$60 to Beta test DoW3. Wow Relic.

This game is honestly one of the poorest releases I can remember of any RTS. Issues include.

1. Balance: There are obvious strengths of certain races/units which have relatively little counterplay. Eldar hit and runs can't be dealt with because they're too fast. The only detector units to deal with stealthed units die in about 2 seconds. Starting units feel completely unbalanced in cost and combat ability. Everything late game dies too quickly. You can be winning a game significantly and just get your entire army wiped with single orbital bombardment. I could go on, but you get the point. The balancing of this game is poor.
2. The best feeling aspects of the franchise were dismantled to make DoW3 into a clunky MOBA/Starcraft hybrid: Where is the build diversity? All the DoW2 charm came from the build disversity. Now its all micro-level click spamming on a game engine that isn't responsive enough to facilitate that.
3. Skulls mechanic drastically tilts balance of multiplayer: If you want to be able to win games, you have to grind out skulls and elite XP. What is the point of this? What does this add to the game? Its just a frustrating barrier to be overcome to get people to sink more time into the game than they should need to in order to get the full/optimal game play experience.
4. The campaign is a glorified tutorial with an absolutely terrible plot: This point does not require further explanation.
5. Overall unit speeds are all over the place and feel terrible. The biggest offender of this in terms of abuse are the elder who can duck in and out of combat faster than you can engage them to trade damage while healing shields for free. Even melee units can't hold them down. They take 2-3 hits and break out of the melee and kite you to death. In addition, with how large the maps are, it takes entirely too long to move most units to any given point on the map. With the obvious attempt at a fast paced, MOBA-like game they were trying to create here, they failed to realize that you can't have that without the ability to respond by moving units adequately. The low movement speed also facilitates the abuse of aoe spam (SM artillery). This brings me to my next point.
6. There is entirely too much aoe damage and that damage is way too high and comes from entirely too long a range. Or it comes in the form of an orbital bombardment that lasts for what seems like forever. It feels like Relic's solution to their terrible balance job was just introduce tons of ridiculous aoe damage. And whats worse, with things like artillery, units are generally so immobile that you have no real counterplay to those mechanics.
7. Obvious QOL changes that were never addressed: The targeting indicator in abilities skips all over the place. Abilities often won't activate on click even without enemy interference. Bugs galore. Convoluted minimap. Multiplayer interface terrible. Multiplayer experience gives no sense of progression. Overall clunkiness of gameplay.

I could go on but I'm likely approaching my character limit. Honestly if I were on Relic's design team and given how other RTS games have felt on release, I would not be proud of the product I just put out.