Once upon a time, RTS games were built on three pillars: base-building, logistics management and maneuvering tons of units on digital battlefields. In the past few years, however, a growing number of strategy game developers have begun to question the received wisdom of the classic C&C/StarCraft model. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II represents a vanguard in this rising trend -- the idea of eschewing base-building in favor of managing a small squad of soldiers. This has resulted in gnashing of teeth among RTS purists who bewail the lost of their beloved dirt-farming and economic management. With the release of a five-level "multiplayer beta," though, GameSpy discovered something surprising... logistics management isn't dead. It's just been moved out onto the battlefield.

Dawn of War II will force players to unlearn much of what they learned from the original game. It adopts much of its strategic model from the more refined version of the "ground control"-style of Relic's own Company of Heroes. That means that resource management is intimately tied to ground control. The battlefield sports three different sorts of control points. The first is a "requisition point." These offer a trickle of "requisition" resources that can be used mostly for basic Tier One units, unit upgrades and special abilities. Then there are "victory points." There are three of these on the battlefield and holding them causes an opponent's pool of "victory points" to shrink from a starting value of 500. The more points held, the faster the pool shrinks, until at zero the player loses the game.