When it comes to real-time strategy, a few different companies are brought up as truly enhancing the genre. Westwood Studios's Command & Conquer defined modern real-time strategy, Creative Assembly's Total War series saw the number of units on a typical battlefield increase from 100 to 10000, Blizzard's Starcraft introduced the world to the idea of truly competitive RTS gaming, and Relic's Company of Heroes brought cover mechanics to the genre. With the release of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Relic has again challenged traditional real-time strategy values, and has created another game that will go down in the annals of RTS history as a game changing release. 

For those who don't know, Warhammer 40,000 is essentially high-fantasy in space, where Orcs, Elves, and all of the other staples of the genre are represented by different alien races. Dawn of War II has players battling against Orkz, Eldar, and the Tyranid enemies, in an effort to defend the Imperium of Man and its people. The campaign is broken into deployments, giving the Blood Ravens different objectives, both mandatory and optional, to complete before the end of any given day. Oftentimes it simply isn't possible to complete every quest offered, so picking and choosing interplanetary battles becomes a major component. Even more importantly, every mission that doesn't push back the Tyranid swarm counts against the commander, so it's important to balance optional missions for items and mandatory missions for the stability of the galaxy. To balance out this problem, each mission ends by rating the player in their fury, resilience, and speed, which reward players with additional deployments. It's a non-linear, but guided experience, and doesn't put a huge amount of emphasis on the actual narrative. While Dawn of War takes leaps away from its contemporaries in terms of unique gameplay, it stays fairly close when it comes to storytelling.