Dawn of War 2

Turtling is NOT a good tactic in DoW, with the possible exception of the Guard. The Tau can't even build turrets. A viable defence involves getting your efficiency down for getting up a good armed force asap. Remember, a listening post pays for itself in 30 seconds, so get the darn things down.

I seem to remember DoW being made with the distinct goal of pretty much eliminating even the possibility of turtling as a viable tactic.

Indeed. And trust me, it doesn't even work with the IG. I spent months raging man tears, trying to turtle my way to victory against a very hard difficulty Necron AI as the IG.

Necrons were overpowerd in DC- they sorted it in Soulstorm and its accompanying patch.

DoW is designed around getting out in the field and holding ground, so literal turtling doesn't work, but the IG can take a defensive posture, especially with Basilisks on the field; then hold until the Baneblade is on the field.

How much like the old DOW is Retribution?

Assuming you mean original DoW? Well... thematically similar, and keeping the Req/Power resource system, but significantly different in gameplay, scale and fighting style.

I did a review of the first two DoW2 releases.

i thought retribution had brought back base building and the like?

No- it's added troop building back into single player, which involves taking over buildings to do it from, but skirmish is unchanged,

Ok, so I took your guys advice about not turtling, started again on hard with Da Orkz and am currently kicking ass. They seem abit overpowered to be honest, just an unstoppable wave of destruction.

Originally posted by Ushgarak
No- it's added troop building back into single player, which involves taking over buildings to do it from, but skirmish is unchanged,

ah, ok.

I haven't seen anybody ask this before so I'll just throw it in here:
What do you people think about SP Tyranid system? It's quite different from the other ones...

I D/L'd the beta. I've yet to play DoW2's multiplayer skirmish mode. It's interesting...

But really boring. 😐 This game is too slow. I possessed all of the requisition/power nodes on the map sans two, and it still took like 5 minutes to upgrade to level 2. Meh.

They delayed T2 shortly after release, as people rushed to it so fast that T1 was pointless.

'Too slow' is an unusual criticism of DOW2 skirmish- if anything, it's too frantic; skirmish games are very short. Company of Heroes is much more measured.

Finally had some time to play the beta. Tried out all Imperial heroes and I'm pretty sure I'll be playing them for a bit.

Originally posted by Ushgarak
They delayed T2 shortly after release, as people rushed to it so fast that T1 was pointless.

'Too slow' is an unusual criticism of DOW2 skirmish- if anything, it's too frantic; skirmish games are very short. Company of Heroes is much more measured.

For example, squads in DoW last like, a ridiculously long amount of time, compared to units in Starcraft. A showdown consisting of 100 PSI's worth of units, on both sides, can end in 10 second in Starcraft. It once took someone with a Baneblade and two squads of IG upwards of about two minutes to kill one squad of IG I had behind heavy cover. There's a bit of a delay, which I think is intentional, between your clicking a command, and the squad carrying it out, which against contrasts to SC's "twitchy" micro'ing of units. Also, it kind of feels to me that the squads seem to "run" in slow motion, or something.

Not really saying that DoW is better or worse than Starcraft or anything, but there's certaintly a difference. DoW strikes me as more special ability focused, as opposed to troop positioning and troop movements, despite it's emphasis on cover.

This is true; they never quite reconciled the Company of Heroes positional-heave style with DoW's melee and magical powers.

Have to say though. I'm pleasantly surprised by the campaign, which I decided to just bite the bullet and go through with half my settings set to low.

I finished the Angel Gate levels in vanilla Dawn of War 2. That was epic. The mood, the level design, the characters. It all worked out really well.

Their set-pieces are always good. With six (though similar) racial campaigns in Retribution, I am keen to see if they have kept that feel throughout.

Originally posted by Ushgarak
Their set-pieces are always good. With six (though similar) racial campaigns in Retribution, I am keen to see if they have kept that feel throughout.

On an unrelated note, is it just me or is Chaos Rising substantially more difficult than vanilla Dawn of War? Maybe I've just gotten used to how overpowered I was by the end of DoW2.

Because you get stripped of a lot of your equipment at the start of it, it tends to give you the next set down you still had- which tends to be crap, as you would likely have sold all the stuff you didn't need. Especially armour.

So CR is unreasonably harder until you get gear relative to your level back.