Warhammer® 40,000: Dawn of War® II Chaos Rising

Chaos Rising and by extension, Dawn of War II was enjoyable right up until the Capital Defence mission. That's where the game completely lost me. The difficulty spike feels absurd for how early it appears in the campaign. You're bombarded with wave after wave of enemies, your squads are constantly stretched across the map, and you're expected to micromanage everything at once. Sure, spamming Tarantula turrets to deal with the endless Chaos Cultists while letting the Devastator Squad handle whatever else came your way was enough to get through the opening waves, but the rest of the mission is just ridiculous. Speaking of the Devastators, I never figured out how to keep them where I wanted them. The moment anything reached them in melee, they'd abandon their firing position and march towards the enemy as though they were close combat specialists instead of a heavy weapons squad. In the time it takes your to check on your Assault Marines, your Devastators were somehow on the wrong side of the sandbags again. The mission also feels like it arrives before you have the wargear to deal with it properly. Even importing a save from the base game, my equipment simply wasn't up to the task. Melta bombs barely seemed to scratch the Predators that appear, and by the time this mission unlocked I still hadn't found any decent heavy weapons for Avitus beyond a Plasma Cannon. Yes, Chaos Rising changes the campaign so failing a mission no longer advances the day, meaning you can keep retrying it until your squads level up and the RNG loot system eventually hands you better gear. Mechanically, that's more forgiving than the original campaign, but it completely destroys the immersion. We've just watched the palace collapse, yet apparently we're rewinding time to try again. If none of that happened, why have my squads suddenly gained experience? And where did this new loot come from? More importantly, I don't want to beat a mission by farming retries until random drops or extra levels make it manageable. The mission feels like it demands one very specific squad composition and loadout, and that's simply not how I want to play. I don't enjoy being railroaded into discovering the one "correct" build just to progress. The corruption mechanic was another chore. I don't want to feel forced into bringing the Scout on certain missions just to manage corruption. That's the opposite of fun. I want to use the squads I enjoy, equip them with the wargear I've chosen, and find my own solution to the challenges the game presents. The rest of the campaign generally allowed for that, but Capital Defence didn't. In the end, I uninstalled the game and deleted my save. There's a reason I hadn't revisited Dawn of War II all these years. For me, the original Dawn of War and its classic base-building RTS gameplay remain far superior.