Unmitigated Evil

My immediate steam issues have been resolved. By me, not with any help or even input from valve. It is late, as in one in the morning, but I want to close this thread off.

The necessary action turned out to be to reinstall steam.
This required copying the steamapps folder to somewhere safe, then uninstalling steam, then going to steampowered and downloading the current copy of steam.msi, then reinstalling it, then loading the Dawn of War 2 disc, then letting it do its steam thing, then its windows live thing, then copying back the steamapps, then through steam reinstalling all of my existing games, then letting DoW2 do the actual install of the game.

A total of SIX HOURS to install a freaking game from a disc!!!!

Along the way both my main gaming account in steam and my backup account used to get support when my main account gets frozen, got frozen, as in steampowered doesn't recognise the passwords and does not acknowledge that there is an account with my email address. So I created another account and lo and behold it defaults to showing me my own issues list because all three accounts share the same email address. You know, the one that ten minutes before it was refusing to acknowledge as existing.

Anyhow, solved.

So far I am finding the games, Fear 2 and DoW2, so so. They are no quantum leap over their first incarnations. Graphics is a lot better in both, you could probably masturbate to the graphics of the female lieutenant in Fear2 they are so good. But playability is not noticeably better. Fear2 is not terrifying as Fear 1.1 was. I haven't played as much of DoW2 yet, strategically it seems to be an improvement, but I wonder if it will be much better than Dark Crusade and SoulStorm, there are a few tactical tweaks that are nice, AI intuitive taking cover is a lot better than Company of Fools (sorry, Heroes). You can carry an extra weapon in F2, and they have improved the guns a bit. I like the ability to level up squads in DoW2 and to be able to add equipment to them, but these are things that have been in other games for some time now.

They were both about $60 in SG, whereas they would have been about $80 in AU.

Anyhow, main issue solved for now. Probably re-occur in a month or two since valve refuses to provide sufficient servers for steam yet requires your install of steam to log onto the internet to validate itself regularly and frequently - even if all you want to do is play single player offline.

Will Star Dock succeed in their concept to counter steam?

Remember Star Dock?
They did Master of Orion.
It came out in 1, 2, & 3. And then Sin of a Solar Empire; kind of a MoO 4, but not as good.
MoO 2 was their pinnacle, 3 was total crap (like Dune; God Emperor, Dune 2 was good, Dune 2000 was the expected graphic improvement, but no game play change, God Emperor was crap).

I to bed now.