It's a great tactical simulation that you have to play while juggling and balancing a pencil on your nose, and several months after purchasing it I realized that was a feat I would never be able to manage.

Even against the AI, more often than not my units may as well just be a mass of Zerglings for all that it matters because I'm just throwing them at the enemy anyway. Oh, and I need to divert a unit over to stop the scouts decapping an undefended point to the north along with a drone to build on it, queue up two production buildings worth of Kroot and another of Fire Warriors, hit my unit upgrades, build and waypoint some replacement scouts to contest the remaining unclaimed points, and remember to cycle through and upgrade the towers I've built already. The result is a game that features alll sorts of fascinating unit-power tactics -Tau stealth suit bombs, cloaked transport rushes, Kroot scavenging, Imperial special characters, Eldar guardian hit and run- that I'll never get to use, because I'm too busy fighting a multi-front running battle that started twenty seconds into the match with the enemy commander marching towards my base, while simutaneously building and expanding constantly and sending my stealth suits out to decap in their backfield (don't forget to trigger their jump packs whenever it cools down!). Plus, the game is explicity geared for constant rushing and the commander units allow every faction to initiate them as soon as a match starts, so you'll be concentrating on microing your fights pretty much from word go until you win or you're dead. And you don't have one or two expansions to worry about, you have three or four or more. Sure, you don't have to build bases or worker units, but it means that you're basically in a constant state of expansion, expansion defense, and expansion raiding while you're busy micromanaging your battles. This would be great fun, except that the nature of the control point resource system doesn't actually let you concentrate on the fighting the way I assume it was meant to. It requires more cycling through units, power activations, and active maneuvering than any other RTS I've ever played - certainly it's on a whole other plane than the original Starcraft. More speed, more expansion, more micro-managing. Dawn of War is like an exaggeration of a standard RTS in every respect.

Total annihilation vs warhammer