Ton of Dawn of War 2 info hits, game will use CoH engine

Bet PC Gamer's happy. Belgian magazine PC Gameplay's preview of Dawn of War 2's been internetalised properly now by the wacky kids at Neogaf, following a few sketchy details this morning and what looks like the game's first teaser movie. Here's what to expect from Relic's next-gen RTS.

• Uses the Essence 2.0 engine with Havok physics, all optimised for DX10 and multicore support.
• It looks great, think of the DoW intro but with a bit less polygons here and there (in terms of lighting and all that it looks almost exactly the same).
• Units also use CoH-like unit AI for awareness and pathfinding to find cover and such.
• While DoW 2 shares the same (upgraded probably) engine as CoH it won't be "CoH in space", while soldiers in CoH will ask themselves if flanking the enemy is the right option, in DoW2 it will be more like Space Marines asking themselves if they should use their jetpacks to jump over an Ork squad to attack them in the back. Different settings, different kinds of warfare.
• Preview only showed a destroyed city landscape, akin to DoW (but more detailed), other tilesets will offer deserts, jungles, mountains and other cities.
• Only the Orkz and Space Marines were revealed, more races on the way obviously and to be to revealed later this year (though how many isn't known).
• Co-op campaign for both the Orkz and Space Marines, apparently not for the other to-be-revealed races.
• More focus on making units and squads unique; every unit has got a name (at least in the campaign it seems), more details and more animations.
• Relic wants to give players rewards at the end of a mission like wargear (armor, weapons, rare objects); "Let's pimp out squads with cool stuff!", you will see these items in-game as well of course.
• You'll fight your way through the campaign with the same squads.
• You can't control more than six squads! I am not sure if this is campaign-only but the preview made it sound like it wasn't.
• The squads are going to be a lot more interesting than before though.
• A squad leader (one or several?) will need to survive if you want to complete a mission; you really have to look out for your squads and don't treat them like cannon fodder.
• There is a lot more interesting commentary from the units as well; if your SM commander is holding a Thunder Hammer f.e. then the opponent will specifically comment on that, Ork Warchief saying something like "Ooh, nice hammer, but mine is bigger!". The warchief will say something else if the commander doesn't have the hammer.
• The campaign lets Space Marines operate from a spaceship, you'll get a view of an underlying planet and you'll be able to choose from different missions (which are tagged with difficulty colours, green, blue and red).
• Certain reward items won't be useable at once in the campaign, so they'll be taken back to the SM spaceship for research.
• Dreadnought can now also trample Orkz.
• No sea or air units (though jetpacks are still in of course).
• Development team of 55 people has been working on it since September 2006.
• Release in early 2009 or later.