Anyone who has had the misfortune to talk to me about PC games will know that I bang on endlessly about how much I love Dawn of War II. While I found the single player campaign to be a step backwards from a more traditional RTS, the multiplayer in Relic's latest game really hooked me. Dispensing with most of the usual faffing around you get in an RTS, it was a game that you would be killing each other within a minute of starting a game, and it would be all over in 25 to 30 minutes at most, while still retaining a lot of tactical choices and strategic variety. Plus, it has Space Marines in it, which is an immediate plus in my book. I've clocked up over 300 ranked matches in it so far, and it has almost stopped me playing any other PC game for the last few months.
v.1.5.0.4038.trainwreck
When Relic released the "There Is Only War" update last week, I was pretty excited. This update promised to completely rebalance the game, as well as more than double the number of multiplayer maps. Well, having downloaded and played it for a few days, I'm hating it. They seem to have ruined the game for me.
The changes are too many to mention, but I think the root of the problem is that Relic increased the power cost to advance to tier 2 enormously, thinking that players wanted to stay in tier 1 and fight it out for a while. This doesn't appeal to me, because I've never been a big fan of the swarm theory in RTS games. I much prefer having small skirmishes with 2 or 3 diverse units, rather than a huge clump of low-tier melee units trying to overwhelm the opponent.
Of course, this by itself would be too much to bear, but they've wrecked the two races that I play. The Space Marines, previously one of the stronger and more versatile sides in the game, are now completely hopeless. Space Marine units are now expensive, slow and poor in melee combat (they always were expensive and slow, but they used to be good in any situation), which means that in tier 1 you just get rushed down, as every other race now has a cheap, powerful melee unit. Because it is now harder to retreat, if you don't leg it before you've even fired a few shots, you are going to lose one or two units before you make it back to base, which is not such an issue if you've got between six and eight units in a squad like the other races do, but when you've only got three in a squad, this is a serious problem, and you end up having to spend all your resources just reinforcing injured squads. Because you can't control territory, you can't accumulate resources to advance to tier 2, where you get some (expensive) methods to deal with swarms. By the time you tech up, the game is usually nearly over, and you don't have the resources to build the units you desperately need.
This happens to you a lot post-patch
The Eldar, on the other hand, are now far stronger than before. Guardian squads are stronger and tougher than they used to be, but what really swings it is how ludicrously powerful howling banshees, the Eldar melee infantry, have become. Banshees just rip most units to shreds, especially space marines, and because they now have no power cost, you can build them as soon as the game starts. You'd think I'd be happy about the increased potency of the Eldar, previously one of the more difficult races to play, but I don't like the way the changes have modified their playstyle. With the power of banshee and guardian squads, they're effectively now another swarm race in tier 1 (which is where a lot of the game is now taking place). I appreciate that they've made rangers more deadly, but there is still not much reason to use them, and by the time you get to tech 2, where you can use warp spiders, wraithlords and falcon grav-tanks, the units I really like, the game is often nearly over. Eldar are now like the tyranids were - easy to win with, but not that much fun to play.
Playing Dawn of War II is now just making me angry as I lose game after game. I still have this urge to play, but it's mainly from remembering how much I used to enjoy it rather than how frustrating I am finding it now. I've had Eldar and Ork opponents tell me that they used to be Space Marine players but have had to switch because it's impossible to win a game with the marines, but unfortunately, they're now the only race that plays the way I enjoy playing. Hopefully Relic will get a balance patch out soon, but even if they weaken banshees and make marines better in melee again, the basic nature of the game will still have been changed in a way that I'm not very fond of.
