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[Game On] Dawn of War II: The Balancing
Posts
Adding Shade to The List.
Sorry, my wording was poor. He only bought one squad of Rangers and the Shuriken Platform, but it was enough to render an entirely Scout army useless until I had countered his counter. My point is, do we want to be playing a game like that? One that is essentially Rock/Paper/Scissors? I chose to build only Scouts and he chose to build only Banshees at the start of the match and neither of us knew whether we'd made the wrong choice until the first engagement. My coin-flip had worked perfectly and he spent the entire first part of the game on the back foot because of a gamble we both made on instinct with zero actual knowledge of the enemy.
I usually go two guardians against SM anyway.
It is true that the game has moved more in a rock-paper-scissors way. Sometimes this can be very frustrating when your paper is... well, paper! It's not nearly that simple though. Tactical Marines versus two guardians, the tacticals should win hands down: but then I threw two well timed grenades and killed two members. Guardians win. Upgraded gear allows units to break their mold. The real killer is commander units, who can radically shift how things interact and play. Two shotgun scouts and heavy bolter against two banshees: A pretty definite victory for the marines. That is, until a warp throw brought them into the banshee suppression, pulling a complete 180.
I wanted to do a overall impressions post but I'm fucking tired today. We'll see.
Wat!? I hear you say.
BUT WAIT KIND SIRS
At the moment, there are a number of small annoying details that make the early game a bit of a bore. Let me break up my basic thinking.
The small number of units on the field makes the effects of RPS balancing vastly more severe. If I have built 2 tac squads (1000 req, all I can afford) and I find out that my opponent has 2 squads of banshees, I might as well just bend over. And this is something I CANNOT have done based on what my opponent has built unless I wait. It should be possible to get an early game advantage via superior strategising and mental guesswork, but it should not be a matter of guessing the wrong type of spam and getting utterly annihilated.
It is clear that the developers were unhappy with how many low-tier units were being fielded, and the longer t1 changes reflect this. The other effect of the change I am suggesting is that it makes power requiring units cost relatively more and take longer to get relative to lower tier units. So this means that even in tier 3, people will be limited more by power than requisition, and have the ability to make the call of spending their req now to get a lower tier unit out rather than waiting for the higher power-costing unit. This might help alleviate tank spam.
But the real benefit is simple. The more units you can have out, the more use you can make of unit synergy. As things stand, if I want an HBdev squad teamed up with a covering scout squad, that's a huge relative investment. With double the number of units on the field, it's a smaller relative investment, and I have more units to help pull them out of any fires tossed their way. Dow2 is not a game that requires much micro as things stand, so I do not think this would be an undue increase in micro - especially given the addition of the coh style tabbing through selection groups. The more I think about it, the more I want this.
There are a whole bunch of problems related to map size though >.<
Thoughts? I haven't totally thought this through, but I can't see any obvious howlers.
All DoW 2 needs is fixes to: Ravener tunnels, spore mines, catalyst, warriors, raveners, spore mines, SM infantry that isn't scouts, rangers, techmarine turrets, and sync kills. I guess something about carnifexes but that comes after the rest of the tyranid army stops being bullshit.
Seriously, fucking christ, a five second default sync-kill is too much unless it cancels when you hit retreat.
Out of interest, who has that?
Yeah, I don't know how to account for this. How do you factor in a piece of wargear (and Warp Throw isn't the only one) that allows you to turn a bad situation completely on its head? Maybe it's just impossible to balance? At least, in this situation, SM have no counter to being thrown at the feet of Banshees which then suppress them. I worry.
Turrets!
In observer mode, when one player upgrades his Force Commander with Terminator Honours, the FC moves from the commander box to the regular units box, and is replaced by whichever normal unit is first in the list.
Of course, they could just make infantry immune and that solves all of the problems.
They do... if you consider Ravener balanced and need warriors to be comparable in cost/effectivness.
MWO: Adamski
Also, if heavy armor goes back to being a good thing, they're going to be right back to being the dicks of the game.
If I need them laying down all the dps they can muster into an approaching melee squad, heavy cover won't help them diddly squat! Do what I say, goddamn.
Feature.
Also, it is neither the same, nor remotely the same as plasma grenades and phase armour.
The ignorance hurts. Physically. Physical pain.
Can't warp throw a turret!
Problem solved.
It seems like there are a lot of different ways they could DO THAT and still make them balanced.
Also I'm a bit confused. The game's been released right? What's in Beta then?
And it's in a sort of patch-beta, like the things MMOs do? It's the next patch and they are letting the public test it before making it live and there's going to be a patch during the beta after the general ideas of what the balance would look like get settled. And I have high hopes for it. The highest.
The 'base' feels a lot more balanced and fun in general though.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SSAUQU01
Spammable 70% damage reduction global? SOUNDS BALANCED TO ME
Bonus points for my Apothecary's knockdown gun constantly bugging on the Warlock because he would do his insane long range leap thing mid-cast and bug it out.
Also for some reason the Warlock kept not being targettable with anything, mostly shotgun knockback.
I've only dabbled in DoW and DoWII when the multiplayer beta was available on steam, as I'm not very good at RTS games. I do however love the 40k universe, and want more of it in my PC gaming life. I will buy this soon.
3v3 is the most fun but also, by property of how matchmaking works, the least common and the one where the most people drop/have connection issues.
When it hits its stride and you have everything on the goddam map rushing the same 10 square feet of real estate, it's awesome.