ThoseDeafMutes
Member
The majority of GAF wouldn't know good game design if it condemned them for heresy. The amount of interesting, important gameplay decisions based around building barracks or research facilities or whatever in a game like Dawn of War is approaching zero. It's different in RTS games with stronger economic gameplay, but thankfully Adeptus Astartes don't chop wood so DOW doesn't have that.
Building stuff like defensive emplacements offers interesting gameplay decisions, of course, and Dawn of War 2 offered that. Same with choosing when to tech up to a new tier, which is essentially the only interesting decision offered by the bases in Company of Heroes. They could have made unit tiers multiple choice instead of a straight linear upgrade, that would have offered 95% of the depth without wasting time on base building.
Again, I'll wait for gameplay to see for sure, but I don't particularly care about what a bunch of casual weekend comp-stompers want out of their Dawn of War RTS gameplay. The really hardcore base-builders will presumably still spend most of their time in the literal dozens of other great RTSes which already focus on that.
Base building is fine, not having base building is fine, they are both 100% valid ways to design your rts. In the case of DoW2 it was expectations set by the first game that cause people to not be a fan of the second for the smaller scale and base building. It very much felt like a different game, and less of a sequel to the original. That doesn't make it bad ofc.
I think you're off the mark to suggest that base building doesn't or didn't offer strategic / gameplay variation.