I'm surprised nobody made this thread yet. Despite being a bit dubious about it when I first played it, I'm actually loving this game now, especially the multiplayer. The single player is great, apart from the terrible story and talking heads, and the lack of variety in missions (most are just, take a load of points, and kill the boss), but the RPG aspects, and the gameplay are fun, and challenging. Multiplayer is amazing, but it has its downfalls, main ones being that there aren't many maps, and only 2 game modes, and the only game mode in ranked matches is victory point control. However The races, commanders and game play are terrific, there's hardly any base control (which imo is a great thing) and it allows for more complicated troop management on the battlefield instead of USSR style raids which tear down anything in sight. Troops are customisable to suit your enemy and have a lot of useful abilities that make such a huge difference, that along with your geared commander and his specials can make an army have a huge amount of variation.
I do have gripes with the live match-up system though, it can take forever to get a game at times, and then you may be on a completely unbalanced team (like you and 2 rank 10's verses 3 rank 20s etc) as well as ping/performance issues which can slow the game down for everyone. I can see how it can work at times, but the system is so clunky and unreliable, its a real shame.
Aside from all its problems, the gameplay keeps me coming back for more though. I have a certain nostalgia for the warhammer francise, I used to collect warhammer when I was 10-12, I wasn't up to scratch on all the rules, I used to play with my mates quite often, but I probably spent more time painting my models than playing with them, they knew a lot more about what they were doing ;p. I also used to play space hulk years ago, such a great game. When I played the first dawn of war I liked it, but the lack of anything but ****loads of troops and basebuilding was never my strong point, but Dawn of War II, seems to have hit the nail on the head for combat, and really reminds me of playing the table top, much more than dawn of war I did.
I do have gripes with the live match-up system though, it can take forever to get a game at times, and then you may be on a completely unbalanced team (like you and 2 rank 10's verses 3 rank 20s etc) as well as ping/performance issues which can slow the game down for everyone. I can see how it can work at times, but the system is so clunky and unreliable, its a real shame.
Aside from all its problems, the gameplay keeps me coming back for more though. I have a certain nostalgia for the warhammer francise, I used to collect warhammer when I was 10-12, I wasn't up to scratch on all the rules, I used to play with my mates quite often, but I probably spent more time painting my models than playing with them, they knew a lot more about what they were doing ;p. I also used to play space hulk years ago, such a great game. When I played the first dawn of war I liked it, but the lack of anything but ****loads of troops and basebuilding was never my strong point, but Dawn of War II, seems to have hit the nail on the head for combat, and really reminds me of playing the table top, much more than dawn of war I did.