There's something oddly appropriate about the most famous and beloved 40k game being a janky melodramatic mess that was slowly iterated upon and improved in further releases, started getting meddled with towards the end by nonsensical demands for product tie-ins, and then was dropped unceremoniously for much worse sequels that failed to learn anything from the previous incarnations.

The game itself is alright now that it is safe from any further meddling but much like the voice lines that every 40k fanboy knows better than their own codex it wears out its welcome after only a couple repetitions.

The game is really not in good shape right now. Even though Dawn of War came out 2-3 years after Warcraft 3, it has a lot of shortcomings compared to it. The game can't go full screen in 1080p. You can't even change the controls. Even though the game has sold close to 10 million copies and is still selling, the developers can't even be bothered to make a simple update that would allow us to change the in-game controls and make the game run in full screen at 1080p. If you're still selling the game, at least show some respect for your players and make these simple QoL updates.

Ngl I’m generally really fucking shocked that I adore this game as much as I do, as a relatively new 40k fan and someone who isn’t the best at rts im utterly amazed by just how much love and care was put into this game back in 2004, including the expansions you get 9 whole factions to play with representing every major faction in the universe at the time (except tryanids) and it’s actually kinda sad knowing both dow 2 and 3 wouldn’t even come close to the number of factions this game had. Gameplay wise the game has a simple but addicting gameplay loop with a mix of base and army building with some additional mechanics depending on the faction. (the orks WAAAGH! meter for example) , the unit path finding is a little dumb but can be ignored after a while. All of the base factions all work off each over really well and have their own strengths and weaknesses. Space marines are the most standard faction with no game changing mechanics though they do get some pretty rad units and buildings farther up the tech tree. Orks are my favourite faction (both in the game and in the verse in general) and are easily the funnest race to play, the orks themselves are quite weak compared to your average astartes but make up for it in sheer numbers with you being able to amass tons of orky squads all ready to krump some humies. Admittedly I actually haven’t gotten to playing the other races yet but I’ll definitely give them all a shot at one point and update the review with my thoughts on them. Overall though this game surprised me when I gave it a go a few days ago, I had gave another relic rts game a shot a while back (coh 1) and didn’t really care for it so seeing this game casually become one of my favourite games of all time (I’m serious) and make me buy the expansions only a few days after buying the game itself really gave me a new view on rts games as a whole.

Dawn of War was my introduction to the Warhammer 40k universe and thanks to it I am now very into this series and it's lore. Dawn of War is a dated but charming strategy game with nice stylized graphics that still hold up relatively well. The story is lackluster and didn't really engage me full force, however it did invest me into this universe. I played through all the 11 campaign missions which took me roughly about 10 hours, and that was at a leisure filled pace exploring every corner of the map I could. The missions are very linear and repetitive offering little to no variety, forgettable characters, limiting maps, restricted troop types. But the missions isn't what the game is based around. And what is it based around you might ask? Well in my opinion two main things, first is the design of troops and locations. They are amazing, the world is so stylized and really cool looking. The gameplay however is without a doubt the main and best part of this game, the combat is so fun and engaging offering a variety of troops and weapons. It's awesome having an army of Space Marines all equipped with upgraded weapons, varying from rocket launchers to plasma guns running into battle while screaming, "For the Emperor!" As their bodies fly in every direction yet they still push onto the enemy, brutal killing animations begin as they tear apart their foes. From hand held chainsaws tearing open a man's chest to a giant robot throwing a man hundreds of feet away this game does not lack brutality or style. Overall this is a very fun strategy game and it's expansions improve upon it even more.

I'm not an RTS fan, by and large, but I enjoyed my time with Dawn of War. It's an accelerated version of classic RTS gameplay; you'll constantly be moving to capture resources and the enemy will be doing the same.

I played the campaign on the lowest difficulty setting, which you may think invalidates this review. As I said, I'm not an RTS guy; even the easiest difficulty usually challenges me in these games. However, I do think there's a bit of a difficulty issue here, because I managed to steamroll the campaign, only occasionally needing to use actual strategy to win.

With that said, the presentation is good, the story is classic 40K (FOR THE EMPEROR), and I can imagine that things really ramp up on higher difficulties, so if you're an RTS fan and you somehow haven't played this yet, give it a look.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/J1Z8B4HNRhA

Some genres of video games aren’t as widely appealing as others. As video games become more mainstream, developers seeking to capture the widest audience tend to create games in styles that are shown to be popular. The average game playthrough occurs on a couch with a controller or on a mobile device, which are scenarios that favours some genres over others. This was especially true prior to the dissemination of the home computer, but in the late 90s and early 2000s as computers were infiltrating homes worldwide, developers suddenly found that games within traditionally niche genres were becoming increasingly popular. Westwood Studios’ Command & Conquer, Ensemble Studios’ Age of Empires, and Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft and Starcraft series all saw enormous success, but their reach was always hindered by their complexity. Real Time Strategy games often require a lot from the player; it takes some attention to manage the military units, unit production, and resource gathering, while also trying to keep on top of enemy activity on a micro and macro scale, and they have to do it all without any pauses or dedicated thinking time. For most, the ability to manage so many things at once is a learned skill, and while it is possible to slam into a hard challenge repeatedly until success happens, having an entry level is a better way of keeping people around. And so, in 2004, after the relative success of their Homeworld games, Relic Entertainment released a game that’d break down the barrier to entry into the RTS genre with their 4th published title: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. Dawn of War adheres to many of the genre's defining attributes, but absent are a large number of complexities to avoid overwhelming their inexperienced players. Diverse economies, continuous production, unit micro, different terrain and elevation, and deep unit types and counters have been excluded from Dawn of War and yet the game has had a lasting popularity that sees many return to it frequently.

Whether the player chooses to play the campaigns or skirmish against CPUs or other players, they will be engaging in similar RTS matches that can last anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour. At the beginning of most matches the player will have a headquarters building and a single worker unit to get things moving, as well as a base quantity of the game’s two resources: blue Requisition and green Power. Requisition is necessary for almost every building, unit, and upgrade while Power is used less often and usually in smaller quantities. The headquarters can produce additional workers as well as scout units and some technologies, and in some scenarios destruction of the enemy’s HQ can be a victory condition. The worker unit can construct buildings that produce different unit types, buildings that can be used to research upgrades and other technologies, and buildings that generate Requisition and Power. Power Generators can be built within any area of influence, but Listening Posts that increase the production of Requisition can only be placed atop the control points dotted throughout the map, which must be captured by an infantry unit before the worker can build anything there. From then on, the game is a tug of war as each side attempts to push their enemies back, capture their control points from them, and prevent them from building more units to use to fight. There are infantry units, heavy infantry units, and vehicle units that all take increased damage from certain weapon types, though it never gets quite as specific as the unit matchups in Age of Empires 2. Vehicle units usually have a lot of health and armour, but equipping an infantry with an anti-tank weapon is a good enough solution in most cases. There is a morale mechanic which causes frightened units to be less effective in battle, but it rarely comes up and simply giving the unit a moment to rest totally resolves their morale qualms, though most units with broken morale are probably moments away from death anyway. Dawn of War released with 4 factions in 2004, and throughout the next couple of years an additional 5 factions were added to the game, leaving the final total at 9 unique factions to play. The expansions also added an additional scripted campaign, and two different 4X game modes which brings the total campaign playthrough time to about 50 hours provided the player only does one run through each of the 4X modes. My total play time ended up at around 100 hours after I spent a while learning to beat the highest CPU tier in skirmish mode and attempting a personal challenge I set for myself. I think the game was definitely worth this much time and attention, and encourage anyone who has never played Dawn of War or any RTS game at all to give it a shot. There are a few issues, quite a few actually, but they aren’t nearly enough to dissuade me from recommending the game. The rest of the video will be going into detail about my thoughts on the campaigns, each faction, the game’s balance, and some other technical stuff, so if you’d rather not have the campaigns spoiled as well as make those mechanical discoveries for yourself then this would be where you depart. Everyone else should get an extra can of Monster ready and make sure to remember that the setting is one of humanity’s bad endings.

Dawn of War’s first campaign introduced the world to the Blood Ravens, a Blood Angels successor chapter whose third company has been deployed to Tartarus to help defend the planet from Ork invasion. Thankfully there are no Genestealers this time. Captain Gabriel Angelos takes command from the planet’s Guardsmen forces with Brother Librarian Isador Akios accompanying him. The player is then introduced to the game’s mechanics in an especially friendly way as the Blood Ravens flush the Orks from the city. From then on the campaign meanders through the jungle as the Blood Ravens push the Ork attack back, each mission introducing more dangerous enemy units and the means to tackle them, though often the construction aspects of the game are minimised in favour of a more linear mission structure. And there are even boss fights! Kinda… They’re there. I personally much prefer this to the Age of Empires 2 campaigns, but the general absence of base building is an odd choice to make for the Blood Ravens’ adventure. It eventually becomes clear that some other force is present on Tartarus, and before long the Eldar make themselves known to the Blood Ravens in a surprisingly brutal ambush. Inquisitor Toth makes his way down to the planet, and if you know anything about the Inquisition in this setting you’ll probably have a hunch where this story is going. Toth orders Angelos to end his war against the Orks due to the imminent arrival of a tremendously destructive warp storm, but Angelos insists that something is amiss. The Eldar haven’t fled and the Orks seem more organised than they typically would be so something more sinister must be afoot. Toth reveals the Inquisition suspects there is a Chaos presence on Tartarus, and sure enough, at least one of the Blood Ravens have already been in contact with them. Isador had been communicating with a Chaos Sorcerer, who tempts the Librarian to unleash the demonic being trapped within the planet. I feel like the Sorcerer doesn’t really have to say too much to get what he wants and that Isador is a big dumb passive blob in this story until the moment he needs to go become evil. It’s a narrative that does the bare minimum to contextualise the battles despite the setting’s narrative richness - which is not unique to Dawn of War - but at least the voice acting is great.

The base game was released in 2004 and it still looks and sounds decent. Relic spared no expense on the presentation for the base game and it is still excellent today. Of course, there are other RTS games with more detailed models and textures, but the silhouettes were vitally important for the game and Relic nailed those designs. The soundscape is similarly excellent. RTS soundscapes can become horrific noise without a lot of attention laid onto them and Dawn of War manages to avoid slipping into such a state for the most part. The performances really stand out during the first campaign, though. Paul Dobson’s performance as Angelos is pretty legendary, and the swap to Scott McNeil’s Damian Thule as the default voice for the Space Marine Captain will never not be a tragedy. I am consistently impressed by the Orks’ voices, too. They sound just like real English people, and with the subtitles I could almost believe they were speaking an actual language. The voicework falls apart through the latter expansions, but I’ll mention that when it's relevant. The animation in Dawn of War is really solid at a base level, but the real marvel are the sync-kill animations. Whenever a model in a unit is killed in hand-to-hand combat, instead of the killed model simply falling over dead and the attacking model immediately switching to the next target, the two models play a unique animation that differs depending on who is involved in the fight. There are so many of these and they’re always cool to look out for in a battle. My favourites usually involve the Dreadnoughts and the Killa-kans tossing dudes across the map. While the majority of animations are great I do have to pick on the Sisters’ running animation. Maybe the plan was for them to have a higher movement speed than they do, but that left them with these wildly exaggerated motions for their running animations. Despite the little flaws like this, all these years later, the game is still well presented and definitely doesn’t look its age.

The passage of time hasn’t been particularly kind to Dawn of War’s controls, however, and its contemporaries receiving regular updates or HD and Definitive Edition re-releases has left Dawn of War feeling very uncooperative and awkward. The keybindings can’t be changed, there aren’t keys to quickly move around the map or create groups of units, the keyboard shortcuts mostly make logical sense but they’re not exactly ergonomic, and there’s a giant UI mass that takes up a large portion of the screen which is too easy to click on. Big UI artworks were the style at the time, but inter-faction keyboard shortcuts were at least consistent. Let’s just get into some examples. Here is the Space Marines’ builder unit, our friend the Servitor, and in order to have him build something for us we can either select the build icon with the cursor or we can press B. To create units of Space Marines we’d need a Chapel-Barracks, so we can select the Chapel-Barracks icon or press the C key, which seems simple enough. The Imperial Guard’s Techpriest Enginseer builds with B, followed by an I press which links to the Infantry Command building that can be used to create Guardsman units. Now, here’s the Chaos Space Marines’ builder unit, the lowly Heretic. In order to create a unit of Chaos Marines, we would need to build a Chaos Temple. So that’s a B for build and a C for Chaos Temple, right? Well, no. Actually, for Chaos Temple it’s E. There aren’t rules for which key does which action across factions and it’s up to the player to not only memorise the name of each of the different factions’ functionally identical buildings, but to also learn whether the faction’s buildings have their first letter assigned as their shortcut or some other random key instead. I stuck to clicking with the mouse for everything, which is slow and imprecise, but I think a standard shortcut layout would do a lot for speeding up the player. I really like the Definitive Edition of Age of Empires 2’s default keyboard shortcuts, but back in 1999 that game had the same layout issues as Dawn of War. Also, moving between the B and I keys with one hand is quite the stretch, but Dawn of War’s slower pace at least makes mouse only viable. Units have a long wind-up before they start actually attacking when commanded and they deal so little damage to each other that there’s no need to have the APM of a Korean infant, but I would’ve liked the option to pick up the pace somehow.

The faction that most embodies standing still, dealing little damage, and taking less are the Space Marines. Games Workshop’s favoured sons have a healthy supply of dudes in armour and rectangular tanks that most other factions can struggle to shift off of a control point. The basic Marines are well armoured and have a broad selection of weapons to tech into that can provide them decent anti-tank damage, effective anti-infantry damage, or some middling damage against the heavily armoured units. Their Predator tanks are similarly flexible and the standard Dreadnought can grind through most everything it can sink its claws into. But then the rest of the roster is almost purposeless, which isn’t too dissimilar to their tabletop range, actually. There are two different Land Speeders and neither of them do anything. There are two different Terminator units that require multiple buildings and technologies to be researched in order to build, and they’re almost as useless as the Land Speeders. The Marines cost 50 requisition per guy before any additional weapons, which is pretty expensive for a low damage bullet magnet, and while the Dreadnoughts are effective when they get going, if the enemy has a single anti-vehicle weapon the Dreadnoughts start melting. Ultimately, this means that the Space Marines are really good at holding objectives, but they’re quite ineffective at taking the points from enemies, which turns most scenarios into long grinds that drain the entire map of all resources. The player can focus on Scouts which are able to circumvent their lack of armour by being invisible, but most factions have a very cheaply accessed counter to invisible units that makes investing so heavily into Scouts an easy loss. With the Marines, the player can at least be confident they’re getting what they’re paying for.

Most RTS games have two major factors that the players must manage in order to be successful; they need to be able to control their army and build the correct units for the situation, and they need to manage their economy in order to continually produce units as necessary. Some economies are more complex than others. In Stronghold, for example, having a supply of wood isn’t enough to start recruiting archers, the wood needs to be fletched into bows and then the completed bows need to be taken to the armoury for distribution. Old School Runescape type of supply lines. Dawn of War is nearer the other extreme where the economy is almost entirely passive. Once a point is captured it begins generating requisition for the controlling player immediately and doesn’t stop until an enemy unit comes along and neutralises the point or it is fully depleted. The player can increase the rate at which requisition is extracted from a control point by building a listening post on it, and then researching technologies within the listening posts, but that’s all there is to gaining requisition. Starcraft’s minerals and gas require workers to collect and hand in the resources, the same is true in Age of Empires, even Pikmin requires a unit to take stuff back home in order to grow more units. Creating an effective economy is part of the skill set within most other RTS games, but it's also an important balancing system too. If one player’s army is too effectively beaten by their opponent’s, instead of fighting a battle and inevitably losing they can take their army into the enemy economy and start slowing down their income. With fewer resources coming in, the relative strength of each army balances back out again, offering an opportunity to make a comeback. This isn’t possible in Dawn of War. Once one player pushes their opponent back and manages to capture one of their control points, the battle is basically over. Winning a battle rewards more requisition, which can then be used to build a more powerful army, which wins subsequent battles, and the cycle continues until the game ends.

A faction that should probably have access to a third resource but doesn’t are the forces of Chaos. The Chaos army features the classic Chaos Space Marines and their warped machinery, as well as a smattering of Demons to summon in opportune moments. Chaos Marines aren’t nearly as customisable as their loyalist brethren, but they still get a few upgrades to make them more effective at anti-infantry damage if that’s what a player needs. The faction also has access to the Predator tank but they swap out the powerhouse Dreadnoughts for slightly less effective Defilers. They serve the same function, they’re just not quite as good at it which isn’t a problem for Chaos. Gone are the niche Land Speeders and Terminators, replaced by the much more applicable Hell Talon, Pink Horrors, and Obliterators. The Hell Talon’s bomb attacks are fairly effective against infantry units, though the investment rarely pays off, but the demons are significantly more worthwhile. After being recruited in a demon pit, Pink Horrors can be summoned anywhere on the map where the controlling player has vision and they immediately add their high damage attacks to any push already underway. The Horrors are quite fragile but they can sit safely behind a hefty blob of Marines and never have to risk being sucked back into the warp. You don’t have to be so subtle with the Obliterators. These guys teleport in, blast off a bunch of tank weaponry, and then they can easily withstand the minimal retaliation from whatever managed to survive their arrival. They’re very expensive, but Obliterators are a surefire way to win a game. And they’re recruited in the same building as the Demon Prince and the Bloodthirster, which are okay. I didn’t mention this before, but every faction has their own super unit that can be reasonably devastating if they show up at the right time. Chaos has 2, and both can be on the battlefield at the same time, which is a luxury no other faction enjoys. The Space Marine’s Land Raider is basically just a bigger, shootier Predator so it isn’t especially exciting or impactful. But turning a Lord into a Bloodthirster is cataclysmic. The arrival of a giant flying monster should be the punctual crescendo of any battle, and the Bloodthirster lives up to the expectations. They’re fast, they’re powerful, and they’re really hard to kill so they’ll smash through most of an enemy’s base before going down. The only bad things about the Bloodthirster is its odd low framerate arrival animation and that it makes the Demon Prince look weak. The Prince is on par with most other super units; he’s still great, but I’m picking the big red dude every time.

The Eldar also have a big red dude, though it's rare to ever see him. Likely the weakest faction in the game, the Eldar have a lot of different types of infantry that are far too costly for what they do and a selection of super flimsy vehicles to throw more resources away on. While Chaos and the Space Marines have their staple units to form a strong baseline for their armies, the Eldar can choose between squishy Guardians or weak and expensive Howling Banshees as their primary infantry unit. Moreover, in order to recruit most units from the Aspect Portal building, the player has to research a specific technology for each unit at each individual building. Rangers don’t require a technology to be recruited, but they take twice as long to build as the other units, they have a slow rate of fire, they do require a technology to go invisible, and they have a hard limit of 1 unit so you can’t make an army out of them. I don’t really know why since Space Marines can spam invisible sniper Scouts all day and there’s no limit to the number of Stealth Teams the Tau can have either, and their plasma weapons are way better than snipers. I did see some old forum comments saying that Eldar were total garbage without their Fleet of Foot tech researched and while that is true, the difference in effectiveness isn’t huge. Yeah, they can get to places faster, but they’re still wearing their cardboard armour they made from the leftover nerf gun packaging. The faction relies heavily on their Farseer casting their AOE spells to deal with enemy infantry pushes while the rest of the army hyper-focuses on countering vehicles or heavy infantry only. There aren’t enough Banshees in a squad to effectively trade against most infantry units, Dark Reapers are super vulnerable to being jumped on, as are Fire Dragons though they’re at least very effective at knocking out vehicles while Dark Reapers don’t often get a chance to shine. I guess that Relic wanted to keep players from reliving their tabletop experiences with Eldar, which I’m sure many people appreciate.

Something I’m also sure is popular with a lot of people are the Orks in Dawn of War because they’re a really wacky faction with a lot of cool toys for players to enjoy, and they’re actually good. The Orks forgo a typical scout unit in favour of sending big squads of Boyz out to grab objectives and win skirmishes with opposing scouts. Those squads of Slugga Boyz are also great at swarming enemies and forcing them to fight in hand-to-hand, allowing the Orks with the real firepower to blast the priority targets freely. There are redundancies in the roster, as well as a handful of weak units, but finding an effective strategy for the Orks is really easy. I haven’t quite figured out what Wartraks are for but they are the first to the fight, so they’ve got that going for them. Flash Gitz are just visible Tank Busters, the Mad Doc is worse than just pressing this little button, and Nobs are twice as expensive as Slugga Boys but they do the same thing. Killa-Kanz are handy in a pinch, and since most Ork play is heavily infantry based it’s unlikely an opponent is going to have many anti-vehicle weapons before the Killa-Kan shows up. And if your opponent is playing Eldar, that Killa-Kan’s going to be around for a good while before they can do anything about it. The Squiggoth is an incredible beast, and the disarray it brings is the epitome of the Ork way. Just explosions and earthquakes and big laser beams flying everywhere, it’s perfect. Everything recruiting from 2 buildings also helps to keep production on track. No resources are wasted trying to get niche units up and running, but the Ork unique population mechanic prevents them from snowballing too hard. Almost every one of their buildings has guns on it too so not only do they get the original benefits of the buildings, they also get a base that nearly defends itself. Very fun faction, and 3 out of 4 being enjoyable to play is great.

A year after Dawn of War’s original release, the game’s first expansion made its way onto store shelves. Winter Assault removed a fair amount of the customization options that were available to every faction in the base game, but these changes also helped to give each unit a more pronounced identity which is fine. The expansion also included a new campaign with two different adventures, as well as enabling a new faction for players: the Imperial Guard. There is a little taste of the Guard’s unit roster in the base game, but there are a bunch of new units and the campaign is entirely new. Players are given the option to pursue the side of Order or Disorder, Order being the combined Imperial Guard and Eldar campaign, and Disorder being Chaos and Orks. The campaign follows each side’s attempt to locate and gain access to a Titan, a warmachine with devastating power and far more than any of the armies present could ever hope to combat. The Imperial Guard are led by General Sturnn, again voiced by Paul Dobson, although this time with an inexplicable American accent. The Imperial Guard are commissioned to locate the Titan and ensure the safety of a crew who would pilot enough of the Titan to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Meanwhile, the Eldar are searching for the Titan in order to syphon some power from it into their own weapon so they might defeat their unnamed ancient enemy and escape. Naturally, the forces of Chaos and the Orks just want the weapon for the weapon’s sake but have determined that neither army is prepared to defeat the Imperial Guard and the Eldar simultaneously so they begrudgingly work together a little. Most missions involve switching from one separated army to the other in order to complete the current objective, usually at the half-way point, but this idea culminates during the penultimate mission where the player is free to switch back and forth as desired. Only one faction can actually enter the final battle, though, and it is way harder to get through as the Guard. The Eldar just have to get one unit through the gate at the end of the map, Chaos and the Orks have a similar goal, but the Guard have to babysit a CPU controlled Land Raider as it slowly makes its way to the gate. The player can kind of manipulate the route the Land Raider takes, but for the most part the Space Marines will want to drive directly through all of the enemy bases on the map. Also, there are barely any control points to gain requisition, and building a headquarters isn’t allowed. I don’t know why Relic decided this was how the campaign should end, but maybe they really didn’t like Dobson’s delivery during the final mission so they wanted to hide it at all costs. That final mission is an effective climax and a great advertisement for Dark Crusade. Activating the Titan in any way awakens the Necrons and they begin their slow march toward eliminating whatever witless creatures have sprung their trap. They don’t break out their full lineup, but the classic warriors and the formidable monoliths are more than enough to put some strain on whatever army managed to make its way into the final mission. But with the Titan claimed and the Necrons held off, the Winter Assault concludes.

While they do borrow a few things from the base game factions, the Imperial Guard are surprisingly unique in their playstyle, for better and for worse. Much like the Orks, the Guard don’t waste any time with scout units, instead they make use of their signature guardsmen. Guardsmen are not a premium unit by any measure, but they are the faction’s only option for massing infantry. Their two other infantry options each have a hard limit of one unit, which is very understandable for the Ogryns, but the Karsikans being so hamstrung makes little sense. Guardsmen and Karsikan units are both equipped with the same lasguns, and while the Karsikans are significantly more accurate, they’re still carrying laser pointers to a bar brawl on Cybertron. Guardsmen fulfil their tabletop role faithfully in Dawn of War; they use their bodies to jam up enemy vehicles while the big guns do the heavy lifting. It does make the faction acutely vulnerable to jump units, and while they can shove enemies off of objectives fairly effectively, actually capturing them is a challenge. Basilisks are excellent at clearing an objective from a safe distance, but eventually some guardsmen are going to have to run over and hope nobody notices. The Imperial Guard also borrow the Eldar’s requirement to research a specific technology in each production building before they can produce certain units, but in the Guard’s case this limitation isn’t too bothersome. Vehicles don’t come out until at least the mid-game, well after the initial skirmishes for objectives that makes Eldar unit research so painful. It only becomes an issue for Guard in the rare butt-clencher end-game situation in which a pair of Leman Russ tanks or a Baneblade are needed to tilt the scales for a win. Having to research these techs wouldn’t be an issue at all if there were a hotkey to immediately select buildings of a certain type, but that’s an improvement for Dawn of War Definitive Edition. My main complaint about Guard is that they play too much like the tabletop. The game already generally lacks the movement and attack speed for fun micro plays, and the Imperial Guard take that limitation to its extreme. It’s really well designed, but it just isn’t a playstyle that I enjoy.

In October 2006, another year after the last Dawn of War release, the Dark Crusade was added to the game. The second expansion brought two new factions as well as an entirely new 4X game mode in place of the scripted campaign, allowing for more flexibility in the outcome of each individual battle instead of requiring the player to win every match. The arrival of the Necrons and Tau bring some new playstyles to the battlefield, and there are new, longer term considerations to be made regarding the 4X campaigns. Every faction has a specified fortress region on the surface of Tartarus from which they launch a single army to battle for control of the other regions on the planet. Factions gain benefits for each region under their control, ranging from an elite unit joining their main army, to buffs affecting build speed and requisition earning, to the ability to teleport around the planet and attack anyone anywhere. Capturing an enemy’s fortress territory doesn’t provide any benefits to the capturing player, but it is the only method of eliminating others from the game. Movements into enemy territories are always considered “attacks” and the battles are resolved on an RTS map determined by which region the battle is occurring within, similar to the Total War games, although the world map isn’t nearly as big as something like Warhammer 2’s Immortal Empires. Dark Crusade campaigns can be over within 10 hours, which is a far cry from the hundreds of hours someone could put into one Immortal Empires playthrough. There is, however, the issue of the map being overcrowded, which compounds into the problem with automatically resolved battles seemingly being decided at random, or at least having a heavy bias toward some factions over others. There are 7 factions battling over 24 total territories, with many strongholds clustered on the eastern side of the continent. If the player starts out west, it’ll be very unlikely they’ll ever encounter the Space Marines or the Imperial Guard before the Necrons wipe them from the planet. And, since the humans built almost all of the infrastructure on Tartarus, that’ll mean the Necrons will quickly have access to some of the stronger 4X power-ups way before anyone can contest them, transforming the inevitable advance of death itself into an inter-continental skeleton gender reveal party for twins. Before long the entire map will be controlled by only a couple of factions and the battles start to become a bit repetitive. I had to fight the Orks off in the same map 11 times in the Tau campaign because they wouldn’t leave my territory alone and just kept attacking. And then there are the stronghold battles. These scenarios are all unique, usually involving an enemy that has multiple armies and a special mechanic that makes the battles a more formidable challenge. These are generally done really well, but it’s where the worst voicework in the game comes from. I don’t know if it’s racist, I just know it’s horrible. They didn’t change the guy for Soulstorm either and I have no idea why they wouldn’t. But then these scenarios and the opportunity to listen to this incredible voicework are limited to the strongholds that are still with their original owners whenever the player finally makes their attack. If another faction has already come along and eliminated Chaos from their stronghold, there’s no way to play that scenario during the current campaign. As a whole, though, the 4X mode offers a little more weight to whatever skirmish games the player might have been playing otherwise, and some interesting new scenarios to engage with, but there are a few too many imbalances that prevent it from being as dramatic as the scripted campaigns. Fortunately, the factions included in the expansion are well worth the price of admission.

The Necrons function quite differently to the rest of the factions in the game, both economically and militarily. Their economy is entirely Power-based, they don’t use Requisition at all. This shifts their priorities away from the control points and encourages a more aggressive opening, which is also facilitated by Necron Warriors having no cost to recruit and their Lord being able to teleport across the map as part of their standard abilities. If the opponent manages to hold out through the early pressure, the Necrons lose a lot of momentum which doesn’t come back until they finish constructing their Summoning Cores and Obelisks, and then the factory can start churning out units again. The Necrons can capture control points, and they have to in order to build Obelisks, but the only unit capable of capturing points are their worker scarabs. This inflexibility combined with all of their units recruiting from the HQ building tests the player’s sequencing skills rather than their ability to manage multiple things happening simultaneously. How many worker scarabs should the player recruit at the start? When do scarabs need to be pulled away from constructing power generators in order to go and capture an objective? Are there any military units nearby to protect those scarabs moving out onto the map and is there time to make some? It’s a significantly more intricate economy than any other in the game, and it was achieved by removing one of the two resources and all of the different buildings units are recruited from. I like this a lot but I really wanted it to extend to the army too and it just doesn’t. Necrons have a single vehicle in Dawn of War, which is true to their tabletop range at the time, but Relic weren’t opposed to including Battlefield Gothic units or units that never received an official model so there’s no reason the Necron croissants didn’t make it in. The flying scarab swarms the Tomb Spider spits out aren’t a particularly interesting substitution, nor is the Tomb Spider’s combat capability in general. There are also the Wraiths; I have no idea what they’re for but the CPU loves them and will consistently throw a bunch of them out to die for no observable benefit. Immortals and Flayed Ones are far too squishy to be regularly useful, though keeping some units busy for a moment by summoning a squad of Flayed Ones on top of them can result in some breathing time here and there. I just wish it wasn’t possible to shoot at them while they’re climbing out of the ground. The Destroyers all come out way too late, and while they are strong, the 2 C’Tan shards only being temporary elevations of the Lord is kind of disappointing. Everyone else gets to keep their big guy around, but the Necrons aren’t allowed. They do have the Monolith, once the thing finally gets going, and that’s pretty cool. It’s very slow, though, so it’s unlikely to be the unit that destroys an enemy base. At the end of the day, most mid and late game play for Necrons revolves around Pariahs, which are very good, but an army of only Pariahs isn’t especially exciting to play with.

Another fan favourite faction, beloved for their highly interactive tabletop gameplay, the Tau were introduced in Dark Crusade and they are remarkably well-balanced. They’re a much more standard faction than the Necrons, although they lack a proper super unit and instead have a collection of other power units that fill the role. I quite like playing as the Tau, mainly for the Stealth teams. Invisible units become irrelevant toward the middle of most matches but in the very early game they’re quite powerful, and Stealth teams can be equipped with plasma guns for punching through vehicles and buildings without having to tech into some other unit, giving them a purpose as the game goes on. Taking advantage of invisibility is one of Tau’s best strengths, but their only method of countering invisibility is to recruit Vespids which are horrible. Aside from the literal dinosaur, all of the non-Tau members of the roster opt out of wearing any armour and strangely default to hand-to-hand combat instead of using their admittedly underwhelming guns. As cheap as the Kroot might be, they still take up population space and do next to nothing with it. Fire Warriors are just as fragile, but their pulse rifles have some ridiculous range allowing them to sit a screen away and shoot from safety. The Drone units occupy a similar role to the Necrons’ Wraiths, but as part of the mix-and-match customisation of the Commander, the Drones at least serve some kind of purpose. It is possible to recruit a tank that just spawns units of Drones, but I only ever recruited that by accident. That tank and the Sky Ray have similar icons and I was definitely trying to recruit a Sky Ray. These things are my favourite vehicle unit in the game, maybe even my favourite unit to play with too. Sky Rays have similar long range attacks to the Fire Warriors, but they also have an upgrade that allows them to fire all of their missiles at once. It’s incredible. The Tau don’t have many elite units locked behind technologies, but they have to build one of the obscure buildings to get them onto the battlefield which makes those units kind of inaccessible. There is also the issue of being locked into 1 of 2 possible unit paths, but both choices are good. One building enables Crisis Suits and Hammerheads, while the other enables Kroot Hounds and Krootoxen, and the choice comes down to whether the player wants bigger guns or some sort of tanky alien critters. The Knarloc is available no matter which, and holding enemies in place is redundant when they’re dead so I favoured the Crisis Suits and Hammerheads despite the limits on total numbers of these units. Overall, while the Tau might be a more standard faction and the Necrons much more experimental, I think the new playable aspects introduced in Dark Crusade are very good, though the common knowledge that “you get Dark Crusade for the campaign” is most certainly not true.

The other half of that aphorism is that “you get Soulstorm for Ultimate Apocalypse '' and while I won’t be playing the mod, I am going to endorse that part of the saying. Released in 2008, 4 years after the base game and less than a year before Dawn of War 2, Soulstorm includes two new factions, a new axis, and a new 4X game mode. The final expansion was not developed by Relic Entertainment, instead the bulk of the expansion was developed by Iron Lore Entertainment, a studio founded by ex-Ensemble Studios staff which was the studio behind the first three Age of Empires games. It seemed like a great partnership for Relic, but Soulstorm is a bit of a mess compared to the previous expansions. There are a few issues with the presentation, like the strange running animations the Sisters of Battle use, but the real meat of the issue is technical. Soulstorm has nowhere near the level of polish that the rest of the game has, and as a result I found it extremely difficult to even get halfway through a Soulstorm campaign, let alone finish one. It is very fortunate that there was such a strong following for the game, because while Relic did try to patch up the game in the months after its release, it was the fan patches that really saved the day. A little ways into a Dark Eldar campaign, I began to be unable to enter the RTS mode. The game consistently crashed upon loading in, even after assuming the save was bugged and starting over. The new setting and inclusion of the two new factions doesn’t really offer much more than what was available in Dark Crusade, and the choice to remove the models on the planet map in favour of these coloured pins makes the 4X mode that bit less exciting. The ratio of territories to factions is still off, and the starting positions are much worse than they were before. Everyone is now spread out across a handful of planets, with the Dark Eldar and the Tau placing their main bases on moons that should be way harder to attack than they are. Travel between planets is much less flexible than I’d like, so what seems to end up happening is that each planet is fought over individually until one faction wipes out the other, and then warding off alien landings becomes the majority of the battles. The Soulstorm campaign is much more like playing skirmish than the Dark Crusade campaign was, and that really isn’t a substitute for a proper, scripted adventure. At least the new factions are fun.

The new Soulstorm factions aren’t anywhere near as experimental as the Necrons were, but they do both have some cool new mechanics on top of the game’s more standard faction style. The Dark Eldar kind of have their Power From Pain mechanic, called Soul Powers, from which they can gain some buffs like the ability to see invisible units, they can also dish out some debuffs to nearby enemies, or use the points on AoE attacks to chunk some unsuspecting victims’ health. Soul Essence drops from units getting got, and the Dark Eldar are no strangers to both sides of that situation. Armour is blasphemy to the Dark Eldar; the only reason one might wear something into battle is if it has a chance of wounding someone, and whether that someone being wounded is a friend or foe is not particularly important. Other than the Talos engine, the entire roster is killed by a stiff breeze, but they complement that fragility by also being equally dangerous. Kabalite Warriors and Scourges are some of the most effective infantry units in the game, especially once the number of Scourges hits a critical mass. Wyches are totally unarmoured, but good use of their Combat Drugs can totally swing any fight in their favour, and if a well-accompanied Archon gets the buff then stuff will start melting. Raiders and Ravagers are decently effective anti-vehicle units, and the Talos is a lot more than just a floating punching bag. Hellions are a little too true to their tabletop renditions, they do basically zero damage and drop dead from a single kick to the shin, and while the Reaver Jetbike models have always looked cool they too are similarly useless. The Dark Eldar also build strangely, though not for any real benefit. Their worker unit doesn’t have to work on a building in order for it to be constructed, once they lay down the foundations the building constructs itself and the worker can leave to do something else. The difference between this and having the worker work on the buildings as normal is that the Dark Eldar can have buildings activate in a large batch rather than turning on one at a time, and it frees up time for the worker to go around collecting Soul Essence points. The buildings all still cost requisition, though, so the main limiting factor isn’t different. You aren’t going to have all of your buildings up sooner because of this mechanic. All this does is move the worker away from where the notification says they’ll be. A building finished, time to task the worker to something else. Where’d he go? The Dark Eldar don’t really have a super unit, I mean, they do but it isn’t noticeably different to a normal Ravager. The Dais of Destruction is too flimsy to send into the fray like a Land Raider or a Bloodthirster, but the Dark Scythe can put a decent dent into almost anything. They’re a solid faction, and I think Iron Lore did quite well to give the Dark Eldar an identity despite being backed into a bit of a corner.

The Adepta Sororitas are the final faction, though the game and I will be referring to them as the Sisters of Battle as that is what they were called before Games Workshop’s lawyers remembered that trademarks were a thing. The Sisters were the last army I played before quitting tabletop, and unfortunately the thing I liked most about the army is missing from Dawn of War, although pre-moving in an RTS would be hard to implement. Similar to the Dark Eldar, the Sisters of Battle have a third resource they can use for buffs and debuffs, although they need a unit to actually cast Faith powers. These powers aren’t especially impactful, and I found I’d often forget to even use them due to how niche some of them are. Instead, the proper identity of the faction is fire and melta weapons. Everyone can have a flamethrower and even the turrets shoot fire instead of bullets. It’s functionally the same, but with an added morale debuff that sometimes comes up. Everyone also gets a meltagun which are premier anti-tank weapons. Every squad sergeant can have a melta-pistol, every member of a Celestian squad can have a meltagun or even a multi-melta, and some of the tanks are zooming around the battlefield equipped with armour piercing laser beams. Honestly, the faction’s roster could stop there and I’d be happy but then Seraphim are also cool, and everyone loves the Exorcist. I don’t really understand the naked people part of the army. Repentia and Penitent Engines are just unusual ways to execute someone, and the Death Cult Assassins come out far too late for their invisibility to be effective. Of course, the big star is the Living Saint. Summoning a resurrecting, 9 foot angel onto the field to slice through most anything and fly around an opponent’s backline is one of those great joys that can only come from a 40k property. She contrasts so well against the hulking monsters the other factions bring to the fight, and her animations are much more meticulously crafted. It’s a shame the rest of the expansion wasn’t as well formed as this one unit.

As a whole, I think every faction is engaging enough and fits into their own niche within the game without too much overlap, though naturally I do have my favourites. But since I didn’t outright despise playing any particular faction, and for my own investigation, I decided to undergo a little challenge. I wanted to complete a fighting game style “Iron man” challenge against the highest tier of CPU. If you’re unfamiliar, a fighting game Iron man challenge requires the player to win a match with every character consecutively without losing. In something like Street Fighter 2, this kind of challenge isn’t too bad, you only need to learn a few things and the full run doesn’t take too long. It gets a bit more strenuous in games like Tekken 7 or Smash Ultimate, where completion probably requires an entire day at the very least. In order to complete this challenge in Dawn of War, I had to prepare a few things. Firstly, I had to become familiar with each faction and their strengths. It wasn’t going to be possible to play infantry only Imperial Guard and expect to win so I spent some time figuring out some builds. I then had to learn what the CPU was capable of and what kind of cheats it had. The Insane CPU gains resources 40% faster than the player, giving it an army out on the map around the time the player has likely finished capturing their natural control points. The CPU rarely aggresses with this advantage, however, and instead it’ll sit in its base and wait to launch a counterattack. Now, colloquially in games we like to refer to a computer controlled player as an “AI”, mostly because a CPU is a computer component and for all we know there could be an element of intelligence involved in the computer player’s actions, but the CPU in Dawn of War is not an AI. It doesn’t make choices and adapt, it’s more like the enemies in Space Invaders. After a while I did begin to learn what the CPU would do and when, and I learned to play with that information in mind. Eventually, I knew to counter the Insane CPU’s strategy with every faction and I did manage to complete the challenge, but I don’t think what I learned to do amounts to good gameplay generally. In a lot of cases, the best course of action is to send scouts to intercept enemy scouts capturing their natural control points to slow down their income. If this interference fails then the game is basically over. Without the ability to out-micro the enemy - because there isn’t really micro in Dawn of War - the player has to win big fights with a 40% resource deficit. It’s just not going to happen. So the game kind of devolves into early pushes that must never lose momentum, and the big fancy units that everyone wants to play with are relegated to destroying the production buildings of an already defeated enemy. The Hard CPU at least gives up after a while and just stops producing units so it’s at least possible to see the Bloodthirster rip a guy apart. Insane CPU really pushes the mechanics to the limit, instead of the player, and I’d imagine it’s at this point where most players move on to a different game.

So it’s a gateway game; once you’ve played it enough the limitations start to hamper any further enjoyment and at that point most people go elsewhere, occasionally returning to reminisce or to see if it was as restricting as they remembered. Back in 2008, Dawn of War players had the sequel to look forward to, Red Alert 3 dropped in October, and the Kingdoms expansion had just released for Medieval 2: Total War. The RTS market would wither away into the 2010’s but things have been looking up recently. Age of Empires 4 released just last year, and the team is also dropping expansions for every other game in the series too which is ridiculous. Warhammer 2 just finished, and Warhammer 3’s Immortal Empires campaign should be on the horizon if it isn’t out already. There are also indie offerings like Warparty and this cute little project called King of the Universe, though the latter likely isn’t going to be hosting a competitive scene any time soon. Dawn of War acting as a tutorial for competitive titles like Age of Empires 2 and Starcraft 2 is also a great reason to play Relic’s game. The learning curve for Starcraft is quite steep, so having that basis in an aesthetically similar game should smooth things out a bit. There are still a few people hanging on to a competitive Dawn of War 2 scene, though again, I think those players are in it for the love of the setting and not so much for the mechanical complexity. In any case, the first Dawn of War is absolutely a worthwhile game to put some time into, and I hope it continues to foster an interest in the RTS genre going forward.

While it might not be the most intricate, or the most flashy, or possess the busiest multiplayer scene, Dawn of War is still a fantastic game and it achieves everything it set out to do. The feel of the tabletop game is quite pronounced and the setting has only ever been captured as well a couple of times since. Naturally, most 40k super fans have already played Dawn of War, but for those of us with a passing interest in the setting or the RTS genre, there’s no better place to start. And there are plenty worse. After all of this, though, I don’t think I can definitively say if Dawn of War is the greatest gateway game because I didn’t play any others. Kind of comes with the territory of trying to determine whether it’s the best or not, but I didn’t and that’s the video. If there’s another game that eases the player into a complex genre better, I haven’t played it yet. See you next time when I return to Zenozoik.