Dawn of War 3 Review & Vision for Dawn of War 4

Dawn of War 3 had strong graphical foundations, but it fell short in delivering the depth and strategic diversity.

How to Make Dawn of War 4 Epic:

Build on DoW3's Engines:
Use the base visuals and game engine from Dawn of War 3 as the foundation

Expand Factions:
Bring back a wide roster, including: Chaos Space Marines, Necrons, Dark Eldar, Sisters of Battle, Imperial Guard, Tau Empire

Gameplay Enhancements:

Keep the Elites system,

Introduce defensive structures to support more tactical play.

Reintroduce units recruit-able through regular troops (similar to Soulstorm).

Make the minimap in skirmish selector coloured & textured like in game map. not having all the maps be grey.

Custom Content & Modding Support

Release a Map Editor at or shortly after launch & allow players to create and share custom maps and game modes to have a diverse online skirmish game types (e.g., RPGs, Tower Defense, MOBAs,), similar to warcraft 3 map editor with online, (custom game modes would be awesome using Warhammer units.)

A disappointing end to an otherwise great trilogy.

I play DoW for the campaign. DoW 1 and 2 both had different but excellent campaigns. I replayed each many times. DoW 3 has a very weak campaign, with the missions rotating between factions. What previously would have been 3 separate campaigns was hashed into one, reducing the amount of this product I am able to enjoy. Base building and technology trees are minimal, with no feeling of your army evolving as the campaign progresses. Of course since the narrative is bouncing around you never develop a feeling of "your army".

Even several years after release the game is rife with bugs. Some examples:
- Receiving a cosmetic after a campaign mission means the next time I start the game I get a pop-up that I am unable to dismiss notifying me of the new cosmetic. Need to alt+F4 since I can't get past the notification.
- Had to restart a mission since that particular save was somehow corrupted so the game would repeatedly crash at a certain mission transition point.
- Game may randomly crash during battles.
- Elites will not retain experience during the campaign.
* Not a bug but after loading you can't click the "press any key" button, you have to press a key on the keyboard. Although not a bug it feels like behavior from a time when not everyone had mice.

I really love the 40K universe. I played the miniature game. I read the books. I have many of the games on Steam. I find it difficult to recommend this game unless it's at a steep discount AND you've already played the crap out of DoW 1 and 2.

Thank you for reading. The Emperor Protects.

Really loving this. As is typical with the RTS community, good RTS on dogged on until they lose support. It happened to Iron Harvest, it happened to CoH3, and it happened here.