Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dawn of War II: Retribution!

My devastators settle behind the rocks. They’re patiently waiting for something, anything, to wander into their field of fire so they can light it up. Heretics, orks, guardsmen. It doesn’t matter. I’m just waiting for them to move in so I can bring down a mailed fist of fury on my foes. See, I’ve got a handful of scouts and tactical marines sitting just a short distance away. And once my devastators pin whatever foul heretic is unfortunate to wander into their sight down my tacticals and scouts will swarm them, withering them with a combination of bolter fire, sniper rounds and plasma charges. It’s a perfect setup, ideal for combating ranged forces, appropriately distributed so that jump troops can be dealt with with acceptable losses. It lets me watch the whole southern victory point and scout the enemy’s power harvesting operation at the same time. In the old Dawn of War II, it would guarantee me a victory over my baffled and infuriated opponent.

In the new game my devastators seem oblivious to the fact that this tactic no longer works. They sit and stew behind their rocks, looking dumbly as spotters sit nearby and sight on them. And when the artillery rounds scream down and the guardsmen charge up, rifles blazing, it’s kind of heartbreaking to watch my veterans topple to the Guard’s combined might. But it’s also kind of impressive. I want to learn how to do that, how to guide fire from the sky and crack even the toughest defenses without batting an eyelash. I want to learn how to coolly walk my army up the middle of the battlefield, quietly scout out enemy positions and then eradicate them, cover and all, with a few well placed shells. This is what Dawn of War II: Retribution has on offer.

Many expansions seek to redefine the way a game plays. Brood War, for example, changed the balance of the game with the addition of a handful of new units and some new technology shrewdly distributed through the various races. These seemingly minor additions rewrote the rules of Starcraft. Zerg could suddenly turtle. Protoss had new options for making quick and dirty raids. Terrans became even more unbelievably tough. A few changes, small ones to the idle observer, changed the entire scope of the game in a wonderful and unanticipated way.

Dawn of War II’s expansions don’t really work that way. Sure, there are new units for each faction. Most of them are heavy ground vehicles that most people won’t see until a game is already decided, things like Land Raiders and weird ork vehicles with misspelled names and humorous subtext to their design, and the rest are super specialized or difficult to acquire units. None of them really change the overall balance of the game. What really shakes things up, aside from Relic’s thorough and at times infuriating balance changes, is the addition of entire new factions.

Factions in most games make a dramatic impact, sure. But Dawn of War II’s primary mode of play, Team Mode, is all about the interaction between factions, the way they shape and control the map and the flow of combat within it. Factions might seem completely different in Starcraft, and the coordination between say a Zerg and a Protoss player is totally unlike the coordination between a Zerg and a Terran player. But the manner in which the maps play isn’t something that changes. Terrans will buckle down and then roll out their forces when convenient, Protoss will try to find a balanced strat that involves a very similar tactic, and Zerg will roll the dice and hope whatever strategy they choose pans out, be it rush, boom or turtle. The maps might effect the mentality of these choices, but the races themselves will never impact the way each map plays out.

But in Dawn of War the factions have an impact on the terrain, in some cases literally. Hive tyrants and Chaos Lords will rush right through heavy cover, ruining it for everyone. Eldar can set up cover that friends and foes can use, Imperial Guard can establish bunkers and, as previously mentioned, also call down devastating artillery that eradicates not only units but precious, precious cover that those units were using to buckle down in. This is to say nothing of how each faction utilizes cover, how each unit functions in the careful balletic interplay that is combat in Dawn of War II. The way that factions interact in Dawn of War II is fundamental to the game and impacts the ebb and flow of play, the pace and the context of the game. It’s difficult to really elucidate in general terms. It’s almost ethereal, with map-control translating into resource control and, by merit of those resources, victory. But the addition of the Imperial Guard drives the nature of this quaint mixture and the importance of adding a single new faction into the mix home.

See, with a Guard player on the opposing team it’s never safe to be still. While there’s no assurance that the Guard player will choose Manticores, their meat-and-potatoes artillery unit, it is quite likely. And every Guard commander has some sort of artillery-like ability imbedded in their Zeal tree, so even if they don’t grab Manticores they’ll be able to do things like drop mines along your fixed position, or walk a devastating artillery strike into your advance that, no shit, is actually considerably more potent than the five hundred Zeal air strike that serves as the Guard’s “ultimate ability.” The end result is a faction that can eliminate or severely disrupt a fixed position at any time, without warning. There are similar abilities sprinkled throughout other factions, but no one is anywhere near as dedicated to forcing the battlefield to be dynamic as much as the Guard.

Which is ironic, because their other strength is setting up static defenses. Again, most factions have some sort of turret in their tech tree. Orks and Space Marines both have heroes dedicated to producing them, and everyone’s got some sort of static suppression unit available at tier 1. But the basic Imperial Guard unit, your dumb, hapless grunt, knows how to set up a turret and dig in cover right off the bat. Special abilities let them call in heavy turrets, bunkers, you name it. Paired with one of the most impressive aforementioned static suppression units in the game and a basic unit which can eventually become a wall of lasers they’re nigh impossible to root out once they’ve dug into a position. Unless, of course, you’ve got your own Imperial Guard teammate who decided to build some artillery into his army.

And that’s how they change everything. You can play a game without the Imperial Guard and things will be more or less the same, sure. You might see some new units but most of the tactics from Chaos Rising will still be effective to one degree or another. But if even one Imperial Guard player is in a match the game has become something new and incredible. It’s still a game about territory control, but the rules of that game have changed. Instead of being about maintaining a fixed position it’s about the cost-benefit of building fixed emplacements when they’re likely to be torn down in a few minutes. It’s about building an army that can overrun an opponent who has dug in and use their static position against them. It’s about adapting constantly to the ebb and flow of the battle, following and avoiding the fight as the situation warrants.

Every faction in Dawn of War II carries with it a set of rules and conditions it brings to the battle. Orks move like a tide, their strength amplified by nearby greenskin allies. Tyranids are a different kind of tide, an overwhelming one which fractures when bigger units are killed, giving the impression of an inhuman horde filled with mini-bosses that demand your attention. Space Marines of both Chaos and regular flavor consist mostly of costly, powerful monoliths of units that demand specific responses and have specific powers, but will barely function at a task they’re not designed for. The Eldar emphasize the importance of a mobile force, suffering greatly when forced into a fixed emplacement for all their defensive abilities. And the Guard? They’re the underdog, the faction that clings to victory by the skin of their teeth, turning the fight around in one brilliant measure and then holding their ground against a superior force.

If you’re looking at Dawn of War II: Retribution as a multiplayer product (and most people probably are since the single player campaigns, while enjoyable, have never really been what made Dawn of War II great) it might seem a bit light, especially given the thirty dollar price tag. The Chaos Space Marines already feel like a flavor of Imperium, and the Imperial Guard were a weak-sauce faction in previous Dawn of War games, a bit of fluff thrown in for true fans which couldn’t really hold their own against superpowered mutants, robots and fearsome peace-loving aliens. But unlike Chaos Rising, where the multiplayer wasn’t much of a draw for me, something about the changes the Imperial Guard have made to the dynamic of Dawn of War II is really alluring to me. It could be the rose-colored glasses that I get when I’m playing a new game, or that I’m still learning about systems which will soon lose their mysticism and appeal as I come to understand them better. And the Imperial Guard are far from a dud faction in Retribution. In fact you could make a case that they’re a bit overpowered, with a collection of Tier 2 units capable of steam rolling all but the best established defensive positions. Retribution made me reconsider the underpowered unfortunate faction from the first series of games, made me look at them and see an impressive army based around conventional, modern day tactics in a world filled with armies based on magic and space-lasers. It made me look at an old game I loved and see new tactical depth to it. It offered me a set of new experiences, all of them as rich and fulfilling as anything I’ve seen since Fallout: New Vegas made me give a shit about video games again. I don’t imagine the single player portion to be anything so divine, but I don’t expect it to be terrible, just adequate and perhaps a bit repetitive. But hey, it’s an RTS. It’s supposed to be repetitive. The key is letting that repetition break every once in a while and letting the wonderful chaos of the game shine through. Dawn of War II: Retribution does so beautifully, and while I’ve no doubt that it won’t make a big commercial splash it’s well worth your attention if you’re interested in the genre of RTS at all.