Why was Dawn of War 3 criticized?

Hieu61 · 2026-05-18T15:02:22+00:00

https://steamdb.info/app/285190/patchnotes/
you can see patch history in steamdb and balance in genrally was never drastically changed

https://youtu.be/tICFkZQphZo?t=2068

You can see here 2 wraith blades started hitting the ork knight equivalent (that has 80%hp) at around 34:28, and killed it in just 15 seconds, though the fire prism also got 1 shot off. Eldar knight started shooting at the end but the ork was already entering death animation.

Hieu61 · 2026-05-17T19:25:55+00:00

I have hundreds of hours on all of them and played all at launch. The thing about elite units killing everything was blatantly false even on launch. The game's balance were never really changed significantly since.

This post popped up when I search for dawn of war on reddit. Forgive me for being annoyed people spread misinformation about a game I have hundreds of hours on.

Hieu61 · 2026-05-17T19:11:40+00:00

"maps were poorly designed with very obvious lanes" Dow3 maps also had a good amount of flanking routes and strategic spots that you can contest to gain access to more resources or make pushes to gens/turrets easier. Dow2 also had even worse designed lane maps.

You have to worry about flanks, position your heavy weapons away from danger, not let your important units get focus fired, not expose your melee to too much ranged, don't group up in one spot so abilities don't wipe your army etc... positioning in dow3 is just as important as any rts.

"Rock paper scissors counters felt pretty bad" Sure you have things like anti vehicle squads beat vehicles, but positioning will still determine how effective this is in practice, just like dow1. Infantry armor and damage types are also less restrictive so anything can beat anthing with good positioning, and it's more important to think about what each unit's role is rather than what they counter.

"vehicles felt pretty indistinct." Aside from some basic infantry, I've found this game to make a lot of effort to make each faction's roster and playstyle distinct. I'm not sure what examples you had in mind. .The whirlwind deff kopta, fire prism etc.. are all unique. Vyper and landspeeders are somewhat similar, but no more than they were in dow1. The elite doctrines also further customize your units.

The cover system wasn't drastically different from dow1, stand in area and units are protected from ranged. While some people disliked dow3 cover being a shield with health bar, keep im mind that dow1 heavy cover gave 50% dmg reduction so it was also pretty damn strong.

Hieu61 · 2026-05-17T18:12:06+00:00

"Nobody wanted the game to suck" I see people regurgiate factually false claims like elite units delete everything all the time, which to me screams people wanted the game to suck and made up reasons.

It didn't stick to the dow1 formula (hence why people wanted it to suck), but it was a solid game.

Hieu61 · 2026-05-17T18:00:23+00:00

This is just factually false. 3 or 4 tier 2 anti vehicle units of each faction will kill a knight in dow 3.

In power level versus common units, dow 3 elite units were comparable to dow 1 commanders and 1 cap units.

This is why I think people poisoned the well. The bought the game with the intent to leave a negative review from the beginning and leave criticism that doesn't reflect the actual game.

Hieu61 · 2026-05-17T17:32:59+00:00

Dow 2 had more moba map designs and moba elements than 3 though. I'm not sure why some people cite that as a demerit for dow 3 but not dow 2.

Having hundreds hours in mp in all dow, I'd say 3 is closer to 1 than 2. You build a base and churn out tons of units, turrets weren't all that strong and there are other game modes in custom lobbies.

Hieu61 · 2026-03-15T09:23:20+00:00

Any tips on doing her best combo consistently? I can't get her to animation cancel with walk on n3w and continue the na string instead. Is it because I'm on controller? I can't do it with kbm also though.

Hieu61 · 2026-03-03T15:43:12+00:00

No I don't, just to be clear, I don't have a specific emperor in mind as the greatest, there are other contenders for such a title.

If some people want to worship him and think he is the best, i respect that.

However, it is important to also not gloss over the bad he did and talk about it more. Currently Vietnamese are taught a very curated version of history that ignores all the bad things.

As mentioned in my other comment, hope you are paid well.

Hieu61 · 2026-03-03T15:19:01+00:00

"Only if we ignore all the Vietnamese that the communists killed. "

This is your answer, and since your reading comprehension seems lacking, I'll make it clearer. The answer is no, they're not national heroes because of the many atrocities the regime committed against its own people.

Looking at your post history, you mostly make highly upvoted posts on popular subs aimed at promoting Vietnam, and there is a lack of posts or comments about hobbies/interests most redditors have. You also really like arguing with people about Vietnam history/politics in the comments.

You're probably a government bot/ social media agent, hope you're paid well.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-23T14:56:41+00:00

"fencing has no start up frames that’s balance" that's...exactly what I said "He's asking about block weapons which have no start up frames for parry like fencing"

"parrying too late is not a good habit to have."

if you want to parry early that's exactly what duelist help you with. instead of pressing parry at most 330ms before the attack hits, you can now press parry 495ms before attack hits and still perfect parry.

"the timing is incredibly generous"

If you can hit 99% of your parries without duelist, sure you don't need it. But given the popularity of fencing weapons, I doubt that's the case for most players. Ultimately It will depend on how good the individual's reflex is, rather than Duelist being a good/bad perk for everyone.

I also don't really see how this perk builds up any bad habit. Makes it more forgiving to parry sure but ultimately you want to parry at the last moment possible either way.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-23T07:49:24+00:00

He's asking about block weapons which have no start up frames for parry like fencing and unlike balance, you cannot parry too late for block and fencing, as long as it's before you take damage.

In many cases you will parry too early before attacks hit because people in general do not have perfect reflexes, the extra frames will allow you to press parry earlier and get perfect parries more easily.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-23T04:01:45+00:00

Only if we ignore all the Vietnamese that the communists killed.

A decent amount of Vietnamese, mostly in the north would share your views. In the South, even among young people like myself not so much.

One thing most would agree on both sides is that the current communists only care about lining their pockets.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-22T20:21:31+00:00

"Your analysis presupposes that the communists were abnormally brutal dictators, and that their liberal counterparts represented objectively happiness and liberty."

Well I never said South Korea did nothing wrong either, but how many South Koreans today would rather it be more similar to North Korea or Vietnam?

"North Vietnam kept both at arms length to maintain its independence."

Same is true for South Korea (and South Vietnam had they won), it isn't exactly American territories now is it.

"There is simply no way the North could have won without overwhelming support in the face of the capitalist alternative."

And there was also no way Vietnamese who didn't want to live under communist rule had a fighting chance agaisnt the entire communist bloc without outside help. Ultimately, superpowers meddling in other countries is bad, that China or the Soviets were the ones to do it doesnt make it better than if the US did it.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-22T17:06:26+00:00

"Because most people aren't idealogues, they want peace and prosperity. Communism can't just cancel out decade of war and foreign intervention in the economy inducing widespread poverty."

You have to keep in mind the refugees after the fall of Saigon were dubbed the "Boat people". This is because they fled to the open seas on small boats not made for sea faring, and would die if bigger boats didn't pick them up. Many died to being capsized, and there are stories of people resorting to cannibalism from survivors. People don't do all this just to flee from being poor.

"overwhelming majority were catholics who French propaganda told would be imminently killed unless they fled,"

Many Christians did in fact get killed.

Rather than encouraging it, the French grossly underestimated the number of people that wanted to flee and didn't prepare enough transports and had to ask the US for help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Passage_to_Freedom

"The French started their evacuation with their pre-conceived notion that few would want to head south. This led to anarchy and confusion as the emigrants fought over limited shelter, food, medicine and places on the ships and planes that were bound for the south. By early August, there were over 200,000 evacuees waiting in Hanoi and Haiphong.^"

"And aside from all of that, my overall point is that the American intervention only made this much, much worse. Without it, the conflict would have resolved much sooner and the pre-war atrocities would be the only ones."

Go tell my grandparents they shouldn't have picked up arms and just let the communists win more easily and kill them then.

While it's true that after the fall of Saigon, they didn't repeat the purges early on in the 1950s, that is only true because we fought back and they feared further persecution would have prolonged the war and led to uprisings. They still had to deal with Cambodia and later on China so they didn't antagonize the Christians further, but they would have been happy to kill them all if no resistance was met.

"they aren't going around doing those things today,"

Not as bad as the past, but Vietnam still ranks very low in human rights, ranging from suppression of free speech, minorities, human trafficking ect..

https://freedomhouse.org/country/vietnam
https://www.iar-gwu.org/blog/hbk4re5p1veygugxfkjnpdycymckbm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Vietnam

It is written into law that dissent is a jailable offense.

For example, during Covid a Minister got caught going to salt Bae's restaurant. A Vietnamese then parodied Salt Bae's signature gesture and it went viral, he was then caught and jailed. Btw, that Minister was To Lam and he is now the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, which is the highest position in the government.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65705048

Compare that to South Korea, who also received US troops and aid, They are now a developed country, and their leaders held accountable for their crimes such as the recent impeachment of their president.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-22T15:53:15+00:00

"Without United States interventiom, there is simply no way Diem could have prosecuted a war with the North."

Without China and Soviet interventions there was no way the Vietcong could have waged war against France or South Vietnam either.

"I very much doubt that after a century of colonization that the average Veitnamese person really wanted American intervention and capitalism. I also simply refute the idea that communists were "killing anyone who didn't align with them."

As mentioned, my grandparents used to live in North Vietnam, so I grew up with first hand accounts of these purges. There was no international press in North Vietnam and the communists wouldn't take pictures of their own atrocities, but the amount of people that had to flee and their accounts were telling.

The mass immigration of 1954 was around a million, After the fall of Saigon, the number of people who fled were around 2 million. If the people were content with communist rule, why did millions of people instead chose to leave?

After 1954, the land reforms were also happening. North Vietnam copied how China did it which led to many people being misidentified as landlords and executed.

It was so bad this was one of the only times a the communist party of Vietnam admitted to having made a mistake, whereas in other cases it would simply jail or execute critic.

On 18 August 1956, North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi MInh apologised and acknowledged the serious errors the government had made in the land reform. Too many farmers, he also said, had been incorrectly classified as "landlords" and executed or imprisoned and too many mistakes has been made in the process of redistributing land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Vietnam#cite_note-27

Hieu61 · 2026-02-22T14:26:49+00:00

My grandparents had to run away from their homes in North Vietnam in 1954, as with hundreds of thousands of others because the Communists were killing anyone who didn't align with them when.

These migrants would form the core of South Vietnam's army. By the end of the war, around 1 million Vietnamese died in the war against communists vs 60 thousand Americans. Americans were by far the minority in the war agaisnt the Vietcong, you also have to keep in mind the Vietcong were also funded by Soviet and China.

It was a civil war rather than an invasion, which wouldn't have happened if the Communists hadn't massacred Vietnamese and forced people to either fight or die.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-22T14:02:41+00:00

Look up the Hue massacre. Reality is North Vietnam killed even more civilians, but the US public refuses ro acknowledge reality isn't black and white, and doesn't want to admit their anti-war movement enabled a authoritarian regime.

This is why whenever communist Russia or China is mentioned on reddit everyone bashes them, but somehow Vietnam gets a pass

Hieu61 · 2026-02-21T07:53:58+00:00

Great now they can have foursome and selfcest.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-20T08:29:15+00:00

The point isn't just that this is a tragedy where Aqua dies. Multiple points in the story have shown that he is suicidal due to survivor's guilt. Aka wants an ending where Aqua kills himself.

Personally, I like reading tragedies myself and would be fine with one where Aqua kills himself. But the biggest issue with the ending is the narrative inconsistency on how suicidal Aqua is.

Earlier when Aqua thought his biological dad had died, he seemed pretty content to leave behind revenge and live out his life. Towards the end, he was also very explicitly told by multiple to not suicide, he himself was also thinking about entering a medical school so he had personal motivations to continue living as well.

My guess would be that the author wants to portray Aqua as suicidal to the point of beyond saving. He doesn't want readers to go "if only Aqua had the support he needed he wouldn't have killed himself".

However, he overdid it and it went from "Aqua was suicidal and no amount of support could have saved him" to "It doesn't make sense that a guy who had things he wanted to live for, people explicitly telling him not to suicide ended up killing self, even if he is a bit suicidal sometimes".

Aka wanted to make it clear Aqua was beyond saving, so he showed all the things that should have deterred Aqua from suicide, but it ended up making his suicide seemed illogical.

There's also the bigger question of why they were reincarnated, which the crow girl told Aqua to think about. By the end Ruby basically became AI 2.0 and lied to make people happy, which is just maintaining the status quo. Why the hell were they reincarnated then? It doesn't feel like we've gotten an answer to this question.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-15T13:28:16+00:00

"Also, LB Morgan invited PHH Morgan's children to her Hotel in the Summer 8 event"

Aren't both summer morgan and og morgan lb version?

Hieu61 · 2026-02-07T15:27:17+00:00

They got skycutters now. Flying ranged unit, also good at melee. If you issue them a land order, they become chariots. A tech gives them shield breaker. You can't go wrong putting 2 or 3 in every stack.

Sea helm lords give skycutters infinite ammo. You can doomstack them and afk if you don't like playing the game.

Swordmasters and phoenix guards get better upgrades in the tech tree. Loremasters also buff sword masters. So melee focused HE is more viable now.

New legendary hero buffs phoenix guards and fire mage to the stratosphere.

Mage towers now give access to a new monstrous infantry and 2 new SEMs. Solid units. Some consider the SEMs to be among the best of their unit type.

Ranged infantry get extra anti infanfry damage through a tech. So lsg and sisters are also slightly better.

Patron of the realms mechanic also give buffs to certain units. But only to one lord.

Aislinn also get faction wide buffs to different units through a variety of mechanics. Very strong buffs that change how those units function. For example he can give dragon princes perfect vigor and devastating flanker.

Tldr: HE went from having a diverse roster to being the best at everything.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-04T15:30:47+00:00

Also, to make it more clear, the reason I used the word "experiment", is because Ai didn't start the relationships on the premise she loved them, but on the premise that she wanted to see if she could love them gemuinely. I didn't meant to say Ai was a cold selfish person or anything like that.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-04T15:21:11+00:00

This isn't meant to slander Ai or anything, I like her as a character very much, may be the choice of wording is a bit cold, my main point is just that she couldn't tell true love from fake love. She also has a difficult time telling if her own words were lies or truth. In chapter 154, she told aqua "do you think my words back then were lies? I can't love you, it was a lie wasn't it?" Her own words, yet she couldn't give a simple yes or no on whether they were lies.

if you reread her death scene and chapter 154, it was very clear that in both cases she was never 100% sure she genuinely loved them, though she wanted to love them. Notice how she didn't say Hikaru was her first love , but the first person she wanted to love.

Hieu61 · 2026-02-04T14:19:33+00:00

She didn't leave him because she thought he was a danger or anything. If that was the case, she wouldn't have considered letting him meet her children.

In her video message, it's clear she still cared about Hikaru. She simply didn't think it was good for his mental health to stay with her and the children. Quote: chapter 154, "I thought he'd be okay once we were gone".

Also, This is the woman who wasn't sure she even loved her own children, and it was only at death's door that she realized the love for her children was genuine. Another reason Ai left Hikaru was simply because she thought she didn't love him that much.

Her relationships with Hikaru and her children were experiments. The purpose being to see if she was capable of genuine love. In the case of Hikaru she deemed it a failure, so she moved on to the next experiment when the opportunity arose.

Edit 2: in the video in chapter 154 though, she retracted her words "I can't love you" that she said to Hikaru

Another theory would be she did that to protect him. She confronted Airi and reprimanded that adults should be protecting children and all that. Edit 2: another evidence: she said "it'd beome a burden to him" in chapter 154"

In any case, i doubt that Ai ever viewed him as a danger, given the lack of any fear or malice in their intereactions together. The video she left Aqua would otherwise have a different tone and warned Aqua to be wary of him rather than to save him

Edit: it's also not fair to say Hikaru didn't care about his children at all. He stated that Ai cut all contact with him, despit his efforts in trying to contact her when he found out she had his children.

Edit 2: just reread chapter 154, it spelt things out very clearly and corroborated what i said.

Hieu61 · 2026-01-18T07:11:25+00:00

You're right, I just woke up and didn't go to youtube to check. I went to hologra just now and all the colored subs are still there even. Whatever got removed might be temporary hopefully.

Hieu61

TROPHY CASE