Dawn of War 2: IGN preview plus brief gameplay video

[Shinova]

Here's the IGN article:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/879/879620p1.html

And here's a link to the video (FLV format):

http://ve3d.ign.com/videos/play/30178/P ... -of-War-II




Needless to say, kick ass.

[Hawkwings]

Very brief gameplay video. The collapsing bridge was cool though. I hope that the jump-packing to safety thing is automatic though.

[Stark]

Very brief gameplay video. The collapsing bridge was cool though. I hope that the jump-packing to safety thing is automatic though.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Sorry, automatic? Squad AI? In a Relic game?

[Shinova]

Very brief gameplay video. The collapsing bridge was cool though. I hope that the jump-packing to safety thing is automatic though.

I hear that it's automatic.

[Stark]

IMPOSSIBLE! What about the drudgery of micro? Next they'll make throwing grenades automatic, and then the game will PLAY ITSELF!

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Stark... no one can decipher your arcane doublespeak sarcasm. Least of all Shinova; what you're doing to him is cruel.

For the record (for those us just reading the thread and who like clarity), the jump-to-safety thing is automatic, obviously only for jumppack troops.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

Stark... no one can decipher your arcane doublespeak sarcasm. Least of all Shinova; what you're doing to him is cruel.

For the record (for those us just reading the thread and who like clarity), the jump-to-safety thing is automatic, obviously only for jumppack troops.

Is that stated in the article somewhere? Because going by Relics previous games, them saying "this game is going to focus on an even smaller number of units than Dawn of War" at this stage could almost mean "We disabled unit path-finding to force players to use their micro-skills for tactical movement". Almost, anyway.

Seriously though, I can't help but feel that the resurgent popularity of RTS games recently has been mostly due to an exodus of FPS playing gamers, who have just become bored with the backwards and unimaginative state of the FPS genre on the PC. With them they bring their favourite gaming skill (reaction time and its bastard spawn actions per minute) and then moan when developers don't develop games which pander to their "skills".

This suits the developers just fine, because it means not only more customers but also that they need to do less of that fiddly "artificial intelligence" programming.

Anyway, just my rant, I don't want to derail the discussion of the video.

[Vendetta]

Seriously though, I can't help but feel that the resurgent popularity of RTS games recently has been mostly due to an exodus of FPS playing gamers, who have just become bored with the backwards and unimaginative state of the FPS genre on the PC. With them they bring their favourite gaming skill (reaction time and its bastard spawn actions per minute) and then moan when developers don't develop games which pander to their "skills".

APM Freakery is hardly new to RTS gaming.

I don't mind having to do a little bit of fucking around personally if there's some kind of reward to it (like rear hits on vehicles in CoH), but it really depends on there being some kind of interesting result.

[Hawkwings]

APM originated with RTSs. Starcraft, anyone?

[MKSheppard]

Oh god no! I want semi intelligent troops!

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

APM originated with RTSs. Starcraft, anyone?

Or Red Alert for that matter.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

APM Freakery is hardly new to RTS gaming.

I don't mind having to do a little bit of fucking around personally if there's some kind of reward to it (like rear hits on vehicles in CoH), but it really depends on there being some kind of interesting result.

I agree, but I don't think things like "flanking" and "taking cover" count as micro-management.

It's things that a computer could very easily do for you - like decide when to throw a grenade or (my favourite) choose to switch to the correct weapon for their current target type. That's the thing that damns the Relic RTS games to me - it's totally inconsistent AI: the units are actually clever enough to take cover, but they need command authority to use their damn Panzerfaust on a tank?

[Commander 598]

APM Freakery is hardly new to RTS gaming.

I don't mind having to do a little bit of fucking around personally if there's some kind of reward to it (like rear hits on vehicles in CoH), but it really depends on there being some kind of interesting result.

I agree, but I don't think things like "flanking" and "taking cover" count as micro-management.

It's things that a computer could very easily do for you - like decide when to throw a grenade or (my favourite) choose to switch to the correct weapon for their current target type. That's the thing that damns the Relic RTS games to me - it's totally inconsistent AI: the units are actually clever enough to take cover, but they need command authority to use their damn Panzerfaust on a tank?

There was a DoW mod that let the AI do all the special stuff on it's own like the Commissar executing a Guardsmen when the squad's morale broke.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

APM Freakery is hardly new to RTS gaming.

I don't mind having to do a little bit of fucking around personally if there's some kind of reward to it (like rear hits on vehicles in CoH), but it really depends on there being some kind of interesting result.

I agree, but I don't think things like "flanking" and "taking cover" count as micro-management.

It's things that a computer could very easily do for you - like decide when to throw a grenade or (my favourite) choose to switch to the correct weapon for their current target type. That's the thing that damns the Relic RTS games to me - it's totally inconsistent AI: the units are actually clever enough to take cover, but they need command authority to use their damn Panzerfaust on a tank?

There was a DoW mod that let the AI do all the special stuff on it's own like the Commissar executing a Guardsmen when the squad's morale broke.

Interesting, I don't suppose you know where to find it?

[Hawkwings]

More than that, I want options where I can tell a group of units to go out and raid the enemy base on their own. I want to be able to tell them to intercept enemy units as they enter radar range. I want to have the option of having the computer do a lot of work for me, while keeping the option to micromanage.

[starfury]

There was a DoW mod that let the AI do all the special stuff on it's own like the Commissar executing a Guardsmen when the squad's morale broke.

I think the Hero mod is what you are referring too for DOW And DOW DC.

[[R_H]]

There was a DoW mod that let the AI do all the special stuff on it's own like the Commissar executing a Guardsmen when the squad's morale broke.

Interesting, I don't suppose you know where to find it?

I'd take a look around at FileFront. I think this (Heroes DoW RPG) is the mod that triggers the special abilities on its own.

[starfury]

I think the DC and SS Versions actually removed the auto-cast abilites. only the original actually had all those things.

[Covenant]

More than that, I want options where I can tell a group of units to go out and raid the enemy base on their own. I want to be able to tell them to intercept enemy units as they enter radar range. I want to have the option of having the computer do a lot of work for me, while keeping the option to micromanage.

I think that's too much automation and removes too much of the player's focus. I'd much prefer removing the macro and leaving the micro. It wouldn't pain me so much to have to command my units specifically if I didn't have a goddamn base to maintain as well, and if the units stayed alive long enough to make maneuver actually feasible. The original DoW version did, by and large, have those features. I felt that as time went on it got more and more about unit spam and squads started to get shot to bits before morale even became a serious issue.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

It will be nice to script the AI to build the base for me, while allowing me to insert build queues occasionally and leave me to command the troops and build new troops as required.

[Shinova]

There's no base-building in DoW 2, although we still have a year of development to go so how it's exactly done can change.

[JointStrikeFighter]

More than that, I want options where I can tell a group of units to go out and raid the enemy base on their own. I want to be able to tell them to intercept enemy units as they enter radar range. I want to have the option of having the computer do a lot of work for me, while keeping the option to micromanage.

I think that's too much automation and removes too much of the player's focus. I'd much prefer removing the macro and leaving the micro. It wouldn't pain me so much to have to command my units specifically if I didn't have a goddamn base to maintain as well, and if the units stayed alive long enough to make maneuver actually feasible. The original DoW version did, by and large, have those features. I felt that as time went on it got more and more about unit spam and squads started to get shot to bits before morale even became a serious issue.

Thats World In Conflict. Shame massive broke the game with the 1.006 patch

[Vendetta]

I think that's too much automation and removes too much of the player's focus.

The things to automate should be the things that require no decision making.

Infantry moving to cover, for instance, isn't a decision. You always want your infantry in cover if there's cover to be in, so they should do that by themselves. You might not always want your infantry to use their grenades at the start of a conflict, because there might be a juicier target just around the corner and you don't want to wait for cooldown though, so they should be manual.

Base building in most RTS games hasn't really been a decision path either. In DOW it was bascially down to whether you build advanced infantry or vehicles first, and that could be handled with doctrine paths (which are always on screen, so less faffing about scrolling).

[Stark]

Grenades shouldn't even BE on a cooldown. That's just how Relic do it. It's like saying 'MANPADs in WiC should be manual because there might be another chopper you wanted to shoot at'. If I want to designate a target I'll do so, I don't want to micromanage weapons.

Backwards-selection would resolve this for games like DoW, but I don't expect anything so interesting from Relic.

[Vendetta]

Grenades shouldn't even BE on a cooldown. That's just how Relic do it.

Depends on their power relative to other infantry weapons. If they're a powerful ability, there needs to be a balancing limit on thier use.

In CoH, they were a significant power in an infantry vs. infantry conflict, because they could be dropped behind cover and fuck a whole squad over, so if there was no limit on their use infantry battles would just be grenade spam battles, and cover would be much less significant (dancing would be the in thing again, to stay out of grenade blast).