Decided to whip out the keys for the nostalgia wagon and have since been playing a lot of Dawn of War: Soulstorm recently.
Now, I say "nostalgia", but I never actually played Soulstorm before... Most of my hours were in Dark Crusade. But Soulstorm was on sale and I figured I owed it a real chance.
And... Well... Uhm. I've basically just been playing the campaign, and wew there are some weird decisions here... I mean sure, one thing is the obvious lack of funding evident in the sparseness of voice lines (done by completely different actors who don't voice those units regularly, leading to some interestingly disjointed scenes the few times anyone does say anything), and I really don't remember having this strong of an aversion to stronghold missions compared to DC... Sure, I was younger back then and maybe I was just more interested in the hour+ slogs, but some of these things are just nutty.
(Quick interjection here to complain about how the "Normal" campaign difficulty gives your troops 200% of normal HP, while the next level up of "Hard" puts you at 100%, but the enemies at 120%...)
The general ease of the campaign is also wildly different across factions... Namely because of how equipped certain factions are for dealing with the strongholds.
Dark Eldar lack any form of beefy frontliners to spearhead an assault and break through defensive lines like Orks do, nor do they have artillery like the Guard or even just long-range direct fire like the Tau for dealing with priority targets and softening up an emplacement. Their extreme focus on rushes and harassment completely falls apart when dealing with an already-established defensive bastion and map control.
Meanwhile the Necrons have their normal levels of hilarity with powerful honor guards (that can be both resurrected and even multiplied with the orb), in addition to now having an option that lets them say "Lol I win now" by teleporting an entire army of anti-building specialists directly on top of the HQ building you need to destroy in order to win.
My Dark Eldar win against the Ork stronghold took 1 hour 56 minutes. My Necron win against the Space Marines took 18 minutes.
I've found myself repeatedly booting the game up, wanting to play it, and then wishing it was just a very slightly different game when I do play...
Also is it just me, or is the normal province to stronghold ratio worse in Soulstorm than DC? I feel like I slurp up all the normal provinces in a moment, while skirting around stronghold after stronghold