Back to it (Dawn of War 2 Review)

Here we go again, another Sunday evening and another few minutes to blog about life...the best way to unwind from a busy weekend.

So Dawn of War II came out and after much pain and suffering I was able to get my hands on it Thursday and so far, I'm fairly impressed. At first I was a bit disappointed, I have been playing the original Dawn of War for so long I went into this with the expectation that this new version would be exactly the same as the last. I was wrong.

The first and most obvious difference is that there's no building in Dawn of War II. You have one base that you get at the beginning of the game and that's it. No expanding up a crazy tech tree with lots of cool looking buildings, nope just one single building that you can upgrade to three different levels. Obviously with less building choices, this also means less unit and vehicle choices, sadness. The next thing that is different is the way unit upgrades work. It used to be that in each different building you built, you could research different upgrades...well, since you only have one base and you can't build other buildings, upgrades are handled much differently now. Each unit has war gear that they have access to, and if you have the resources, you can do the research get that war gear for the unit, this actually pretty cool. The final main difference is the character focus. In the original DoW the focus was on the entire army and putting together the best combination of vehicles / troops that you can to mount a full attack on the enemy. Now, since you building options are VERY limited, more focus gets shifted onto your commanding officer (or Champion.) Basically at the start of each game you choose what champion you want, you can choose Offense, Defense, or Medical (or something similar to medical.) Based on this choice, you have various units available to you and your champion can build different things to help with your cause.

This is good example of real game play with the Tyranids vs. Eldar:



As you can see most of the game is no longer focused on large armies going to crush you opponents, but small unit tactics and movements. Gone are the days where you can take your massive force and crush you opponent who isn't as far along in the tech tree as you are, oh well.

Now don't get me wrong, I in no way believe that these changes made in this game are for the worse. They are different and will take some getting used to, but I do think they are for the betterment of the DoW universe. The first real benefit to this whole thing is the incorporation of Tyranids into the mix. This race was totally left out of the first DoW series, and it's easy to see why. In the original game, the Tyranid Army would have to be MASSIVE in order to compare with any of the other armies, I really don't think the engine that drove DoW could of handled the amount of characters they have had to put on the map to make the Tyranid army balanced. Now with the focus being more on small unit tactics, the makers are able to bring the Nids into the mix and allow the full Warhammer 40,000 universe to join the game. Based on previous experience though, with the other races in the 40K universe, I really am wondering how they plan on bringing in races, such as the Imperial Guard (again, another group who in the original game had TONS of troops, but each unit was very weak.) I guess only time will tell how THQ plans to roll out the expansions, but I do look forward to seeing what they have in store.

Secondly, as I've said before, it forces you to change your tactics. The only real gripe I ever had with the first DoW is that it was like every other RTS out there. Get lots of resources, build a big army, go kill your opponent. With the new way they've made DoW II those tactics won't work...period. You can't even being to start building a big army. Sure you do still have collect minerals and collect energy, but from what I've seen so far the unit cap is hard set a 100 units (no matter what) so even if you do manage to get massive amounts of minerals and energy, there's no real benefit to it because you're going to rapidly hit your unit cap.

It's a crazy game, as I get more into the game and manage to get further along in the first player campaign (which is awesome by the way) I will write more here. I also have only done a little bit in the multi-player campaign but again, it looks really nice.

Other than Dawn of War life has been good. Rally trails were successful for this first time handler! I took our beagle Zephyr though the courses and we managed to get two qualifying scores and both times we placed...first time we got 5th the second time we got first! It was a good weekend in the end, and hopefully now in June we can get Zephyr's level 1 title :) One of our friends has an English Bulldog and she took her though the courses and got 4 qualifying scores, and also managed to get her title the first weekend out...we were all very proud of her :) My wife Amy, took Beatrice through (as she has for the past 3 years) but they did manage to get their level 1 championship so we are also very proud of our Mutt Pup!

On the work front, I've still been playing with Hyper-V a lot and after doing some extensive reading, discovered that M$ also has App-V which is virtualization for applications. This is something that is very interesting and we have had a few customers asking us about the possibility of running CFdesign as a virtual app.

Ok, I think that's about it for now. More later on.

~C

Rally-O Weekend

So not many people know this about my wife and I, but we do compete with our dogs.  Not in the normal stuff you see on TV where you owner and dog trot around and look all pretty.  Also not the other thing you see on TV where the dogs go over crazy jumps and over really tall a-frames (this is agility.) 

We compete in something called Rally Obedience (Rally-O for short.)  It’s a great time for both the owner and the dog!  We have been taking our Mutt Beatrice to competitions for the past 3 years and this is the first year that we are brining our Beagle, Zephyr, to competition with us.  This also means it’s the first time that I’ve been a handler in the competition.  Previously I’ve just been the equipment manager, dog holder, food getter, and video camera guy. 

If you’ve been checking my facebook status recently you can see that Zephyr and I have been working really hard and we’re both really exited about the weekend and I really hope we do well.

On a gaming note, if you haven’t seen Dawn of War II is set to come out on the February 18th…I’m going to get my copy reserved this week during lunch so I can make sure I get it on the 18th.  If you haven’t seen anything from DoW II yet, check this out:

Yeah, it’s going to be a crazy game…and there’s NIDS!!!  Can’t wait!  Anyway, off to get some dinner.  More later on.

~C

Windows Live Writer

So I’m currently writing from my desktop, with out actually being logged into blogspot.  How can I do this you ask??  The answer is a nifty little program called Windows Live Writer.  I know it’s been out a while, but I just finally got my crap together enough to start really concentrating on this whole cloud computing thing.  This is really nice though.  It makes blogging WAY easier, especially since you don’t have to visit a site to login and then blog, just click an icon on your desktop and there ya go, a space to blog. 

Anyway, now on to my other recent favorite topic, Hyper-V (pleas let all groans out here.) 

I got my hands on Hyper-V server 2008 R2 and wow, what a huge improvement it is over the initial Beta.  The command line utility that they have, has way more options and makes life way easier for those of us who have become spoiled by the WYSIWYG interfaces that exist now-a-days. 

Another really nice feature that has been added in is the ability to enable Failover Clustering.  This is a new feature that was rolled out with Server 2008, and from what I’ve read about it, it looks really cool, and the perfect solution for a fully VM environment.  The only downside right now, besides the need for setting up a test environment and then destroying it (ok, so that’s more of the fun part and not really a challenge) but all the management tools that exist only work with server 2008 and not with hyper-v server…I know, hyper-v server is only in Beta form and I’m sure once it gets out of Beta then MS will release tools that will work with it…hopefully. 

Ok, that’s about it from me.  More later on.

~C