Once again i started a DoW by picking up a cool-looking faction, which somewhat bored me with the gameplay. My first choice was Adepta Sororitas and while they turned out to be as weak as ranged factions, their playstyle is still mimics that of Adeptus Astartes. For throwaway maps it wasn't that big a deal, but on story-missions sometimes it was hard. Worst one was the mission against Astra Militarum. When you and the AI start on equal you can suppress their expansion by the virtue of having human player powers. But their home-base starts already at maximum strength and once scripts allow it, they harrass you with attrition. I lost or abandoned the fight several times, until I noticed why exactly my dumb experimental tactic i used on plain maps has worked before. Adepta Sororitas Rhino transport has a ton of HP, costs about nothing and while it shoots like ork towers — a lot of animation, but only one low damage bullet once in a while, their unit cap is ridiculous. I just flooded the map with stupid transports and overwhelmed any Baneblade thrown at me. From that moment i employed this dumb and boring but effective tactic every time I got in trouble. While aesthetically interesting the rest of Adepta Sororitas units are pretty weak and boring. The Dark Eldar are cool, pretty effective and well balanced. Necrons this time started to talk in cutscenes, which is stupid, but whatever.
The rest of the game is exactly the same as Dark Crusade. Padding skirmish maps, powerful bonus squads, pretty upgrades for the leader, cool home-base fights with cutscenes and different goals, and three (!) Imperium factions at war with each other and not much explanation. There are new flying units for everyone, and a new titan for Necrons. But the flyers at this scale are pretty meaningless and Deceiver is really meh. Global map looks like several planets and that's cool.
Somewhere in the middle of my complete walkthrough i've installed an FoV mod, and after that it's impossible to go back. The game was never released on consoles, and even if we consider the possible reasoning that 2004's average hardware was not being able to process such tiny amount of fully 3D units at minimum settings, this expansion was released in 2008. Nothing prevented the devs from unlocking the camera, the mod looks like it wasn't that hard to create. After tasting proper FoV, unmoded version feels painfully claustrophobic and unstrategic. You can't make adequate decisions, when you lack information, and the game's friendly AI is pretty pathetic on its own.
For anyone who likes Dark Crusade there's no reason to not like this serving of more of the same.