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Plumbumbarum wrote:


It is a chase game though at vanila population cap level with the base thing at your back and too reliant on abilities imo, some of which you have to actualy aim btw i.e. bioplasma - not something that should have place in a tactical game. The result is way better than DoW 1 but it still is not the type of gameplay that appeals to me and still not the 40k TT feel, though much more than DoW 1. I'd say ingame option for 100, 200, 300 maybe up to 500 population cap games would take it to another level, it is a good game but some decisions were wrong, imo.

Obviously GW doesn't want the video game to be too close to tabletop but probably doing the same but realtime could pass, no base just the map, your force, deployment, reserves, timer and objectives. I think it was a financial decision to make the first as a base building RTS and a second as narrative driven light real time tactics/ rpg mixup in SP. DoW 3 looks good, let's hope THQ survives or some other entity picks Relic, that CoH 2 engine is the best that could happen to 40k tactical game.

Anyway OP, the game is cheap to the point of no brainer now and Relic deserves support, you want to play skirmishes get Retribution, want single player get all three and try yourself . It's not a game to skip if only to watch, the battles are a sight to behold.

DoW1 is the way it is because Relic wanted to streamline RTS games by removing resource gathering with their control point system. DoW2 is the way it is because Relic wanted to streamline things even further by removing base building altogether. I really appreciate that aspect, since while I enjoy building bases some of the time, it's a bold move to remove it. It showed they were willing to innovate and evolve their game instead of just rehashing it with prettier graphics.

DoW1 has a lot of micromanagement that they want you to use, but the population cap means most battles become A-move fests with a little bit of pointing here and there. When you have 10 squads of Marines, 3 Predators, a Land Raider, and three commanders, it's hard as hell to even tell what's what, let alone utilize their special abilities, target them against what they're best against, and so on. There are all these abilities like grenades, psychic powers, sergeant/HQ abilities and so on, and you just end up with mobs of dudes smashing into each other, constantly replacing casualties in the field, and hoping your army is the one standing when the dust settles. It's fun to watch, and pausing the game to get down in there with the camera is cool, but the gameplay ends up being very simplistic. I'd hate to turn DoW2 into that with expanded pop mods. I will say that DoW2 doesn't work as well in a 1v1 environment though; then it does truly become a chase game. It's just capping a point, running away at the first sign of trouble, then capping a different one. DoW2 multiplayer defaulted to 3v3, which is what the game was built and balanced around. Even with a team that's not terribly coordinated, a 3v3 DoW2 game can be insanely fun, and you get a scale a bit closer to that of the 40k tabletop.

I just replayed DoW2: Retribution and I'm nearing the end of DoW1 right now. It's something I'm already very opinionated about, but with both games this fresh in my mind it's something else!

Total War style with spaceship battles based on Batlefleet Gothic, that's a dream. Second is massive Battlefield type 40k game.

Total War style with spaceship battles based on Batlefleet Gothic, that's a dream. Second is massive Battlefield type 40k game.

Closest you might get are Sins of a Solar Empire (40k mod - unfinished) and perhaps Planet Side 2.

Nothing really to add ontopic but I really loved DoW2, thoroughly immersive with great characters and story.
DoW1 was fun too albeit a little buggy/unfair/unpolished in places but comparing the two imho, is not fair, they are different games and genres.

Eve online and Rust would be a good bet as well.

Eve Online? You guys obviously haven't played Homeworld, which was made by Relic in the first place. Turning that into a BFG game wouldn't be terribly hard, especially with the budget and experience Relic has now.

Aye, good shout for Homeworld.

 Brother SRM wrote:
DoW1 has a lot of micromanagement that they want you to use, but the population cap means most battles become A-move fests with a little bit of pointing here and there. When you have 10 squads of Marines, 3 Predators, a Land Raider, and three commanders, it's hard as hell to even tell what's what, let alone utilize their special abilities, target them against what they're best against, and so on. There are all these abilities like grenades, psychic powers, sergeant/HQ abilities and so on, and you just end up with mobs of dudes smashing into each other, constantly replacing casualties in the field, and hoping your army is the one standing when the dust settles. It's fun to watch, and pausing the game to get down in there with the camera is cool, but the gameplay ends up being very simplistic. I'd hate to turn DoW2 into that with expanded pop mods.

It's not like that. It depends on how you play, but if you set resources for standard then you have your usual DoW 2 skirmish that builds up to become a bigger game, if you fail at that initial phase then you have troubles later. So the basic game is still there just only for a while, though you still have the smaller battles here or there later in the game that require most of the skills of the standard skirmish. Also there's a possibility to pause the game and issue orders when paused so you can give detailed orders to everything you want to and watch the oucomes, can't use abilities there though. As for those, I use most of them all the time, they are not that important as pure number of Lascannons but you can still mark ten units of Terminators instead of two and fire missile launchers fire or find time to puke a little with GUO. Paradoxicaly I'd say DoW 2 environment works better for larger force than DoW 1.

The AI is not suited to moded population cap though, you have to make up those battles for yourself and use self restrains to make it enjoyable. That said, witthout self restrains and using AI weakness I had me vs 3 expert enemies battles that if played continuosly, would take 3 days at least. Everything on the map was burned to the ground, the number of bugs on the screen storming my positions was hundreds probably and those waves of them were long, mistakes in setting up costed me half of the force at least. Huge waste of time but was worth it for me.

 Brother SRM wrote:
I will say that DoW2 doesn't work as well in a 1v1 environment though; then it does truly become a chase game. It's just capping a point, running away at the first sign of trouble, then capping a different one. DoW2 multiplayer defaulted to 3v3, which is what the game was built and balanced around. Even with a team that's not terribly coordinated, a 3v3 DoW2 game can be insanely fun, and you get a scale a bit closer to that of the 40k tabletop.

That's true, the isssues are mostly gone with 3v3.

 Brother SRM wrote:
I just replayed DoW2: Retribution and I'm nearing the end of DoW1 right now. It's something I'm already very opinionated about, but with both games this fresh in my mind it's something else!

I'm always playing them, Soulstorm and DoW II

Try dawn of war soulstorm it has more units

 Brother SRM wrote:
Eve Online? You guys obviously haven't played Homeworld, which was made by Relic in the first place. Turning that into a BFG game wouldn't be terribly hard, especially with the budget and experience Relic has now.

Yes that's such an obvious direction to take I'm still puzzled noone at THQ/ Relic did.

Brother maximus wrote:
Try dawn of war soulstorm it has more units

It has the laziest, crappiest implementation of aircraft I've seen in an RTS, and is honestly just the studio (not Relic!) milking the DoW engine dry. It also has some atrocious voice acting that I highlighted in my Dawn of Awesome videos. I like that it added two armies to the game (even if there were some awful exploits for Sisters at first) but after Dark Crusade changed up the whole campaign system it was just underwhelming. Had a few nice maps though.

 Ratius wrote:

Total War style with spaceship battles based on Batlefleet Gothic, that's a dream. Second is massive Battlefield type 40k game.

Closest you might get are Sins of a Solar Empire (40k mod - unfinished)

Thanks didn't know the mod, have to check it.

 Ratius wrote:
...and perhaps Planet Side 2.

No space facist theocracies, alien dinosaur bugs, tanks from hell, fungus monkey-ish orks or sado-maso elves there, no fun sadly.






Automatically Appended Next Post:
More pics, some of those are situations created for fun or pic sake rather than typical gameplay with modded cap. Btw it's easy to have both modded and unmodded game, you just need two shortcuts.



- I've spoilered the pics as they are rather large and some folks might be struggling to load the page. - MDS

DOW 2 should have built on DOW 1 more, rather than starting from scratch.

What I mean by this is streamlining the combat system, bringing in a meta-game - who wouldn't want to earn XP to spend on planitary bombarment, or expand upon the "elite units" idea, so instead of better versions of normal troops, you'd get a single squad of a unit that you can't build ingame. So instead of a tactical squad with more HP and better morale, you get a sternguard squad with better shooting. All you need is a couple of skins for that.

Also make the combat less hectic. When two groups are shooting each other, they should hunker down so that you get two "sides", rather than everyone running around and shooting each other in the face.

And some sort of doctrinal choice. As the Imperial Guard, I should be able to choose between my troops being more disciplined, or access to special weapons. Space Marines should be able to bring in specialists from other chapters (Blood Angel assault specialists, etc).



Automatically Appended Next Post:
dude those screenshots are ruining the page can you remove them please?

I agree homeworld is a good bet as well, but Eve Online and Rust fit the bill of his question of a game of 40k Army & Navy better.... at least so far. I too would trust Relic and Vigil games to make a better game, if they had the funding to do it.

I think that the Dawn of War series would be much improved by a reduction in the number of capture points and a larger time frame in which the control point tickets would expire.

That way there would be more constant contact with the enemy and more of a tug-of-war and defense-breakthrough dynamic rather than constantly breaking up your forces and sending capture units throughout the map probing for undefended areas and sitting and capping points before retreating once things got too hot.

The attempt to streamline the RTS dynamic by removing resource gathering and replacing them with capture points also, in my opinion, failed. In Warcraft 3, my strategic target is a gold mine expansion - it is of critical importance and defeating it usually means a major confrontation. I need to take out the gold mine expansion to deny my opponent resources and deny him his ability to recoup a substantial resource investment in building and defending that expansion. My opponent, for his part, sees defending that expansion as defending that investment. So he maneuvers his army to head off my assault and we stand and bang. A battle, if you will. THQ's RTS games tend to be about sending small units around the map probing for undefended flags rather than contributing meaningfully to the battle. There's less fighting. The retreating mechanic just made it worse. In DoW1, you would just stand and bang and fight until your resources ran out and your unit perished - again, a battle. In DoW2 the dynamic has changed, it's all about timing your retreats so that you lose less models than the enemy per confrontation and wearing him down from a resources standpoint without actually staying and engaging his main spearhead.

There's also no connection as to why every mount of dirt with a flag on it is even strategically significant outside of the fact that it increases the + value next to your resource ticker.

But the best thing to compare DoW/CoH's combat system to is Total War. Total War has no "capture points." You just rout the enemy's forces. Kill the enemy. It is RTS distilled. It's so simple and yet it works wonderfully. You get all the fun of figuring out how to flank with your cavalry and protect your archers from an advancing infantry horde without any of the nerve wracking tedium of running around the map playing a game of tag with capture points.

And the campaign is even better in Total War, because you get a strategy map, Civilization-style. You're in a battle because you want to capture a city, head off an army before it reaches a stronghold to garrison, or because you want to burn and loot the countryside. Strategy is where strategy should be - on maps. The tactics comes down to how you defeat your enemy on the battlefield.

Sorry for the pics but I've never had a problem with jpgs even using worst connections in Poland, like those mobile network USB modems and 25kb speed, couldn't have guessed. Will spoiler pics from now on.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

TedNugent wrote:
THQ's RTS games tend to be about sending small units around the map probing for undefended flags rather than contributing meaningfully to the battle. There's less fighting.

That's a problem of too small population cap. Mod it and you have more units, better control and taking next point or strategic position requires a plan, scouting etc.

In vanila though timing your movements, using terrain and positioning, you can cut your opponent from undefended flags etc but indeed, there is too much chasing too little fighting.

TedNugent wrote:
The retreating mechanic just made it worse. In DoW1, you would just stand and bang and fight until your resources ran out and your unit perished - again, a battle. In DoW2 the dynamic has changed, it's all about timing your retreats so that you lose less models than the enemy per confrontation and wearing him down from a resources standpoint without actually staying and engaging his main spearhead.

Retreats are bad but DoW 1 system feels so artificial, out of place and exactly economical dependent that it's not 40k anymore, imo. I prefer running, as ridiculous as it is with SM for example.

TedNugent wrote:
But the best thing to compare DoW/CoH's combat system to is Total War. Total War has no "capture points." You just rout the enemy's forces. Kill the enemy. It is RTS distilled. It's so simple and yet it works wonderfully. You get all the fun of figuring out how to flank with your cavalry and protect your archers from an advancing infantry horde without any of the nerve wracking tedium of running around the map playing a game of tag with capture points.

And the campaign is even better in Total War, because you get a strategy map, Civilization-style. You're in a battle because you want to capture a city, head off an army before it reaches a stronghold to garrison, or because you want to burn and loot the countryside. Strategy is where strategy should be - on maps. The tactics comes down to how you defeat your enemy on the battlefield.

Yep an obvious fix, get economy, bases and all this out of the battle, either you pick your army for money before a battle or you use what you produced before like in Total War. Objectives could stay but only as places that count for victory if occupied when the time runs out, just like it is in TT game.

TedNugent wrote:
I think that the Dawn of War series would be much improved by a reduction in the number of capture points and a larger time frame in which the control point tickets would expire.

So basically you want to fight over the same piece of dirt on the map for a longer amount of time? In doing so, you'd be removing the only way a losing side can recover, which is hitting genfarms, taking other points on the map away from the main objective, and so on. If there are three critical points and 10 resource points, one side can't defend them all. If there are fewer, then the winning side can actually protect them all and effectively win by waiting around. It's frustrating trying to catch a few guerilla squads running around the map uncapping points, but it's even more frustrating when you're essentially locked in your base because the other team has a lockdown on the only ground that matters.

As for your point about combat: sometimes it's better to run than fight. If you can kill a few guys and force your enemy to retreat, that means they're going to need to stick around at their base and reinforce, then trek back to the fight if they want to be effective. Reinforcing in the field (without a conscious support element like an APC) isn't a great mechanic since it means you'll end up with fights like you just said - a handful of guys standing there until your resources run out. That's not dynamic, and frankly uninteresting. In addition, there are some great opportunities for a tactician to get behind a squad that's anticipated to flee, and cut off their retreat. Most of your ideas sound like you'd want the game to be somewhat more static game altogether.

I can see pretty much on the level with your Total War comments though. I do like the campaign system from Total War, and the "diet" version of that we had in Dark Crusade was fun. I'd rather fights didn't devolve into two armies meeting and killing each other with no further objectives though. Fighting over multiple objectives is more interesting, and to use my favorite word from my previous points, dynamic. You're not just meeting in the middle, you're meeting in multiple locations with different concentrations of forces. You have to be conscious of more than just what's in front of you.

 Macok wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Also, avoid the Retribution expansion of Dawn of War 2, since it took the good part of the first game and Chaos Rising (the campaign) and tried to make it more like the bad part (the skirmish mode).

I respectfully disagree.

First of all, choice of your faction.
There are people who want to play something other than Space Marines.

Second of all, various missions.
I think Vanilla DoW2 had a longer long campaign. It doesn't matter, it was boring in the long run. Can't compare the stories because I didn't finish it. It felt like chore after a while. Missions and maps were copy-pasted.
Reti handled this problem much better.

The second part is more important IMHO. I did finish Retribution SM campaign (second playthrough, first was Eldar). In vanilla I couldn't stand the grinding.

I have no comment about Chaos Rising because I didn't play that one.

Honestly, choice of faction doesn't mean a lot when every single Retribution campaign is the same exact thing with different cutscenes, and the unit customization was almost absurdly simplified. I really liked how the base campaign can take you back to different portions of the same map two or three times, myself, and present interesting choices in how you want to go about getting to the objective; Retribution felt very linear to me, even after the problem of using literally the exact same missions on the exact same maps in the exact same order with the exact same enemies six times over for the different campaigns. I've beaten the Eldar, IG, and Ork campaigns in Retribution, every time it got a little more tedious.

The base game did get kind of tedious if you wanted to go through and do absolutely every random defense mission and acquire all three suits of Terminator armor (I think my shortest time record for the Avatar is thirty seven minutes), true, but a lot of the length is optional and I'm not sure I'd call it 'grinding' when you can start bumping into the level cap as early as I did. Chaos Rising was a very good game in terms of having a lot of meaningful choices, plenty of interesting characterization and background that doesn't detract from the gameplay or get boring, lacking filler, and remaining relatively concise.

I am perfectly supportive of peoples' desire to play something other than Space Marines, however. If someone could take the people who wrote the plots and characters for Retribution's campaigns (DoW2 has perhaps the deepest and most interesting overarching plot I've ever seen in an RTS, and some of the best and most-detailed characters) and put them in a setup where they work with the gameplay and rules elements from the base or Chaos Rising campaigns, I would buy the game so fast I would have to retroactively turn red to justify my speed.

I'm actually working on an adaption of the Mordheim rules based around that concept, since I don't have access to the engine, art assets, or licensing to make it as a video game (without reverse-engineering DoW2, which is probably illegal); if anyone wants to help playtest it feel free to PM me for the rules (I'm assuming everyone here has access to a dozen or so 40k minis and some terrain). I've got the base rules written and am attempting to write and balance the various warbands available (every army with a Codex except for the Tyranids, the Adeptus Arbites, Eldar Corsairs, and a backwards-looking fluff interpretation of the three Ordos of the Inquisition are represented so far, I'm not sure about what to do with Necrons and I don't know about trying to write Harlequins).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

TedNugent wrote:
I think that the Dawn of War series would be much improved by a reduction in the number of capture points and a larger time frame in which the control point tickets would expire.

That way there would be more constant contact with the enemy and more of a tug-of-war and defense-breakthrough dynamic rather than constantly breaking up your forces and sending capture units throughout the map probing for undefended areas and sitting and capping points before retreating once things got too hot.

The attempt to streamline the RTS dynamic by removing resource gathering and replacing them with capture points also, in my opinion, failed. In Warcraft 3, my strategic target is a gold mine expansion - it is of critical importance and defeating it usually means a major confrontation. I need to take out the gold mine expansion to deny my opponent resources and deny him his ability to recoup a substantial resource investment in building and defending that expansion. My opponent, for his part, sees defending that expansion as defending that investment. So he maneuvers his army to head off my assault and we stand and bang. A battle, if you will. THQ's RTS games tend to be about sending small units around the map probing for undefended flags rather than contributing meaningfully to the battle. There's less fighting. The retreating mechanic just made it worse. In DoW1, you would just stand and bang and fight until your resources ran out and your unit perished - again, a battle. In DoW2 the dynamic has changed, it's all about timing your retreats so that you lose less models than the enemy per confrontation and wearing him down from a resources standpoint without actually staying and engaging his main spearhead.

There's also no connection as to why every mount of dirt with a flag on it is even strategically significant outside of the fact that it increases the + value next to your resource ticker.

But the best thing to compare DoW/CoH's combat system to is Total War. Total War has no "capture points." You just rout the enemy's forces. Kill the enemy. It is RTS distilled. It's so simple and yet it works wonderfully. You get all the fun of figuring out how to flank with your cavalry and protect your archers from an advancing infantry horde without any of the nerve wracking tedium of running around the map playing a game of tag with capture points.

And the campaign is even better in Total War, because you get a strategy map, Civilization-style. You're in a battle because you want to capture a city, head off an army before it reaches a stronghold to garrison, or because you want to burn and loot the countryside. Strategy is where strategy should be - on maps. The tactics comes down to how you defeat your enemy on the battlefield.

I acknowledge the first point to some degree; DoW2's skirmish mode feels a lot like I'm running around playing whack-a-mole (or whack-a-Tyranid, as the case may be) on random insurgent enemy units popping up behind my lines. I'd be a lot happier if they altered the game structure such that it supported a wider variety of objectives in general, as well as making it less of a game of running around the other guy in the dark.