While Dawn of War and CoH may be a bit demanding and too complicated for an RTS newbie with their fast-paced squad based action I wouldn't say that they would necessarily "humiliate" a new player, especially on the easiest difficulty levels. The tutorials cover the basics very well and the easiest AI is very passive, allowing you to get accustomed to the gameplay in peace. My brother for instance, while he has played a few of the great RTS classics like C&C 1 and Warcraft 2 and Starcraft a long time ago, plays barely anything anymore and if he does it's mainly TBS games and some political simulations (yup, games like that still exist). Still he adores DoW and CoH while he wouldn't touch the Blizzard games from WC3 onwards with a stick. True, he'd often pause the game and take all the time he needs to observe the situation and make his moves but he still enjoys the gameplay of these two much more than any other RTS (plus at least DoW 1 provided the ability to slow the game down, making it more accessible for TBS players when playing against AI). In fact I have to say that some of the classics of the genre, especially the Blizzard ones like Warcraft 2 and StarCraft are much less forgiving and far less accessible than DoW and CoH. So I can't say that it makes sense to tell someone to start with those ones instead of the Relic ones.

Lol, just two days ago I heard of the series for the first time when I grabbed an ancient issue of the Polish magazine CD-Action (from 2004) which included the review of Kohan 2. I was instantly intrigued. Good to see that there *are* players who remember and recommend the series to this day. I may pick it up eventually from Steam but I'd rather wait for the GOG release.
Eleven! Eleven games! (Twelve if you count Renegade) That's what the box cover says! ;)

Imho DoW and CoH is more micro/tactic based and usually have more "hot spots" on the map. It's easy to quickly lose a big portion of the map because you concentrated on another battle and your unattended troops was outmanoeuvred. But that might be because I'm one of those RTS players that have difficulties with just that...

TimeGate Studios sell the Kohan games on their homesite. I think the only copy protection is a serial key and you can buy and download them or pay for a shipped disc.
Though they have gone bankrupt so I don't know if you can buy from them anymore.
Yeah getting them on GOG would be a very good thing. :)

Edit: I'm with your brother on that. Since I started playing Relic games I don't touch the Blizzard games or similar either.

Edit 2: I recommended the classics since, well, they are what most players think about when you mention RTS. It's sort of what other RTS are compared to. So if you are about to start playing RTS that is a good way to start to get a feel for the genre.

The box cover lies! There is no excuse for counting an expansion as a game.

Actually that's one of the reasons why I instantly preferred DoW and CoH over the Blizzard games. In Warcraft 2 and Starcraft the enemy could attack you from pretty much any direction with the ships, flying units and what not (that was probably also the main reason why the Blizzard games were so much more demanding than their C&C counterparts at the time) while in Dawn of War you will rarely be surprised by enemy units suddenly appearing at your base or getting past the front otherwise. Plus there was those (IMHO) far too powerful spells / abilities that could come out of nowhere and instantly devastate large chunks of your troops or defenses without you even noticing the approach (that stuff is also somewhat present in DoW but as far as I can tell not nearly as effective). I always felt that in Dawn of War, especially on the smaller maps, you could rather easily focus on a few spots and directions and you wouldn't even be distracted so much by the base building and resource gathering as in the Blizzard games and losses could be replenished rather fast and cheap. Sure, on larger maps things can get rather complicated but I'd only play those ones after I got accustomed to the gameplay on the smaller straightforward maps.
Yeah, I know. I also hate it whenever publishers count addons as full games in case of compilations or something. IIRC the box cover of the GOTY edition of Operation Flashpoint also said "three games" while it was just Operation Flashpoint with two addons. It's simply a friggin' lie.

I agree on the smaller maps. It's much easier to control territory in DoW and CoH on them. That new players should start on small maps is a good point which I didn't even think about. Duh!
For the most part I play medium or large maps because I like longer games so I didn't even consider this.

I'm guessing that one reason why we differ is because of play style. And/or my memory of Blizzard RTS is foggier than I thought. It was a long time since I played them.

LotR: War of the Ring is the easiest of the 3 on my play list, it uses the same engine as is by the same people as Battle Realms, which is here, I don't know if its supposed to be a it more simplified than that one though

Other than that you could try something where you just have a small squad without base building if you was a really uncomplicated start - like Syndicate or Canon Fodder!

I wonder when MOBA will get mentioned.
Oh...

That reminds me - Dark Omen was one friggin' awesome game. Very hard and real-time but the gameplay was pretty much TBS-ish (in fact, as far as I'm aware it's very faithful to the rules of the table top game). I'd recommend that one if it were available anywhere. Hope GOG is eventually gonna find a way to pull that one out of legal hell (along with Shadow of the Horned Rat which I haven't played yet).

Then either I'm much better at RTS games than I realize, or I got extremely lucky. Company of Heroes and Dawn of War are the only two RTSs I've ever beaten, and they are the second and third (respectively) I have ever actually played. My first RTS was Supreme Commander, which I thought was much more difficult. That isn't to say DoW and CoH are necessarily the best choices for a beginner, but I wouldn't say they humiliate them.

For what it's worth, then, I would personally recommend Dawn of War and Company of Heroes.

It depends largely on what you have played before. For example if you play TB Wargames and CoH is one of your first RTS you'll probably do fine after getting used to the real time. CoH is a Wargame lite in realtime. If you're not used to rules like pinning, cover, flanking, kill zones and so on you're going to have a hard time at first to say the least.
Not that many gamers on the net play Wargames any more so I took the liberty of guessing that the topic starter haven't played them. That and they rarely touch the RTS genre.

DoW have two things against a new RTS player.
The units aren't as intuitive as WW2 units unless you're a Warhammer 40000 fan.
The races play very different. If you don't know how a race should be played you're in trouble.

Both games have as winning key to deny the enemy resources and both games punish you quickly if you don't. Getting resources yourself is important yes but stumping the enemy at the start is much more effective.
Probably all strategy and tactical games share this but in these two games they are very important. Arguably this is more important in RTS than in TB because the result of it shows much faster since RTS games play faster than TB.
Yeah I know about Paradox games. ;)

None of these games are harder than standard RTS (I believe.). It's just that they take longer to figure out how to play effectively.

I think you're either overestimating the effort necessary to grasp certain concepts or underestimating the mental abilities of the average gamer. If I were OP I'd almost feel insulted if someone suggested that features like suppression, demoralization or gaining resources from strategic points might make a game too hard to grasp for me (especially considering that he claims to have experience with turn based strategy which tends to be far more complex). :P Also the fact that games like DoW and CoH demand that you instantly expand in order to stand a chance shouldn't be a big problem - I mean, OP has experience with TBS games where from the first moment on you have to act towards your goal, it's a typical RTS idea that at first you can just sit on your ass, construct base buildings and wait for resources to come in.

In fact expanding for resources seems much more accessible to me than managing the amount of resource gathering units and balancing the different resources (I'm sure that to this day I'm incredibly inefficient when it comes to this kind of stuff in the Blizzard games while it took only a few minutes to understand that in DoW and CoH you have to capture as many points as possible as fast as you can and hinder the enemy during his attempt to capture strategic points - that you don't really have to balance your expenses between resource gatherers and combatants makes it SO much easier). Plus the fact that the resources never completely deplete makes it easier to experiment than in Blizzard games where efficient use of the resources is often very critical.

As for the units in DoW and CoH - rather recently it occurred to me how incredibly easy it is to grasp the purposes, strengths and weaknesses of the units in DoW. For one the interface provides most information necessary (beginning with a nice "effective against...") and the units have very different names and appearances and even the upgrades are clearly explained in the interface ("okay, so the Heavy Bolter shreds infantry into pieces while Rocket Launchers tear apart buildings and vehicles"). If you have used a unit once or twice you should have no hard time remembering what it did and what it looked like. For one, this rock-paper-scissors concept is much simpler than having units where the effectiveness is purely a result of different values for damage, armor, speed etc. (to this day I don't even really have an idea when to use melee fighters and when ranged units in WC2 - the game has only three basic combat units and yet I'm not sure when what should be used).

Plus: the very different and original appearances and names in Warhammer are IMHO much easier to remember than in "realistic" games. I mean, in a WW2 game you normally have a fairly wide array of different types of soldiers, light vehicles and tanks which all look similarly, have historical names which say little to nothing about their purpose and the factors that determine their effectiveness and purpose are stuff like caliber and armor thickness which you normally can barely see if at all. With CoH the developers were nice enough to keep the amount of different unit types rather low (compared to some other WW2 games out there) and again by including a lot of important information in the interface. But still memorizing what does what was by far harder for me than in DoW, despite having played a lot of WW2 themed games (plus the strengths of real tanks and weapons are very debatable so even if you have experience with WW2 games they may differ a lot from game to game as much as historians and enthusiasts disagree on that kind of stuff).

Oh man, that post sure makes me appear like a Relic fanboy. And sorry, I know, the amount of text makes it appear like I'm being a jerk right now but sometimes when I start talking I notice that I'm thinking about it in a new way and then I feel like I have to keep it going. :D (seriously, writing that post kinda helped myself understanding why I prefer Relic's games so much over Blizzard's)

And you can get it free.
http://gruntmods.com/Projects/Downloads/Dune_2000/

AoE was also one of the first games I played after getting a PC, though I don't remember if it was the first or the second one. Don't remember beating it though. Think I was just screwing around with the cheats :D

Don't have any time for it now, but although I'm not that great of a strategist, I'll probably give this a go sometime, because I simply love Dune! Thanks!

Is this legit? I've seen "free" copies all over the web but I swore off ever doing that again when I signed up here. In fact I had a "free" Dune 2000 and I deleted it when I joined here; last time I'll ever pirate anything. This is for real free with the permission of the distributor/designer whatever?