If you have enjoyed the previous Dawn of War titles, Dark Crusade is a must have.
The 2 new factions are both very fun and fit well into the balance of the game. The Necrons especially have a very unique play style, using only energy for all of their production. The capture points are used to increase the rate of production which can be very slow. As far as combat goes the Necrons feel much like you might think an undead army should. They slowly plod towards their much swifter enemies and proceed to walk through enemy fire until they are in range at which point they lay waste to most units. All of their infantry squads have a chance to resurrect in combat, that’s not to say when you kill off a squad it will resurrect, but its members might stand back up after being killed if the squad still exists. Their commander is very unique in that when he falls the stays at the location he dies. When you recreate him he stands back up. I found this very useful when my army was wiped out. I would wait a few moments for the enemy force to continue pushing while rebuilding my army and at an opportune moment resurrect my hero and have him use his mass resurrection ability on my fallen army. This allows the Necron player to pass the unit cap restriction and scars the hell out of players who fall for it.
The Tao are ranged gods, I would consider them silly when played correctly. Their base units, Fire Warriors can not fire on the move and are useless in melee, but when stationary have a much longer range than any other base units and deal devastating amounts of damage. Their hero and mechanical vehicles tend to have higher range and damage but much less ability to take hits in return. Their Kroot mercenary creatures are quite different being very much the opposite. This leads to the player having to have a lot of planning when heading into battle as your force is only effective when used thoughtfully, much like the imperial guard.
The game has gone through a lot of rebalancing, removing the previous strategies of swarming elite troops such as Assault Terminators and Prism Tanks. The New units in most cases seem to have a definite place in the game. All things considered with the changes the game plays even better than before and removes several of the I win strategies from the game,
The only gripe I have is with the computer's skirmish AI. They feel dummed down compared to previous versions leaving me playing Extreme computers and winning too easily in many cases. In DAWN: Winter Assault I would beat an Extreme computers maybe 1 in 5 tries possibly less, now its more like 3 out of 4 and I don't feel its due to increased skill on my part.