Official Dawn of War 3 thread

[Fenixgoon]

I am excited to the return of large scale battles. The closer to RTT-style of DoW2 made combat very clunky (squads engaged in melee would walk around FOREVER before fighting). That being said, I really enjoyed the RTS/RPG hybrid of the single player campaigns and have played through them multiple times across DoW2 and its expansions.

Having played the beta, the only thing I will say is that I'm a little disappointed in the lack of base building and the resourcing. I played 3v3 matches, and everyone waited around until enough points were captured that we could reasonably continually build squads of some kind. After that, big fights would break out, with neither team pressing an advantage, until one team out-macro'd the other, for lack of a better term. Static defense positions really don't exist - no bunkers, turrets, etc. of any kind. Squads must be left in place to defend resource points. I feel like this really favors the attacker over the defender outside of attacking the base (shield generator, turret, nexus).

I really enjoy the elite units, but their deployment seems somewhat inconsistent. Sometimes my teammates will get to all the way to the T3 nuker unit relatively early and I won't get mine all game.

The last thing is that I really love the fact that larger scale battles happen now. They are chaotic, and messy, and gloriously bloody. And while I am still terrible at RTS games, I had fun in the MP beta.

Is it the perfect DoW? Probably not. Am I excited for it? Yes. Will I buy it? Steam sale for $40.

 

[shortylickens]

it actually doesnt look that great, so far as gameplay goes.
But I will buy it on the inevitable Thanksgiving sale.

 

[Ranulf]

As I said in the death of rts thread, most of its cues to the first two games are superficial. You could take the base building out of the game and would miss nothing, I guess making it more like DoW2 but it isn't, since it doesn't have any real cover system nor the squad customization of either 1 or 2. It ends up as a massive ball of death and pretty graphical effects. Oh, and shield bubbles that are basically buildings you can garrison troops in, that only melee can pass thru to attack the defenders. You only have one MP gameplay mode, "power core" which along with the strength of heroes/elites is what has everyone calling it a moba or some sort of real time strat/tac/arena game. The single player doesn't look that special to make the game worth $60 on it own either.

They might have learned from CoH2 with doctrines/strategies system but I have my doubts. When one strat gives your basic marines grendades, you're pretty much going to take that. Same with one that lets you reinforce troops at victory points. There are other issues, the art style, game mechanics with grenades, reinforcement often being pointless, small maps (who needs 250 troops/units on a small map) but they all add up to a game I have little interest in playing. I think the name will be what carries it through for sales but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up a lot like Company of Heroes 2 did, 75% off after 6 months to get more people to play the game.

I'd read that they were taking it in a new direction but this I think will satisfy few people. I'd have loved an updated DoW1 with parts of 2 thrown in.