The online-only requirements of modern PC gaming is obstinately to stop pirates by forcing all players to log in and register their unique serial numbers. Pirates can't do that.

Of course, what pirates do is instead just hack the game to completely bypass the registration system in its entirety. So it doesn't work. DRM penalises the player with a legal copy and has no impact on the pirates. This was made clear several years ago, but the publishers remain pushing the online-DRM angle despite its futility.

Why? To further the true agenda of gaming companies, which is to kill off the second-hand computer game market which they really hate, instead forcing you to buy games firsthand (either on release or on budget re-release) with the money going to them. In fairness Steam has a (convoluted) way of enabling people to sell on copies of their games, but IIRC Games for Windows Live, which DoW2 also uses, doesn't, so you can't re-sell the game after purchase.



I agree with this, although I actually enjoyed the game a lot more than you did. I stopped thinking of it as an RTS and switched to thinking of it as DIABLO with flamethrowers and different loot a couple of hours in, and on that basis it made a bit more sense. But compared to the tactical possibilities in COMPANY OF HEROES, DoW2 is pretty pathetic and limited.



In fairness, this is actually true to the lore (okay, maybe having just 11 Space Marines to fight off a planetary invasion is pushing it, but not as much as you might think). A Space Marine is an eight-foot-tall, superhuman warrior armed with the best weapons and encased in the best armour in the entire galaxy. A rule-of-thumb from the lore is that one Space Marine should be the equal of 100 or more Orks in battle. There's only a few hundred thousand of them or so in existence (compared to the many billions of Imperial Guard, the 'normal' human soldiers) to defend the million worlds of the Imperium. The problem with many of the other Space Marine computer games and even, to a lesser extent, the miniatures game is that Marines are often treated as expendable grunts rather than what they really are, an army of chainsaw-wielding Gregor Cleganes who can advance through a hail of missiles without breaking a sweat and upend tanks with their bare hands.

DoW2 is probably the closest they've come to replicating this feel in a game, although they've arguably gone slightly overboard with the concept.



True, but this was also a problem with DoW1 and COMPANY OF HEROES, where you could only play the Space Marines and Americans in the single-player campaign, and had to wait for the expansions to play the others (and in CoH's case, we still haven't gotten a proper Wehrmacht campaign).



I take the point, and it's true that the Chaos Space Marines are the regular Space Marines' eternal nemeses and most well-matched foes overall. However, the CSM are also not tremendously common, being outnumbered by the standard Space Marines in the lore, and in the setting the Orks are a far more common threat. In addition, many players, particularly those who came in to the fandom through the SPACE HULK and SPACE CRUSADE boardgames of 1990 or so, consider the Tyranids to be just as iconic a foe as the CSM, and were severely annoyed at their exclusion from DoW1 in favour of lesser-known enemies like the Tau, Necrons and Space Drow.

In the case of the game, the producers claimed that in the lore one of the biggest fears of fighting Chaos is the fear of being consumed or subverted by it and going rogue, and they wanted to implement a game mechanism that would replicate this to be more true to the lore. As a result, they held Chaos back for the new stand-alone expansion where they could tailor the story around both the fight against Chaos and its ability to 'infect' your characters, maybe even subverting them to Chaos altogether. So, fair enough, I think.



The Space Marines have some good vehicles and the fully-upgraded Land Raider in the first game is a thing of beauty. But the most hardcore weapons in the Space Marines' arsenal are fully-upgraded Terminator squads, who are present and correct (eventually) in DoW2. In DoW1 I used to dump the vehicles to make room in the pop cap for Terminator squads, just one or two of which could take out the entire battlefield.

The Space Marines don't even really have good tanks or artillery as such, as they are simply expected to overwhelm targets through sheer badassery. It's the Imperial Guard who have the full load-out of tanks, artillery, strategic bombers and so forth, and that's not really compatible with DoW2's engine (although they do crop up as NPCs in DoW2 and the new expansion).



Indeed they are not. Among many other differences, Tyranids predate the Zerg's first appearance by about twelve years, and it's pretty much common knowledge that Blizzard were told they couldn't make an official WH40K game and went for the Pepsi option instead (which worked out really well for them, and I love STARCRAFT, but the similarities to WH40K are more than slightly obvious).

The Tyranids are, however, a blatant rip-off of the aliens from ALIEN and ALIENS, as even the game designers cheerfully admit (although this is more obvious in the SPACE HULK games than in the battlefield ones).



They've been around for hundreds of thousands of years, built a vast empire of unsurpassed beauty and now a bunch of unwashed apes are outbreeding and outsmarting them at every turn, and they don't quite get how this has happened. They also have an added guilt bonus to their dickishness because they're the ones who tore open the Eye of Terror and unleashed Chaos into the universe in the first place.

DoW2 does get slight bonus points for not having the 'Space Marines and Eldar team up to face down a greater threat!' trope which is really annoying in both the computer games and the odd books where it happens. The Eldar consider themselves supreme to all other forms of life, and would ally with humans the same way we would ally with termites, whilst the Space Marines are quasi-genocidal fanatics who consider all aliens to be untrustworthy and should be cleansed at the earliest opportunity.