Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II
2009 video game

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II is a real-time tactics and tactical role-playing video game based on Games Workshop's fictional Warhammer 40,000 universe, developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ for Microsoft Windows. It is the sequel to Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War.
Dawn of War II was released in North America on February 19, 2009, and in Europe on February 20, 2009, with two expansions Chaos Rising and Retribution being released in 2010 and 2011, respectively. A sequel, Dawn of War III, developed by Relic and published by Sega, was released in April 2017.
Gameplay
Playable armies at the initial release of the game include the Space Marines, Orks, Eldar, and Tyranids. The Chaos Space Marines and the Imperial Guard were later added to the game through its two expansion packs.
The gameplay of Dawn of War II is markedly different from that of Dawn of War and its expansions. Building bases is completely removed. Jonny Ebbert, the game's lead designer, describes the feel of the game by saying that it "takes everything that was great about the original and combines it with the best that Company of Heroes had to offer." There is a heavier focus on utilizing cover, which gives more substantial defensive bonuses. Accordingly, there is also new emphasis on methods of dealing with units in cover.
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This entry incorporates text from “Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.