So, WH40K version of EndWar, then?
Gameplay is similar to Dawn of War 2, but instead of equipping wargear, completing missions rewards you with credits you can spend between missions to buy permanent upgrades and abilities for your units. For example, rifle infantry can be upgraded with marksmen with a snipe ability that instakills enemy infantry - and in the case of one faction, the marksmen can be further upgraded with anti-materiel rifles that ignore cover when sniping. There are no hero units but standard units gain ranks between missions and retain these ranks if they survive, with some upgrades (such as engineers being able to deploy minefields) requiring you to have at least one squad of the applicable unit reach a certain minimum rank (and the upgrade itself only takes effect on lower-ranked units when they reach that minimum rank themselves). There's no base building, units are airlifted in (riflemen can even deep strike once they have the ability).
The campaign plays like Dark Crusade, minus honor guards. DC's special territories are present in the form of army and air bases, which allow the owner use of certain Support Powers (if the ability in question has been bought first, of course) while fighting on nearby territories. Unlike DC, though, you don't control your faction's main army; you only control one battalion (which you can pick at the start of the campaign, each giving a specific bonus) and the rest of your faction's forces fight other battles in the meantime, with you winning a battle frequently inspiring other victories in the same theater.
Story-wise, you're right, but gameplay-wise they were gigantic attrition happy idiots in Dark Crusade. If you don't take them out right away, the map right before their HQ turns into an interminable slog against two Eldar bases, blasting through wave after wave after wave of Guardians, buying every foot with mountains of spindly corpses. I must have depopulated three craftworlds wandering in circles before I finally found their stealthed bases.
Granted, Dawn of War 2 wasn't much better in its portrayal of the Eldar, but the smaller scale helped in selling the idea that they weren't throwing hundreds and hundreds of their number into a meatgrinder.
edited 3rd Mar '16 11:02:04 AM by Durazno
That post of yours just refuses to leave my head.
While originally I wanted to concentrate my modding efforts mainly on the honor guard and bugfix front, I've been thinking... could there be merit in reducing infantry squad sizes? Imperial Guard and Orks are left alone, but everyone else fields smaller squads. All honor guard squads would also be reduced to single-man units like the vanilla Space Marine and Chaos honor guards.
Mental image in this regard: a five-man squad of Howling Banshees cutting down a cloud of Guardsmen almost triple their number.
I am, however, worried that this would further marginalize infantry in favor of vehicles. Decreasing Tactical Marine squads from 8 to 4 also brings up the issue of heavy weapon allocation: should everyone but the Sergeant be able to switch their bolters out (which would turn battles into a heavy weapon spamfest where everyone is equipped with a weapon that's supposed to be rare enough to require extra resources to acquire), or should the squad be able to equip only 1-2 heavies (which would marginalize heavies due to not enough of them being on the battlefield to make a difference)? Or, to keep using the Tactical Marines as an example, should I go for a compromise and make heavy bolters and missile launchers as the only proper heavy weapon upgrades, with plasma guns being a global Armory upgrade that permanently replaces their bolters? But then what to do about the flamethrower?
You know what I'm sorely missing from the game? A way to control engagement distance for units set on ranged stance. As it is, when an infantry squad with varying weapon ranges is ordered to attack, it opens fire from the maximum range of its furthest-ranged weapon and everyone else picks whatever targets of opportunity are nearby, requiring micro if you want to maximize DPS against the intended target. Or, as I frequently saw in DC, infantry squads on ranged stance sometimes bug out and instead of attacking the target at maximum range, they run into melee range and open fire from there.
Another annoyance with heavy weapons is that AI-controlled units seemingly have the uncanny ability to pick off squad members with heavy weapons first, despite the game interface giving you no way to target individual squad members.
edited 23rd Mar '16 1:27:39 PM by amitakartok
I think I found a solution to my dilemma. In hindsight, it's rather obvious.
Do the same thing Dawn of War 2 did and take Space Marine squads apart into Tactical Marine Squads and Devastator Marine Squads.
- Tactical: bolter by default, can upgrade to flamers with Armory and plasma guns with the second HQ upgrade. The latter is intended to keep them useful alongside Terminators: plasma-upgraded Tacticals are faster and have more DPS against heavy infantry, while Termies are tougher and have more melee DPS.
- Devastator: requires Armory and first HQ upgrade, heavy bolter by default, can upgrade to missiles, crap in melee and barely faster than Terminators.
- Honor guard Marines can go both ways.
How about this?
Maybe. Though I don't want to go the way of the Dreadnought / Hellfire pair where the standard Dreadnought has significantly more health than the Hellfire, even though they're pretty much the same unit with the arms swapped out, simply because the Dreadnought is supposed to go into melee while the Hellfire doesn't.
Speaking of which, would it be too unbalancing to remove fire-on-the-move accuracy penalties for walkers and hovering vehicles on the basis that they are not affected as badly by rough terrain? Or to put it another way, treaded tanks' aim can be jolted off-target by bumps because the tracks stick to the ground, but legs aren't in contact with the ground all the time and hovertanks don't touch the ground at all. Both Dreadnoughts would greatly benefit from this with their autocannons, but it would also make the Eldar (and the Tau) even more powerful than already is.
Non-modding related: I got really damn annoyed yesterday while playing Winter Crusade. On the second Order mission, I had to restart several times because my entire army, six squads of Guardmen plus the Command Squad, got so bunched up while capturing a strategic point that the whole army got deadlocked. Like, half the squad on the outside and the other half in the middle of the cloud, unable to move because the squad members stuck in the middle being unable to move from the other squads and the ones outside refusing to move without the rest of the squad, with all seven squads mutually tangling each other into being unable to move. It already happened once before the restart and took me about ten minutes and a Listening Post to untangle them but this time, they were so densely packed that my Techpriest couldn't get to the strategic point. Even worse, I had no access to vehicles yet, so I couldn't force-move the infantry apart by moving a vehicle through the cloud.
Stand fast, brothers! The Emperor shan't forsake us just yet!
edited 3rd May '16 2:46:37 AM by amitakartok
Ultimately it is up to wether the game is good, Company of Heroes wasn't exactly fat at launch but the updates and expansion increased its value.
edited 3rd May '16 10:21:12 AM by YoKab

For my part, I'd hope for a hybrid in a slightly different way - that in the story campaign, armies like Tyranids and the IG would be fighting over the map Dark Crusade style, while armies like the Space Marines and Eldar would instead have a (branching?) series of missions for an elite strike force to carry out.
Of course, if this were the case, I'd want there to be a way to launch "sandbox" campaigns where you can conquer the map as any faction. I don't want to deprive anyone of leading the Blood Ravens to planetary domination, it just struck me as bizarre to crash down in a drop pod from a strike cruiser and... start building a barracks. You know?
This would also put Chaos in a weird place. I'd almost suggest having demon-supported Traitor Guard fighting to take territory for them while your band of Chaos Marines picks missions more carefully.