Dawn of War 2

Designing a Victory

To win a competitive game, you need a competitive end-game strategy. You need to know how you're going to beat your opponent and which units you'll need to achieve that victory. There's no better starting point than thinking about the opposing faction. Every faction has some sort of weakness that you can try to take advantage of - even if some are more pronounced than others.

• The small unit count for Space Marines means that a high mobility 'capping' game to dominate map control and play VP pressure is a very strong option. Their low unit count also means their army takes a while to truly become threatening. Their T2 is extremely versatile and allows them to expand through the map, so your early actions have to set you up to face a lot of fire-power.
• Orks have arguably the most limited T2. Their power harassment is very powerful early game and their capping outstanding. The only T2 unit that you may have to worry about is the deff dread. Orks also have very limited ranged capacity until their T3, which is very expensive for them to utilize. A war through attrition and heavy pressure in T2 will serve you well against the greenskins.
• Eldar generally speaking don't have the best melee fighters. While banshees have very high DPS, they're not particularly resilient. The faction relies very heavily on maintaining a high power income and has limited AV capacity. Power harassment is a necessity against the Eldar as you won't be able to fight them unless you're at least the same tier or higher.
• Tyranids tend to rely on their bigger units for damage. If you can bring out some hard hitters and target synapse creatures, you'll be able to send screams of agony through their swarm and hopefully force a retreat. AoE weapons can serve you well, but a good mix is still required to fight the combined horde.

When you've figured out what the weaknesses of a particular faction are, you then have to decide how you're going to exploit them. Are you going to play a heavy VP pressure game or fast tech? Will you try for an extended war of attrition or a low resource scrum? There's no point trying to play attrition against Eldar if you're swarming with Orks. I'd also advise against playing for total map dominance as a Space Marine when fighting a Tyranid. Make a logical decision and follow it up by figuring out which units you need to run this type of strategy and how you'll be using each squad. To choose the right units for the job, ask yourself: What is their purpose? This should trigger thoughts about which units can effectively complete a set task and which are more effective at doing a particular job or fit together to provide an effective unit composition. Does a unit on your list fulfill more than one role? Scouts make good capping units but can also act as disruption with a weapons upgrade. This may cover the use of ASM as disruption, allowing you to spend your resources on something else. Think about how your opponent will counter your unit mix and run it all over again. Keep filtering through your unit lists until you've got something you're happy can stand up and do a particular job exceedingly well without being completely torn up by your opponent.

As an example (idealistic as it may be):

You're playing Space Marines against an idiot (Tyranid) and you're fighting with a couple of Tactical Squads and your Force Commander while you tech to T3. The purpose of your army is to put the hurt on your opponents Warriors and win a war of attrition while you buy yourself time to get a predator out and strike up that ubiquitous Orbital Bombardment. Having an army with Tacs and a Predator would give you a well rounded and very tough late game army with a bit of run-around firepower from the Predator. You've also got a nice plan for knocking out the inevitable Carnifex.

Your opponent finally brings the big monster out to start chewing up Tacs and completely destroy your late game setup. What would your next move be? You're a smart player and you knew the Carnifex was coming. Soon after, your counter arrives in the form of a Predator. Congratulations, you can kite the slow creature and pull out some pretty big damage. The purpose of your Predator is to fight off the Carnifex and provide fire support against the Tyranid mass, while also providing some mobile fire to aid in stemming any Victory Point bleeding. This puts you further up in the war of attrition. We're not done yet however and the very *cough* clever Tyranid quickly responds with a Zoanthrope - ready with a warp blast to disable your Predator and allow his Carnifex to slice it in half. Here you've got several options to respond with.

1. You cloak your scouts and melee the Zoanthrope. At the same time, you run in with your army and try to kill as many high priced units as possible in the confusion. This is great because you're utilizing units already on the field by extending their 'purpose' and really putting those resources to work.
2. You attach a Teleporter to your Force Commander and again, melee the Zoanthrope. Proceed as above. This is a versatile upgrade that can be used to aid in the capping game while the battles aren't happening.
3. You build ASM because you were silly enough to lose the scouts early game and use those to counter the Zoanthrope. Proceed to cause pain. 650-50 is a big chunk of resources to be putting into T1 infantry. There's no doubt these guys are strong but you're spending unnecessary resources by not utilizing what's already on the field to its fullest potential. Those resources could go toward another Predator or a Dreadnaught.

While this sort of play isn't always possible, this is a broad example of just how the active counters are dictated by the purpose of a unit. Those scouts that you'd been using for capping served another purpose in tying up the Zoanthrope. On top of this, you were able to continue to cost effectively fight the swarm with your tacs and predator and win out through attrition.



Stop. Think. Think Harder.
I watch a lot of replays where I see players build a Slugga squad and send it out to fight. It'll take heavy losses and they'll retreat and reinforce. 20 seconds later, that same squad is down to half it's members as it was just sent back in to 'start killin' stuff'. After a few fights like these, the Ork player has put himself down by a very large requisition deficit while he scratches his green head trying to figure out where his shiny requisition went. The issue is that the Ork player hasn't realized what the purpose of their unit was. If they sent the Sluggas off to tie up the enemy forces and cause delays, they'd be better off dancing it around and using it to threaten their opponents instead of just bum-rushing into a fight. By doing this, they can hold up the other squad for longer and not lose as many Sluggas for such little gain. If on the other hand, their purpose was simply to have more units (which often means they're playing map control) then the Sluggas had no business going anywhere near their opposition! Think about what each of your units is trying to achieve and let them do it. There's no point building a razorback and sending it into a falcon unless you've got something on standby to knock it out while the razorback blocks the falcon in.