy to get on my PC to check it out, yet.  Once ot the problems I read about this game is that it would not install correctly.  I guess that could be one of the problems people had with the game.  :S   But if I can get it on my PC, I will give some type of review and let you all know what I think of it.

Wish me luck.

A coworker of mine played it and gave it good reviews, and he usually says games are just "OK".  I've actually got a copy that's still shrinkwrapped, and I'm going to wait until I get my new computer in a few months before I play it.

I've played it. I enjoyed the game, but I hated hated hated it too. The stupid game takes GHz just to run the graphics. If you don't have a tweaked-out bleeding edge gaming PC with lots of free memory, you can expect ridiculously long load-times (like, upwards of 20 minutes) and significant input/response lag when there are lots of units on the map. And I was running it at the lowest resolution possible; my computer couldn't run it at higher graphics resolutions without a reeeaally slow refresh-rate.

It would be a much better gaming experience if it wasn't such a memory-pig. I played through the Empire campaign, but quit early in the Chaos campaign because the wait for each scenario to load was freakin' painful. I'm not kidding about the 20 minutes. And about half the time it would crash because it couldn't free up enough virtual memory, even after I downloaded the patch that was supposed to fix that.

Someone needs to explain to game programmers that 'really fancy & detailed graphics' are not a substitute for an enjoyable gameplay experience, and more does not equal better.

Fellblade, what kind of rig are you running?

I'm almost embarrassed to admit. But hell, I'm not any kind of computer geek; to me it's a magic box that mostly does what I want, i.e. surf the internet, exchange email, and play the occasional game.
I'm running an HP Pavilion a450n with a 3 GHz pentium-4 processor, 512 MB SDRAM memory, 48x CD-ROM, and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 graphics card, according to the sticker on the front of the stack. WinXP is the OS.

Posted By fellblade on 06/26/2007 2:55 PM
I'm almost embarrassed to admit. But hell, I'm not any kind of computer geek; to me it's a magic box that mostly does what I want, i.e. surf the internet, exchange email, and play the occasional game.

Wow.  fellblade, it takes a real man to admit his limitations.  Kudos to you.

After working in the computer field, I have seen it all.  From the guys who think they know what they are doing:

"Yeah, after I formated the hard drive, I could not find any of my old files.  Can you find them for me?  Under $10?"

To the guy who wants to save himself some money and do it himself:

"My computer started acting funny after I installed my new hard drive.  No, the hard drive is not mounted to the computer case.  I could not find any screws for it."

 The worst are the self-proclaimed, "I-know-just-enough-to-be-dangerous."  At that point, I say:

"Put the computer down and take three steps back!"

:S

Looks like it's system RAM and your video card that are your real bottlenecks, although your P4 isn't doing you any favors.  Bottom line is that you need a computer that has some newer, faster parts to be able to play this game.  I've got a $1500 gaming computer from three years ago and I'm still putting this game off until I get my new box in a month or so.  PC Gaming is hell on the wallet.

Heh. Bottom line is, the programmers should have made a game like Dawn of War, where the graphics are adequate, rather than this game, which was too cutting-edge for the common, household computers at the time of the release. In a couple of years, those sort of system demands will probably be easily met by the bulk of the computers in people's homes, but by then, the game will be out of print.

Several folks in my area bought this game when it first came out, and we were looking forward to some multiplayer action... it never happened, because most of us didn't have fast enough machines.

Honestly, I'm not sure computer games are targeted to common, household computers.  Maybe so.  I've been a computer gamer since MicroProse was publishing F-15 Strike Eagle, so I've always gotten gaming computers, and still have icky feelings about anything that you can buy straight from Best Buy.  I'm not saying that those computers are bad (my parents have one, and I've supported several non-gamer friends in purchasing that kind of computer), but I wouldn't try to play anything more recent than a 2003 game on those computers.  And that's on the new ones.  New games just require so much extra oomph to get them noticed these days that playing on an older system isn't feasible.  Heck, my three year old gaming rig won't run Medieval 2: Total War well.

To be honest, if I were you I'd do a little research and find some games that are a bit older but got great reviews.  Heck, I still go back and play the original Half Life from time to time when I simply want to kill stuff, and I've actually been playing the original Doom on my XBox 360 more than anything else on the platform lately. 

Man, this has gotten off-topic.  Your computer could definitely use more RAM, and if you got a better video card, that would help immensely as well (the 5000 series was notoriously underpowered, and the 5200 is the low-end card of the 5000 series).  Also, many of those pre-built computers have a whole passle of software running in the background, and that'll slow your game down as well.  I'm guessing you have 15 or so icons in your task bar (next to the clock, lower right), and each one of those is a program that's eating up computer resources (mostly RAM and CPU time).

Computer gaming will probably be, at least for a while, a hobby that requires a certain amount of dedication and research to enjoy.  At least we're past the stages of editing your CONFIG.SYS to get that damned Expanded (vs. Extended) memory working right.

And sorry you can't fully enjoy the game; if you really feel strongly, write the publisher about it (a real letter, not an email).  They do listen to that sort of thing, especially when a game doesn't sell well.

Off topic indeed!
If games aren't targeted at common, household computers, the game makers are going to starve themselves to death. The percentage of high-end, custom-built gaming boxes that can run the latest bleeding-edge graphics, compared to the percentage of off-the-shelf, bloatware filled desktop boxes, is, well, low. It is very frustrating to spend $50 on a game that your computer cannot run, especially when most companies have "no return on opened software" policies. (Oh, I can return it, but only to exchange it for an unopened copy of the same game? What part of 'doesn't run on my computer' don't you understand?)

So the game designers, programming geeks that they are, get all excited about the cool graphics rendering they can do, and make games that suck up memory in order to make the character's hair float realistically in the breeze. But they don't do anything to make the game itself more fun. As Shamus Young says in one of his rants: "Lots of people have been whining about the lack of innovation in gaming. About endless sequals. About re-re-rehashes of Tolkienesque knights vs. ogres and one-man-army type games. About the fact that in the last 10 years we?ve evolved from find-the-key and jumping puzzles to find-the-key and jumping puzzles with awesome graphics."

You point about the older games is valid: Doom 2, Return to Wolfenstein, Half-Life... Battlezone, BZII, Thunder Brigade... Sword of Aragon, Civilization... fun games. But. Most of them, the average person cannot run, because they have the wrong Windows OS installed. Games designed to run on Win95 won't run on Win XP, etc. I know it is possible to get the games to work, but it is not easy, or simple, for people with a rudimentary grasp of computer technology. And let's face it, for all the claims that our younger generation is going to be computer-literate, most of them aren't. They can turn the computer on, and search the internet, and upload videos and download music, but they have no idea how to reconfigure an operating system or recover lost files. It's a magic box! And most of the tech support people I deal with (keep in mind, I work for a public school system) seem to be reading 'Windows for Dummies' to me over the phone- which doesn't help when the problem is with the school system's proprietary software, that was installed four years ago (AND WAS WRITTEN IN DOS! WHAT KIND OF PROGRAMMER STILL WRITES FOR DOS? I'll tell you- the superintendant's nephew, that's who) but I digress. Basically, if computer game companies want to sell games, they need to make them painless plug-and-play.

I had really high hopes for Mark of Chaos, because Dawn of War was such a good set of games. I was, end the end, really disappointed. Not because the game was lacking, but because the graphics requirements were needlessly bloated, to the point that the game was unplayable on most computers. I'll say it again- by the time the average off-the-shelf computer can easily run MoC, the operating systems installed on said computer will not work with MoC, and another good game will vanish into limbo.