This whole thing made a lot more sense if you followed along with Dawn of War’s development lifespan, but I can see how looking back on it today would be more than a little confusing.While I'm not very experienced at it, I've been tinkering around with a personal mod project for unifying and standardizing unit/structure stats and tech trees between vanilla, Winter Assault and Dark Crusade, possibly Soulstorm as well once I get there, using the DC Bugfix mod (and Dawn of Skirmish) as a base. If you already own Retribution, basically the only things you get out of Dawn of War 2 and Chaos Rising are their respective campaigns. Relic eventually backported Steamworks to the base game and Chaos Rising so you can have everything in one executable. Retribution brought its own campaign and the Imperial Guard faction, but was treated as a bit of a new start for the DoW2 line and so allowed you to play every faction in multiplayer. Retribution came out after physical sales basically died, and it committed to Steamworks more heavily. You had to own the original game which debuted the other four factions in order to play as those other four groups. If you only had Chaos Rising, you could play its campaign and you could play multiplayer, but multiplayer was limited to the Chaos faction. Chaos Rising was an expandalone, which is to say it had a campaign separate from DoW2’s original campaign and added the Chaos faction. So you’re saying they are individual games with their own campaigns?ĭawn of War 2 and Chaos Rising were released in that weird time where physical retail sales were still a thing. Confusing since it and the original Dawn of War 2 sit separate from retribution. Some people really liked them, I personally did not. In your case, since you already own Retribution, buying Dawn of War 2 and Chaos Rising would only give you the campaigns that each of those two came with. Dark Crusade is generally seen as the one that holds up best. Dawn of War and Winter Assault both have linear campaigns, while Dark Crusade and Soulstorm have strategic map campaigns a la Dune 2 and Rise of Nations. You can decide if you want to dabble in the rest of DoW2 later, and it’s less than $10 for a mountain of content. I was never a big fan of most of the gameplay changes from the first installment to the second, so if you’re not looking for pure eye candy then I would personally recommend the Master Collection, which will give you everything for Dawn of War. Most of these entries are standalone, with varying amounts of content missing from the full package if you happen to own all the various parts. Retribution (the DLC you see is mostly for this) Gold Edition (including Dawn of War and Winter Assault) is a package on Steam, not a separate SKU.
So, for Dawn of War 1, the following installments were released: