Metamap

Hyrican

The game gets a lot of negative feedback and many players i know have stopped playing the game. That is not, like a lot a people speculate, because of the current balance issues or too few races but simply due to the baffling lack of single-player content and thus lack of replayability.
The campaign itself can only keep you entertained for so long. It's a linear campaign without too many choices or optional missions involved, additionally quite a few people disliked the overall style and story of the campaign (make of that what you will i don't really want to get into wheter the campaign itself really sucks or is quite good).
But i think it's safe to say that there isn't much incentive to play the campaign more than once.

So if we wil see another big content release it might be beneficial to include some way to entertain the single player crowd for longer than one campaign playthrough. A good foundation for a solution has already been given by previous iterations of the franchise, in this case namely Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Soulstorm -> the Metamap style campaign.

As i mentioned, this sort of campaign only offers a good foundation for an enjoyable single-player (and possibly multiplayer as well) experience. The Dark Crusade and Soulstorm campaigns got their fair share of criticism too, and deservedly so.
Besides the elaborate stronghold maps the campaigns offert a lot of skirmishes in between (which could feel like a chore) and very little story. Nonetheless the act of conquering a whole planet/system/sub-sector/whatever with your favorite faction gaining global bonuses on the metamap and purchasing new wargear for your commander was pretty fun.

So why do i think this could be used for a fun gamemode in Dawn of War 3 and how do i propose to do this.?

Well Part of this has already been discussed in another thread quite some time ago (i think "will there be a dark crusade stile campaign" ... or something like this if you want to check it out). As i said, the basic principal of such a campaign can be very entertaining and with a few tweaks and improvements could lead to a fun experience for single- and multiplayer as well as creating a nice platform to bring out new content and possibly offering nice statistical feedback for relic.

The basic idea would be to create a metamap similar to those in DC or SS. There are several areas to conquer, could be
1 planet = 1 area or 1 planet = several areas or both and some of the areas could award small global bonuses for the faction holding the area just like in DC/SS. One conquest could run over the course of a certain period of time or until the whole map got conquered until it resets (i'll refer to one such "playthrough" as crusade from here on).

Hyrican

But instead of a single player conquering those areas it could be a faction or alliance. A faction beeing exactly what you think it would be (just sm, orks or eldar) an Alliance beeing one of however many alliances (maybe 4-8?) you have to sign on to before the crusade/campaign with a mix of all factions. An area would then be conquered if a certain amount (maybe best calculated of the current participants of the ongoing crusade ?) of wins are achieved or possibly some sort of victory point mode similar to DoW 2 games inducing some sort of tug of war ?
Both aproaches have their pros and cons(just what came to mind, feel free to add more):

-Factions: Would be more lore friendly, but unbalanced player numbers in the respective factions are more likely than with alliances.

-Alliances: Very conflicting with the lore, but it's less likely that there are, let's say 4 times more players playing sm than there are players playing eldar.

Regardless of wether there would be factions or alliances, it should be considerd to implement some mechanics to switch factions/alliances during a crusade to enable the player numbers to balance itself. Maybe only allow a migration to the factions/alliances with very low player counts coupled with some bonuses to factions/alliances with significantly lower player counts than others (the bonus being bigger the bigger the player difference, and smaller if the player count evens out).

What would be the rewards and how would they be contributed ? Lots of possibilites here really ... You could award skulls for each battle, a small skull bonuses if an area is conquered and a big boost of skulls if your faction/alliance won the crusade.
Let's say one would be eligible to receive rewards for the area conquest if he partook in fights over that particular area and for the bonus received for wining a crusade if one played 10 (really an arbitrary number...) games during that crusade.
Instead of just skulls the rewards could be skins or new elites or doctrines or whatever relic seems fit to offer as ingame goodies (relic mentioned the possibility of voice or music packs beeing added somewhere ?). Just nothing exlusive ... that stuff should be obtainable for everyone, the winners would just get it without having to dish out addional resources.

Players should be able to participate in any way they want, vs. the ai, vs. other players or a mixture of both. As i said in a few other threads before, players shouldn't be punished for for preferring to play one way or another ... that's just bad buisiness practice. It's a game after all and in this case no one really gains anything from pissing off a porion of the playerbase.

Hyrican

Now what game mode should the different areas be set in ?
Again lots of possibilities ... assuming that more game modes will be added in the future (relic already said at some point that they will at least consider a last stand ?). Areas could have specific set game modes, for example one area can only be conquered by playing the current standard game mode, another could only be won by games in victory point mode (if added) and another little planet could only be claimed by finishing a certain number of last stad wins, there could or should even be campaign areas (better more than less) very similar to the stronghold maps in DC/SS. Assymetrical maps with a plethora of handicaps/bonuses and several objectives, on those you could do some amazing things ... there are really not too many limits here.
It would also be possible to enable every area to be played in any game mode available. Again i guess arguments can be made for both approaches.
Special time limited event areas on the map that are not part of a regular crusade could be a thing... say a space hulk appears out of the warp and you have to fight over it ... that could be a way to test possible new game modes and keep things fresh and interessting.

The point is that way new game modes can slowly be introduced, new campaign maps could be added in a pace relics deems fit (a few areas/ game modes here and there for free or a lot in an expansion). A metamap of such proportions would welcome small and big additions and could be tied to the success of the game. If the game isn't very successful ... so be it no new additions ... but if it is successful there are practicly no limits to how much relic wants to expand the metamap. Plus they wouldn't need to create/add a completely new campaign with every expansion and keep the game fresh and entertaining in single- and multiplayer.

(Even more subjective and unlikely than the metamap idea ... so skip if you don't want to bother)
I would love to see some sort of random (don't freak out about "random" just yet ...hear me out) component introduced. A wether or environmental hazards mode, where random environmental conditions (and combinations of those) could happen influencing the map. For example a blizzard on acheron slowing units down and imparing vision. Everyone would get a 2 or 3 minute warning before the event to prepare for it. Those hazards could be tied to the maps you are playing on, blizzards and something like vulcanic erruptions on archeron, shifts of the map in cage world, poisonous of corrosives clouds on another world or even things like wild animals or tyranids roaming the map. This could keep standard matches from getting too borring with too stale metas (same build order and battle routines over and over ... ).

(I think this won't be possible in DoW 3 but would have been very nice and fit perfectly with the metamap and it's rewards system)
For me one of the key aspects of Warhammer 40k has always been the love for detail and the customisation that comes with it. It would love for a future dawn of war to allow to customize squads with gear. For the tactical marine squad you have 4 or 5 slots and could create one or more templates for each slot (customizing the marine, size, the head, bionics, armor, weapons etc.) and than enable some kind of shuffle of those templates, so every tactical squad ingame would have different details. Those parts for custimisation could for example be earned as rewards on the metamap. So you could REALLY create your own recognizable army ... that would be an addition to the army painter i would kill to see. For something like this to happen the squads would ofcourse still need to be recognizable as a tactical squad but i think something like this should be achievable with clear icons and the overall features of a certain squad (jumpmoduls for assault marins for example should still be very recognizable).
Something like this would probably work better with a scale a little bit smaller than that of DoW 3 and is likely nothing more than a crazy idea of mine ... but would be nice to have in future itereations of the franchise (if such thing should ever happen).

Sorry for the wall of text and thanks for reading. Let me know what you think of a metamap like that and what you would like to see with such a feature.