Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2

Getting pretty pumped for Steamworks with DoW. Booted up a game yesterday and GFWL still angers me. It felt good to taste DoW again, even though I'm still in the middle of SC2 addiction, which is still going strong. DoW is like a that cozy pillow you keep coming back to, except this one's covered in blood and metal spikes.

Tamren wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:

The password is if you're a returning customer and already have an account. I was able to purchase without having to enter any password.

Well thats weird, cause I have never even visited the THQ store before let alone bought anything. It won't let the purchase happen without one, to register it for future use I assume.

In any case the point is moot. When they said the CE is for US only they really meant US only and not NA. It seems that here in Canada you are not allowed to order the Collectors Edition. I didn't try ordering the normal one because if I was happy with that I could just get it over Steam. The terms of use for the THQ store state that they ship to any country without a trade embargo with the US. I live in Canada, not fricken North Korea. What gives?

EDIT: Oh I see, they can't charge me because of the billing country. Shipping has nothing to do with it. Well that sucks. I guess Visa has cooties or something north of the border.

I guess that is now fixed, give it a look: Dawn of War II: Retribution Collector's Edition for Canadians

I shot them an annoyed email. I doubt that was the catalyst, but its good to see them fixing issues. It was a little ridiculous not being able to order, considering I live a bus ride away from Relic HQ.

spedman wrote:

Getting pretty pumped for Steamworks with DoW. Booted up a game yesterday and GFWL still angers me. It felt good to taste DoW again, even though I'm still in the middle of SC2 addiction, which is still going strong. DoW is like a that cozy pillow you keep coming back to, except this one's covered in blood and metal spikes.

Agreed! GFWL = suck! It tooks me 2 hours to get it working right when I bought BioShock2 just so I could play. Besides, steamworks is the place I have all the goodjer's added already!

Sweet. Free multiplayer Beta.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011...

I'm pretty excited about Retribution coming up. MP beta will be sweet indeed.

On another note, I've been reading some of the Horus Heresy novels lately. Pretty good stuff I must say. Giving me an itch to play through Chaos Rising again without being held back by the restrictions of the false Emperor.

Egon Spengler (not a real ghostbuster) posted a big sort of Retribution FAQ on Relic News.

Interesting tidbits:

Progression in the campaign has been reworked. The new level cap is 10, and each level will grant a new trait/ability, so it's less of a grind to get the useful stuff.

and

Heroes can be swapped out for Honor Guard units past a certain point in the game, allowing you to field a bigger army, and giving you access to a few unique options.

Co-op is still in the game for all six races in campaign. You can choose which players get which heroes, and whoever triggers the production of built squads will get control of it. It's possible to give one player all of the heroes and let the other play the production game, if you so desire.

On the other hand, for those interested in multiplayer, Scanlon had this to say on the Gamereplay forums:

If you pre-order thru Steam the beta will appear in your games list for download as soon as it goes live. The same will happen once the access is available to previous DoW product owners.

We expect that the size of the beta will be somewhere between 4 and 4.5gb. We're doing everything we can to keep the size down but 6 races naturally take up a lot of space.

Expect the Beta to behave just like a beta. Certain units and builds will probably be broken (OP/UP) at the start, but Task3r and others will be following it closely.

We're two weeks away from the beta and internally the balance for Retribution is looking solid. On top of this we have tried to address a large amount of issues related to the current live game. For example I saw an issue in another thread related to scout snipers having their bolter brethren wandering too close when direct targeting. This is an example of something we have fixed.

There are things that I have previously mentioned that have not yet been addressed. For example, Khorne Havocs have not been changed. The reason for this specifically is that in Retribution we will be adding a low tier unit to Chaos that should significantly change the way this faction is played. I look forward to Chaos players trying this new unit, developing new play styles and trying to fit a unit like Khorne Havocs into this new style rather than trying to predict it internally.

(...)

Myself and other parts of the balance team will be active in both playing the beta along side you and discussing any concerns that may come up. I hope you all have preordered and I look forward to seeing you in the beta.

I'm still a bit on the fence about jumping into the beta. Gaming time is short as it is, and getting into an imbalanced game might jade me a bit towards the future. Nevertheless, it seems like Relic is building the definitive version of DoW2.

oMonarca wrote:

I'm still a bit on the fence about jumping into the beta. Gaming time is short as it is, and getting into an imbalanced game might jade me a bit towards the future.

I feel the same about many betas. If I'm not getting anything out of it myself, like practice or working out if I want to buy the full thing, then it is spending my time for their benefit, which could be spent playing something else.

Scratched wrote:
oMonarca wrote:

I'm still a bit on the fence about jumping into the beta. Gaming time is short as it is, and getting into an imbalanced game might jade me a bit towards the future.

I feel the same about many betas. If I'm not getting anything out of it myself, like practice or working out if I want to buy the full thing, then it is spending my time for their benefit, which could be spent playing something else.

Well, you do start playing around with the metagame sooner, you do get a leg up against newcomers once the full version hits, and you can screw around without a negative impact on your stats, if you care about that (I kind of do).

You also get to control a hot lady in leather sooner.

I think I sold myself back in again.

oMonarca wrote:

I think I sold myself back in again.

Like you were ever out :p

Considering how my work schedule has been. I was going to wait for the game release to start the FFA tourney. It will rise from the dead shortly.

BlackSabre wrote:
oMonarca wrote:

I think I sold myself back in again.

Like you were ever out :p

I'm the Emprah's little Female Doggo, and he has me wrapped around His dying finger.

For those of you interested in the beta to check out what it is about, but don't own the previous titles nor want to pre-order just yet, good news.

We're happy to announce that registered users of our community site will be getting access to our Dawn of War II: Retribution beta.

I am a newbie to Dawn of War II. If any other newbs would like to run through the campaign with me, my windows live name is 'eyeresearcher'. Best times for me to play are Friday and Saturday nights.

Anyone want to help a newbie out with the campaign? The Co-op feature sounds cool. I will be on later tonight. I will park in the vent channel.

I could do a little co-op Achievement hunting.

Hi Spedman,

I will add you as a friend. I can usually play Friday and Saturday nights after 8pm EDT.

Greg wrote:

Hi Spedman,

I will add you as a friend. I can usually play Friday and Saturday nights after 8pm EDT.

Watch your back...

?

Has anyone here tried to play Last Stand with either the base game or Chaos Rising (NOT Retribution) lately? A couple of friends and I hopped online last night to enjoy some Last Stand and experienced this odd lag throughout that made it nearly unplayable. In particular, commands were often lagged by 2-3 seconds which made getting out of the way of grenades and such a complete pain in the ass.

Just wondering if anyone else has tried to play recently and experienced this. I'm really hoping MS isn't letting the older games go into the tank because Relic chose to move on to another platform.

I played Friday night with no problems.

Most of the "constant" lag in Last Stand happens because one of the people playing can't handle all the graphics and stuff. Last Stand is different from Skirmish because all of the action happens on a single screen. If you look at the loading bars and one guy takes longer to load than anyone else. Then its probable that you might get a few issues.

If the action periodically stops and hitches up then it probably has to do with a slow connection.

thanks for the input, guys.

Tamren: Indeed, one of the guys (who's on an older system, a Mac Pro using bootcamp to run windows) was loading a good deal slower than the other guy and me. Thing is, we've played Last Stand with this guy in the past and never had any issues like this. Two things that I can think of have changed since the last time we played: 1. This time two of us were sharing the same network connection via router (i was set up over his place), rather than all three of us playing from our homes. 2. I upgraded to 64-bit Win 7 a couple of days ago and cranked the game graphics up to ultra. The performance test confirms these settings are fine, though, and my system is beefy enough to deal with it (4 gigs of ram, Geforce 260GTX, etc).

Come to think of it, we did notice occasional lag messages from that third player showing up on both of our consoles. To boot, when both of us dropped and the third player was in the game alone it was still lagging for him. Oddness.

In terms of the behavior, there's no hitching at all. It's basically like everything is in slow-mo, with delayed action responses as mentioned above.

I think a test with a different third player is in order.

The litmus test basically goes like this:

- If your game is choppy, but runs smooth when you scroll the map off the arena. Then the cause is graphical lag on your computer. In rare cases this may also be processor choke from too many physics calculations. This usually happens when a lot of crap is flying around the screen, explosions and smoke for instance. The Mekboyz Rok Shower is particular bad about this. Looking at the meteor shower makes my computer chug, and the growing craters it leaves behind cause cumulative slowdown. Multiple showers STACK in this regard, so try to avoid using it.

- If the game pauses every now and then with a "this guys settings are too high" message. Then the issue is HIS graphics slowing down his computer to the point where it misses packets. This warning is a bit hit or miss. But anything that will spike a drop in FPS can cause it. Generally not an issue unless it happens from the start of the game.

- If you constantly get messages like "waiting for this player to catch up, lag grace 30 seconds". It means that his connection is slow. But keep in mind this works both ways, the issue is a slow connection between you two. So he gets the messages as well. If the delay lasts for more than a second, the connection is actually dropping, not just slow.

- If none of the above apply, and your game is still slowed down to a crawl. Its quite likely that the other two people in the game are having an issue between each other. If they both communicate at half speed, your game basically ends up 4 times slower than it normally would be. The slam dunk diagnosis for this is when they both leave the game and the slowdown vanishes.

Jow wrote:

This time two of us were sharing the same network connection via router (i was set up over his place), rather than all three of us playing from our homes.

The router could be the issue. GFWL doesn't play nice. I had to jump through hoops to allow my computer to host games. And I remember having all sorts of problems ranging from slowdowns, to not being able to join games hosted by specific people.

There are still quite a few people playing Last Stand without Retribution. But the community split probably means that there are less people with acceptable pings that the matchmaker can choose from. Pings are usually not a big issue, anything 400 or below is workable as long as no one has graphic slowdown.

Anyone up for some last stand tonight?

After playing Space Marine, I finally got in the mood to run through the Chaos Rising campaign. If anyone would like to join me, let me know. I played the first mission tonight, and will try knocking it out over the next couple of weeks at a leisurely mission or two a night pace.

I am 'eyeresearcher' on Windows Live.

Finally got back into this for Chaos Rising. I finished the main game... seems like 2 years ago? Anyway seems to be more of the same, and pretty fun. I hope I can get through CR pretty quick and maybe finally hit Retribution this weekend. Have had it since the holiday Steam sale and felt like I should do things in order at least.

Stele wrote:

Finally got back into this for Chaos Rising. I finished the main game... seems like 2 years ago? Anyway seems to be more of the same, and pretty fun. I hope I can get through CR pretty quick and maybe finally hit Retribution this weekend. Have had it since the holiday Steam sale and felt like I should do things in order at least.

Single player in Retribution is... not good. Multiplayer and last stand are where it's at.

Single player is fine. It's not as good as the previous two DOW2 games though, in my opinion.

It's what you get when you take the first two games and divide them by seven. Not horrible but not great either. I finished one campaign as space marine and stalled hard on the IG campaign. IG units are really fragile and missions do really stupid things like walk your units out in front of guns and tanks during a cutscene.

I completed the campaign with all of the races. It lacked a ton of depth but it was very fun for me. I feel Chaos Rising had the best campaign of the 3. They probably should have kept the model of the prior 2 where each expansion introduced a new race or 2 and campaign to go with it.

Or it is too bad they couldn't make an expansion to retribution that fleshed out each race's campaign and diverged them more.

IG units were fragile as were the Eldar if you hadn't found any ranged weapon loot early on. The Chaos marines were a lot of fun and the Tyranids were very unique.

edit: looking into this I see that DoW3 is no longer in development. They are in the rethinking phase. They had originally speculated that it would release between now and feb 2013. Me = very sad panda