Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War Walkthrough

First, to the best thing about this game: the battles! Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War is all about the battles, as most RTS games are, but this game makes a stunning, successful effort to make you interested again. I was never bored with watching the combat and not having 50 different abilities to have to choose from to utilize against my opponents was a real plus. You don't build single units, you build squads. These squads can be reinforced during combat once they take losses. And you will take losses! I was horrified when I fought my first Squiggoth. This thing is absolutely huge and has to be seen to be believed. I always wanted a real titan-like creature to battle in a game and I found it. It took a huge beating before it went down and it managed to kill over 20 soldiers before it fell.

Second, the way you gather resources is quite different. You don't have a bunch of worker units which go and harvest some rare material and transport it to your base, you have two resources which are generated automatically. But it's not quite so simple as the game simply giving you resources. To gain the primary resource, known as requisition, you must establish a foothold on the various types of structure on the map which generate it. Your troops must capture these structures (only some units of each race can capture) and protect them to gather the resources that they generate. The second resource, power, is simply gathered by building your race's power structure which generates a set amount. The more you have, as it is also with strategic points, the faster you gain resources.

Naturally, as with other RTS games, you have a limit on the number of units you can produce. This is fine and makes players have to consider how they will spend their points. Players won't be mass producing a certain unit type because of this and it's all the more important that you keep a balanced force. Also, mass production of defensive structures is quite useless in this game as the buildings aren't very strong and will crumble rapidly under a well-organized assault.

There aren't a vast number of units to be produced in this game, but none of them are useless. Building simple infantry is a very wise decision as they are cheap, quick to produce and are often specialized to take out a certain type of foe. Yes, we're talking paper-rock-scissors a bit here, but it's not quite that simplistic. Every race has some unit or another (some many) that can be upgraded with a special weapon. I'll use the Space Marines as an example here: you build a unit of marines, they have 4 possible weapon upgrades. You could upgrade them with four heavy bolters and mow down any infantry that is foolish enough to cross them, add on a missile launcher or two to help take down vehicles they encounter, equip one with a plasma blaster to tackle the heavy infantry you're likely to encounter or even give them flamethrowers to break the enemy's morale. The mix and match possibilities in Warhammer 40k is very cool. Instead of having a horde of units for you to choose from in your assault they've managed to make most (not all) of the units useful in combat.

I've mentioned the flamethrower and how it lowers enemy morale, so I'll attempt to explain morale and its affects in combat. If you've played Medieval: or other Total War games you probably already have an idea of this. If your units' morale reaches 0 they will be considered broken and their combat effectiveness will plummet. You can use the commander's rally ability to rejuvenate the troops' morale and regain their power or let it heal naturally as the troops stop being so damn afraid. This debilitating effect is not only caused by the sniper rifle but by many other types of weapons. One of the coolest is the sniper rifle which scouts (of the space marines) can wield. They attack out of sight and kill enemy units, the enemy takes a morale hit. That's a good time to rush your units into combat with flamethrowers and really scare the bastards. My favorite morale-breaking unit type is definitely artillery.

Artillery has one of the coolest effects in this game. When a shell detonates near a mass of infantry they will fly off in different directions. This gives the weapon a sense of power. It may not cause so much damage to them but it will surely scare them and temporarily take them out of the fight. This awesome detail isn't limited to explosions. Gun-barrels flash with beautiful light as your infantry mow down their opponents. Another cool effect is that some of the units in the game have special animations they use when they slay an opponent. The Orks' Killa Khan will impale an enemy and toss him aside. This is very, very cool to watch. This type of variety makes the battles in this game worth watching! Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War has some of the most beautiful graphics and detailed animations of any computer game I've ever seen.