Buildings are no longer a focus of the game, in fact with the beta the only building available to you is an energy generator.  Once you have captured and upgraded an energy point, you can then build up to three generators.  You don’t really control the creation of them other than spending the resources, once you click on their icon they drop in from the sky or appear and a few seconds later they are up and running in effect increasing the output of the energy point.  Some of the commanders can also build or place building like objects around the battlefield such as gun turrets, tunnel entrances, and waygates.  There is a tech tree, or rather a unit tree, but it is not building based.  Each advanced level of the tree costs a specific amount of requisition and energy, and has a specific research time.  Researching advanced levels generally has two results, it allows you to build additional unit types, but it also opens additional options for lower level units allowing you to increase their abilities or customize them for other roles.

While you can see some similarity between the victory conditions from DoW to DoW II in playing the game it becomes evident quite quickly that the feel of the game is very different.  The maps tend to be smaller with resources nodes being located relatively close to each other.  This tends to create a very fast-paced game.  Gone are the days of capturing the one or two resources close to your starting point and building up a horde of troops before rolling to meet your opponent for the first time.  In addition, resources tick relatively slowly and units are expensive, though costs do vary by army type.  This creates a need to grab and hold as many resources points as you can, often causing a confrontation with the enemy quite early.  Of course focusing only on resources can also lose you the game if your opponent captures victory points and depletes your tickets past recovery. 

The layout of the maps also add to the pace of the game, though they are littered with piles of rubbish, trees, brush, buildings, and barbwire, the number of chokepoints or bottlenecks are very limited.  This means that setting up a defensive line to prevent the enemy from getting behind you can be difficult, not to mention several of the commanders have the ability to teleport right past those lines.  There were plenty of times where I thought my line was secure and pushed forward only to find that the majority of the enemy ended up behind me capturing points out from under me depleting my ability to deal with them.