In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war...

But heck - it's not that important a war, so budding commanders need only send a dozen or so men to win it - right?

Welcome to Dawn of War 2 - sequel to the game that pretty much revolutionized the RTS genre, making it more accessible than it had been for a decade. This time it goes even further in it's quest to draw in the wider audience by addressing the issues of what actually made the previous game fun. But lets not get ahead of ourselves, and talk about the game itself. Maybe with the funnies - who knows?

Just to mix this up - I'll look at some RTS conventions, and then show how DOW2 likes to bend them over and give them a good old relic style pounding.

First off we have base building!
Well as everyone knows, building bases, defenses and other such paraphernalia are essentially for homosexuals. As far as DOW2 is concerned if you want to play at real estate developer then go and play The Sims. DOW2's only concession to base building is that one of the hero choices allows you to build turrets, which are of course suitably manly enough to be permitted in the grim darkness of the far interior decorator.
So suddenly you're not looking at a traditional RTS turtling game, where you spend the first ten minutes of every match setting up pointless architecture that allows you to build slightly shinier pointless architecture.
You have one building. It's bum hard, defend it. Period.

This brings us to the units. Now we don't have to worry about managing our housing portfolio we have time to actually concentrate on the units.
Now this isn't Supreme Commander, or even the last DOW. You won't see four hundred units locked epically in pitched battle at any one time. The best results often come from maybe a dozen or so men who you carefully micromanage. It's all about tactics, and picking your battles.