Speaking of the eldar, what is the generally accepted strategy for dealing with them? Thus far I’ve been setting up a small square-shaped killzone inside my perimeter and betting on the fact that most eldar are stupid enough to teleport into it.
Other than that, my only real approach has involved inching tarkus ahead of the rest of the team, and having him skill grenade the crap out of any groups he sees before they aggro.
Both approaches make me feel like I’m exploiting the AI (and not being all strategical and such), but every time I actually engage the eldar in force, I get my butt handed to me.
The Eldar strength/weakness is that they’re heavily specialized. The ranged units are really good at ranged combat and the melee units are really good at melee combat, but they do not cross over at all. The sniper units will butcher you in a firefight, but drop Thaddeus on their head and they die quickly. The howling banshees will trash your guys in melee with all the knockback they do, but if you can make some breathing room, such as with the stun grenades or force commander’s charge, then they go down pretty quick to volley fire.
The campaign Eldar also uses a lot of the heavy weapon platforms (Shuriken, Brightlance, D-Cannon) which are potent, but have a lot of drawbacks. If you put a unit in melee combat with them, then they can’t fire the platform. If you knock them back, then they have to go through set-up time again. If you snipe or melta-bomb the platform, the unit is worthless, despite still having two handlers around. If they’re counter-attacking, they have to set up after moving in, giving you time to rush their position.
The main thing is just knowing what’s where. Cyrus is handy for recon where Eldar are involved because of their long-range weaponry. Most things can pelt you from well outside your own visual range. I had one memorable moment where I was moving units past what I thought was an empty area of a city, and Thaddeus and his whole squad went down instantly to snipes while a single Brightlance shot took out the dreadnought behind him. Resilience score went to crap in a moment, and not a one of the attackers were visible. Had I known they were there, a simple jump in and ground-smash would’ve cleared the place out.
Wow, so a bug just took Avitus out on a tyranid mission, and man are my guys helpless without an enfiladed base of fire. Also, screw Thaddeus. Seriously, screw that guy with a wet paper towel- I know he’s going to become a monster, but right now he goes down faster than an ork in australia and the missions he comes on leave me pining for my awesome if slightly underpowered sniper team.
Thaddeus needs to be constantly jumped around. As soon as the cooldown on his jump pack ability is done, use it. Even if you’re just going to stay in place. It’s also a good bet to keep him in range of the FC’s roar-ability - the bonuses are worth it.
Good god, Thaddeus is a monster. Now that he has terminator armor and my force commander has a thunder hammer, the other two squad members aren’t even involved in most of our fighting. Tarkus sometimes stays back to secure our retreat, and Cyrus can snipe bosses and run around infiltrated blowing things up, but basically nothing else can keep up with my two melee guys now.
I opted for close combat Thaddeus and FC, but ranged Tarkus. I didn’t get him the grenadier option. The infiltrate and revive while infiltrated abilities of Cyrus were hugely helpful in some of the tougher battles. I preferred to teleport someone in, draw aggro, then draw them into a canyon of mines, remote detonators, and focused fire. Dreadnaught Assault Cannon was absolutely devastating. The defend missions became nearly trivial when I could force a choke point and unleash the assault cannon or remote detonation. Artillery support and orbital bombardment were usually saved for the final wave, but taking a Carnifex from 100 to 10% health with a remote detonation always made me smile.
I just really wish I could play the other armies in a campaign or some single-player modes in DoW 2. I wanted to play 'nids, that’s the main reason I bought the game.
It does, but the enemy AI is really bad, so it’s pretty much only useful to play around with the units.
The unit kit of the tyranids is pretty weird, too. They’ve got a lot more quantity and power in ranged combat than you’d expect for the bug-swarm archetype.
You can blame *Starcraft *for that. No, really.
In Ye Olden Dayth, the Tyranid army list consisted of slightly larger than average units of fast, human sized, relatively resilient, pure melee Genestealers with a handful of expensive heavy Tyranid warriors wielding a few heavy-weapon like guns at most. In support, maybe a Carnifex or two. Carnifexes back then were also predominantly melee-centric - they were fast, smaller than a tank, could fire bio-plasma but only if they were immobile and it was mostly an anti-vehicle thing. Against personnel, their melee stats were ten times more effective.
Then *Starcraft *came out, borrowing heavily from 40k but adding new twists, and in turn Tyranids got a redesign, both cosmetic (from Aliens looking things to a more insectoid, segmented and spiky organic look) and in depth : now there were hordes of little flying shooty things, swarms of tiny termagants with their bile rifles, stealth Lictors and burrowing [del]Hydralisk[/del]Raveners, psyker Zoanthropes… and no Genestealer in sight
Jesus christ, they’re letting me convert all of Cyrus’s explosives into energy-using skills? That is awesome, I never have enough demo packs.
…they took away his melta bombs though, that’s total bullshit. :smack:
Anyway, hmm. Does chaos work like an alignment, or do I actually need to keep it low? Because if I have a choice, I’m totally chaos marine-ing the hell out of this thing.
The way they handled corruption really is weighted towards going Chaos IMO. Here’s how it works :
each of your marine squads (plus the new Psyker introduced in the campaign) gets an individual Corruption meter. They all start at 0 (Pure) and this gives them the one and only Pure perk, which is generally a damage bonus against demons. Meh.
during each mission, you’ll get optional objectives, some of which give you Corruption, some of which take some of it back (it’s fairly obvious which does which - you’re not going to get purity if you go “fuck the imperial guard, blow them up they’re in the way !” ).
There’s also wargear that corrupts the wearer each time it’s carried into a mission.
Finally, during each mission one of your guys will “take it personal” for some reason or other and ask to be brought in the field. If you don’t, that guy gets some Corruption.
And what corruption does is awesome. The first level is the same for all Marines : you lose 90% of your natural energy regen (ouch) but you gain energy by doing damage. This sucks. A lot. Especially for Cyrus, since he doesn’t do much damage, and besides he needs energy to sneak, not to fight…
But once you get past that hurdle, there’s something like 4 or 5 different perks each character gets as he gets corrupted further and further and each of them is more overpowered than the next. Some are modifiers to existing abilities, some are entirely new abilities, and some are completely broken (insta revive+full health on everyone. Invulnerability for everyone. You get the idea…) - and most of them corrupt you some more when you decide to use them so it’s fairly easy to swing full Chaos in no time, even inadvertently.
Kinda hard to get back down though, so it’s definitely something you have to make up your mind on in the beginning.
The storyline itself doesn’t really change whether you’re Pure/Corrupt : the boss of the next-to-last mission is different, and of course the final cutscene, but besides that you’ll do the same missions, just differently.
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