Dawn of War

[Jonathan]

I oughta download the demo for this and see if it's any good. I wonder if the LotR RTS or TW are coming out soon.

[Alan]

RTW has a demo out.

[Peijen]

I tried it and I must say I like it quite a bit. The idea of specialize squad is really cool, but I think flamethrower are really useless upgrade for space marine.

Going to play some more and try out different units

[George]

My feelings are kind of mixed. Battles look cool, but I would need a lot of practice to be able to control things properly. As it is, I simply lump everything but scouts and artillery onto one hot key and sent it en masse into the enemy.

Artillery + cloaked scouts rule. Dropping six long range missles onto a mass of orcs and watching them be hurled across the map is one of the best parts of the game. Reminds me of Freedom Force a little.

I wish they had done away with the tactical resource management (ie, mine/research/build during the mission). The demo mission was pretty easy, so I was able build up once at the beginning and then just slog through. However, in a real mission, I expect that will not be possilbe. I want to spend time controlling troops, not doing research, building mines (or whatever they call them in this game). Tactical resource management badly detracts from the game experience and has in every RTS I've played so far. Warhammer is typically played with strategic resource management, if any. You build your army before the battle begins, and then just clobber stuff. They really screwed up by not allowing units to carry across missions too. Ok, Original War showed how that could truly suck, but Battle Isle's system worked pretty well.

[George]

Has anyone else been burning heretics, killing mutants, and purging the unclean?

I "acquired" a full version of the game, and I've played about a mission a day for the last week. The concept of reinforcement works pretty well; once you build all the buildings, you never go back to them. You just keep reinforcing your existing units.