Just completed the vanilla Dawn of War 1's campaign on normal difficulty (I don't think I'll be touching the hard difficulty anytime soon), and I have to say it was a really challenging campaign. At first (the first few missions out of 11), I was a little stagnant or I guess conservative in terms of my choice of units I sent to the battlefield, however as I progressed through the missions, I was slowly expanding on the variety of units I play as I tried to deploy other units that I hadn't made an effort in using.
I guess this was also due to the difficulty aspect of the game as the game would sometimes force you to capture objectives that are far away from one another thus spreading your forces to be quite thin, made worse by the fact that those captured objectives would require defending as the enemy would send their units to retake those points. The Orks were a challenge, Eldars worse, and the Chaos the worst. The Eldars would literally spam you with their tanks, giving you a hard time defending. So my solution was to quickly find their base buildings that are responsible for their creation, or just their bases in general. As for the Chaos, I freaking hate their teleport devices! Like they would keep spawning new units near you unless you go destroy the base building responsible for teleporting them. This was a nightmare in mission 9.
That said, the last mission (mission 11), or I guess the last two missions (10 and 11), were relatively less stressful than mission 9 mainly because the objectives were not about capturing, but eliminating a certain target in addition to destroying the units of the opposing force. For me, I don't see this as a bad thing since I really needed that respite after clearing a level like mission 9, and so those last two missions were a welcome surprise to me. Lastly I guess people would have different experiences regarding the last mission as the mission would literally task you to kill a giant daemon, which I initially found myself struggling since you need to keep your forces always on the move (a hit and run tactic) due to the high health that the final boss has. My solution, apart from the hit and run tactic I mentioned, was to also have your Servitors build Heavy Bolter Turrets (be sure to upgrade them too) near your Strategic Points, and have the rest of your attacking units travel past those turrets as they run from the final boss. The giant daemon would then be occupied with dealing with the turrets, which then opened up the opportunity for your units to attack that daemon.
Funny thing, the final boss got stuck to a hill (since I constructed one of my Heavy Bolter Turrets hugging one of the hills), and that allowed me to have my units have an easy kill from there LOL. In the end, my experience with this game has been really good. And I'm quite happy that I didn't need to look up on Google for some guides on how to finish the missions throughout the whole campaign, which made me a little proud of myself hehe.
Now, on to the next Dawn of War campaign! (which I assume is the Winter Assault one)
EDIT: My experience with the game has been good, not really good. I just remembered how much I hate the pathfinding in this game, and the zoomed in camera that the game has, making it really hard to both navigate, and multitask respectively.
Post edited October 04, 2023 by Lovstrelfra