I just hit some seriously weird and massively aggravating difficulty spikes in Dark Crusade after buying it two days ago. The first three zones I took over were hilariously easy, with the enemy content to just sit at the far side of the map exhibiting no initiative whatsoever while I steadily built up the world's largest zerg rush and then flooded down on them. Then, entering an innocuous Eldar zone (not even a home territory) I get rushed by literally a fully developed army in the first three minutes. I eventually manage to get a foothold in the level by making liberal use of the Pause button and set up a perimeter of heavy anti-vehicle firepower. I just spent about an hour killing wave upon wave of absolutely brutal Eldar units, unable to progress one inch, the Eldar seemingly controlling every other node on the map. I killed my fourth Wraith and got bored of the stalemate, unpaused the game for a full minute, and within that minute, my base was swarmed by heavy infantry and destroyed. So what gives? Is it intended to be impossible? Why? It makes no sense in the context of the plot that it would be. And why put such a brutal zone right next to the player's starting zone? Are they just trying to drive me to psychotic rage? Is this an atrocious game with broken AI, or am I missing some central point to it?
lol will keep an eye out for that one when i get there, i have paused half way through winter assualt at the moment as i have just had to play some of the other games i got over the steam winter sales and now have more games than i have time to play them so have to pick a game to suit the amount of time i can sit and play and dawn of war does tend to eat time without me noticing
Had a few incidents of something similar when playing as Necrons going up against the Orks. Sheer numbers were insane and they seemed to have Sguiggoths right from the get go. Annihilated me no end. Imps, Chaos and Marines were a walk in the park. Good tactice for Necrons, although it is cheap, run an army into their base, let them all get destroyed, then teleport your Lord in there with a Res Orb and resurrect the whole army and lay waste as they are marching to your base where you should have 3 Monoliths ready to go (One awakened, 2 dormant, rotate through them).
Yeh, this happened to me too. I've found each race has sort of a weakness and advantage over other races. Necrons are quite well balanced apart from against eldar, because of the lack of cloak detecting units in the necron forces. I've found that Chaos are one of the best armies, they seem to have nicely balanced forces able to create a devastating army. My tactic was always: 2-3 normal chaos soliders 2 jump ones the infected ones (can't remember names as its been ages since I played) The big devastators Some walkers Mage thing and Commander All main unit upgrades and you can pretty much decimate anything.
I'm playing Tau and I've found them hopelessly unbalanced, mainly because their decent vehicle units - the Kroot beasties - have stupidly low limits on them (3 at once in total, ever). But they're the only vehicles worth a damn: the mech vehicles are all troop carriers or missile platforms that either do no damage or are stupidly easy to destroy and get decimated so fast they're not worth their own build cost. So I always end up with a huge, fully expanded vehicle cap and no decent vehicles to fill it. Compare this, a supposedly pure mech-tech lasers-and-missiles race, to the Imperial Guard whose whole raison d'etre - the facemelting Baneblade - can be acquired in very little time, does silly damage and never ever dies. Actually, comparison to the Imperial Guard is apt. The Tau are basically the Imperial Guard, but worse in every way. They have worse vehicles and fewer of them, a plethora of stupid arbitrary limitations, an equally puny and frail infantry unit but that does far less damage, and they have no mechanism for morale restoration. Basically, the Tau are crap. I'm going to restart as one of the Marine variants
From when I used to play dow tau really are not that bad, the hammerhead gunships have the most powerful weaponry of all the non-relic units and the standard tau troops are lethal, you just have to learn to use their vastly superior range (which is greater than their los, meaning they need to be combined with other units to work well). Might actually reinstall it again after reading this thread....