Defenders Advantage

Defender's Advantage refers to the well-known idea in RTS games that the player defending an attack at their base is at an inherent advantage stemming from the facts that: In Dawn of War, generally speaking, this advantage is reduced compared to certain other RTS games because units can reinforce in the field. While Dawn of War lacks walling off, in the Starcraft sense, it has negative cover.
 * 1) The attack is occurring at a minimal distance from the defender's production facilities and that the defender has additional time to produce units (due to map attack distances).
 * 2) There is less distance between the defending army and the production facilities, making multi-tasking perhaps easier.
 * 3) The defender has more vision in and around their base than the attacker.

Players in Dawn of War will rarely build structures near an ongoing combat if they can help it, as there is no value from adding to an existing wall off (as can happen in Starcraft).

Also, in Starcraft units often come out combat ready (assuming the relevant researches have been completed). In Dawn of War, many units depend upon special weapons or squad leaders to be combat effective after being produced, which increases the amount of time it takes to build an effective force. In this sense, ensuring that your units survive a combat (even if it is just one squad member) may give a greater reward in Dawn of War compared to Starcraft.

In the base game tiering up takes a significant amount of time. This means it must be done preemptively (often with a build order in mind) with a plan to stall for time. In the mod this is not nearly as necessary. Tiering up to gain access to new capabilities takes less time when preparing for an attack.

In the mod, there are additional factors:
 * The advantage from fortifications and structures remains, but there is additional nuance as structures help you take advantage of weapons that have a range greater than the sight radius of the armed unit.
 * Upgraded Listening Posts now provide most of your base vision, instead of structures. Thus destroying Listening Posts can remove the defender's base vision advantage.
 * In combat reinforcement penalties reduce the defender's advantage when their un-reinforced troops are under fire.
 * The harder counter system (compared to the base game) and the fact that special weapons do not suffer a penalty to build times in combat mean that adapting to an aggressive enemy feels fast in Dowpro.
 * Build time penalties for having multiple of the same unit on the field mean that the defender should favour unit mixing over massing of the same unit, as time becomes more important.
 * Armies with combat effective cappers have a production advantage, because they can build from their HQ in addition to other structure simultaneously when preparing to ward off an attack.