Dawn of War II: Retribution Windows game

Codex Edition 2.0 comes with three new standalone factions - Necrons, Tau, and Grey Knights. These are not just commander choices or re-skins of an existing faction like the old Tau used to be, but actual independent factions that have their own voices, HQs, units, models, animations, and the rest.

Here's a list of the squads for each faction:

+++TAU+++
Focused on extreme firepower at a distance, the Tau dominate the battlefield in ranged combat, but are generally weak to trauma and require a combined arms force of their various allies to be most effective.

- XV8 Commander
- XV22 Commander
- Fire Warrior
- XV15 Stealth Suit
- Kroot Carnivore
- Earth Caste Builder
- Gue'vesa Auxiliary
- Devilfish Transport
- Gundrone Squad
- Knarloc
- Krootox
- Kroot Hounds
- Pathfinder
- Shas'ui Bodyguard
- Vespid
- Broadside Battlesuit
- Ethereal
- Hammerhead Gunship
- XV8 Battlesuit

+++NECRONS+++
A slowly awakening threat that can become nigh unstoppable if given time to produce units and accumulate resources, their units regenerating health rapidly if they are not being hit by sustained fire, making it imperative to maintain pressure on them in order to keep them at bay.

- Overlord
- Warrior
- Wraith
- Flayed One
- Attack Scarab
- Builder Scarab
- Immortal
- Heavy Destroyer
- Destroyer
- Pariah
- Tomb Spyder
- Lord
- Destroyer Lord
- Lychguard
- Restored Monolith
- Deceiver
- Nightbringer

+++GREY KNIGHTS+++
The bane of all daemons, the Grey Knights are not unlike their less specialized brethren in conventional situations, though even their most basic units can obliterate daemonic entities with ease.

- Brother Captain
- Strike Squad
- Combat Strike Squad
- Interceptor Squad
- Purgation Squad
- Terminator Squad
- Rhino
- Razorback
- Librarian
- Paladin Squad
- Purifier Squad
- Land Raider
- Dreadnought
- Venerable Dreadnought

Listing all of their upgrades, abilities, functions, strengths, and weaknesses, would make this a pretty hefty post, and it would spoil the surprise, so go ahead and find out for yourself on the battlefield!

Next up - the new units. As you may have already seen, Knights... not the grey or medieval type, I mean the superheavies, have made an appearance. Imperial Knights, Wraithknights, and Gorkanauts are here to crush your enemies beneath their feet; fully animated, modeled, and textured. Two new units had also been added to other factions; the Painboy for the Orks, and a Lictor commander for the Tyranids.

Alongside all of this come more major changes to the overall gameplay and feel of the mod.

- The camera zoom distance was increased even further than Codex 1.2, allowing for a much less claustrophobic experience, as well as one that is devoid of the model pop-in that you may have experienced if you had tried other camera zoom distance mods or tried to increase it yourself. Do keep in mind that this is extremely taxing on your processing power, and it is not recommended to remain at the maximum zoom distance in very large firefights, as your FPS might take a dive depending on your computer. For that reason, I highly recommend installing the Performance and Stability mod.

- 8-player Free-for-All used to crash with 1.2's introduction of 8-player functionality, so I did not include any 8-player FFA maps. That is fixed now. There is an 8-player version of Siege of Vraks called "(FFA8) Siege of Vraks". In-game UI is a bit broken due to the lack of the 7th and 8th player victory point control ticker, but it still works gameplay-wise.

- Added a self-destruct ability to all generators, meaning that you can now deny your enemy generators if they are about to capture your Power Node.

Those were just some of the many changes that are, as always, listed in the changelog of the actual Codex 2.0 download page and within its archive. That said, I have switched back to distributing the mod as an archive, since the installer was causing numerous problems. There are instructions in the archive that will help you install the mod successfully.

While the new factions, units, and content were thoroughly playtested, certain things may have slipped through the cracks due to the sheer quantity of it all. Combined with the fact that that there are some details to the new factions which will take a long while to flesh out, such as more detailed voice lines and visual quirks like Grey Knights' smoothing, this is still very much an ongoing project. The Imperial knights, Wraithknights, and Gorkanauts are also going to be experimented with in the future in order to make them even more dynamic, though they're already quite functional and a pleasure to behold. Other than that, a lot of fixes and changes were made to the original factions, but there is still work to be done considering the amount of content this Codex Edition started with.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the help of the Contributors and Playtesters listed on the Discord server. Special thanks to clocktickin, BruiserBanned, Joazzz, Adam 09WilliamsAd, OCHE BOLSHE YOBA, enlargingcloud, and Urnsheme for their great contributions to the mod's development, as well as 531st, Haganaz, Wyzilla, and Ginger Jesus for playtesting.

The road ahead remains as one would expect - upcoming patches will primarily focus on more bug fixes and further improving the new factions, more importantly improving the AI and polishing the Tyranids' unit roster, before moving on to create more and more units and factions... and hopefully increasing scale even further while at it... base building is also in the cooker to an extent... we shall see. As for when those patches arrive will depend on their contents and the severity of any issues found, expect the usual release schedule with this mod, though I will keep people updated primarily on the Discord server.

Hope you enjoy it. As always, you can join the Discord server. As a last note, the "Factions in Codex Edition" article will be archived for now and soon replaced with a version that is more informative and accommodates the new factions.