RTS Revisiting Dawn of War

[Lyric Suite]

Haven't played this game in eons. I used to play it all the time with friends so it was a lot of fun, not sure if the multiplayer is still up.

I just finished the main campaign for nostalgia's sake and it was as crappy and as piss easy (even on insane) as i remember it lmao. Nice voice acting though.

Anyway, i noticed there are some big mods out there and i was thinking of trying them. Unification for instance seems interesting. The improved AI in particular makes me want to try it as skirmishes in this game just don't it for me (i can really dance around the AI at this point) but i'm not entirely sure i want to go back to multiplayer (assuming it is still up).

Ho, btw, any way to fix the fucking UI on widesceen resolutions? Either i suck at google or nobody fixed this which seems strange considering all the big mods out there. Surely if you can add tons of units and factions you can fix the fucking UI, right?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

best dawn of war is vanilla 1.0.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I can beat vanilla with my hands tied behind my back and shoved up my anus.

I just noticed there's an AI mod for Soulstorm skirmishes i think i'll try that first.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Well, so far i got the skirmish AI mod, the redux mod, and unification all in one folder. Can switch to any of them as i want. Pretty neat. Haven't tried the AI mod yet as i'm doing the Winter Assault campaign now (which is slightly more challenging than base game).

So far so good. Unification UI art is ugly as shit, and caught one bug with Redux (one of the unit icons is not updated). I hate this shit. Fucking modders.

So far so good except i can't stand the stretched out UI. Is there really no way to make the game play at 4:3? The Redux mod actually fixes the UI (albeit with its own version). The Unification guys apparently couldn't bother to do that despite spending hundreds of hours on their mod. Fucking hell.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Wow, Winter Assault is pretty good so far. Too bad it is so short.

Managed to run DC/Soul Storm at 4:3 by creating a custom resolution in windows. Bleh.

This unification shit seems a bit of a clusterfuck despite the amount of work they put into it:



Hardly suited for multiplayer but seems fun for singleplayer assuming the AI is as good as they say it is (i guess i'll see once i get down playing it).

 

[Zibniyat]

Soulstorm is awful. More flashy, excessively so, and with HP-bloat all over the place.

The original DoW is great, with WA and Dark Crusade it becomes excellent. Soulstorm ruins it all, also muh Sisters of Battle and other cringe factions are retarded.

 

[markec]

When Winter Assault was released Imps were so op it was insane. Only to be nerfed into oblivion later on, still my favorite faction and wins with them really felt satisfying.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I think visually they look rad as fuck. Just the tanks look somewhat the same.

I had no idea Soulstorm actually changed shit i though it just added some stuff and the campaign was bad. Isn't this where all the multiplayer is concentrated? I assumed it was basically the same base game just with more races.

I finished watching that video of Unification. I can't believe some of those factions are actually legit (i assume everything in there is based on actual Warhammer stuff).

 

[Zibniyat]

I think visually they look rad as fuck. Just the tanks look somewhat the same.

It is not that Soulstorm looks bad in itself, it is that graphically (and stylistically) it is a downgrade compared to the original (DoW). There are more flashy exaggerated effects of weapons firing and special abilities of heroes, and due to HP bloat which leads to larger armies being present on the screen (because it now takes much more time to kill off individual units) this means that sometimes it is literally impossible to see who is fighting who and what is actually happening. I could take screenshots, actually I will first see if I already have screenshots ready. In comparison, in original DoW it was always possible to zoom in on the action and see all the unique and brutal killing blows being dealt between units.

I had no idea Soulstorm actually changed shit i though it just added some stuff

It is commendable they added new factions, even though I personally found them boring and ugly (ugly stylistically). However, possibly because they wanted "BIG battles and planetary CONQUEST", they made all units either have more HP, less damage output, or both. On the one side this made it possible to have said big protracted battles that fill the screen for quite a bit more time than how it was in DoW, whilst on the other it meant serious departure from rather fast-paced, brutal and quickly changing battlefield. As well as said complete graphical and stylisticall exaggeration where you can't see what is happening any more, though "can't see what's happening" is the less important issue, the most important being that it all just looks messy and ugly.

I finished watching that video of Unification. I can't believe some of those factions are actually legit (i assume everything in there is based on actual Warhammer stuff).

I never played with mods, but I did hear there are some good ones. Worth a try that is for sure.

 

[Zibniyat]

I see you like Winter Assault. Too bad, as I'm now going to take a dump on it by quoting myself (the post was sometimes from 2018):

Well, now that I'm playing Winter Assault campaign (and skirmish against the AI) I must say that either my memory falters or Winter Assault (WA) never was as enjoyable as I would've liked. Or both actually.

The very first mission pitted me against some "semi-boss" with a massively over-bloated (can't emphasise enough, as you can see) number of HP points, a whooping 15000 of them. What!? In original DOW that many HP points were reserved only for the few truly powerful bosses, like some summoned monsters (demons) and the end boss. The battle with this "semi-boss" thus lasted for ages, figuratively, and I was overall quite annoyed with it. He stood no chance against me, but due to limited number of my own units and only having the weak ones, it took several minutes to reduce those 15000 to 0. Later bosses showed even greater bloat, and I was just forced to endure a mission which threw a boss with 30000 HP points against me, complete with having to deal with waves of enemies pouring from all sides to my base. Quantity over quality indeed.

The campaign itself is uninspired, with predictable and boring dialogue and fake urgency of some actors' statements and behaviours. There are no funny but serviceable cutscenes as in the DOW, which makes the whole experience that much more sterile. It's all about surviving the onslaught/waves of countless numbers of uninteresting little figures on the screen. The art is good in general, but the Imperial Guard is too ordinary and all about bloody quantity; e.g. they seem to have one of the biggest highest-tier weapon/vehicle that shoots spectacular stuff out of its many openings, dealing minuscule damage overall, and the only thing that makes it dangerous is it's massive 15000 (or was it 20000?) HP points.

The positive side is that the missions are much more challenging, unpredictable and difficult. I'm playing on the hardest difficulty btw.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I was talking about the Imperial faction, which is what i assume markec meant with "Imps". I haven't played Soulstorm yet, had no idea they even changed the graphgics.

I actually agree on the Winter Assault campaign i was talking in relative terms. The Dawn of War campaign was piss easy the one in Winter Assault is an improvement i think.

This is annoying i though after playing the campaigns i could have just moved to Soulstorm for skirmish. Seems now i have to keep all of them around. Except the AI mod is only for Soulstorm and i can already dance around the AI in Dawn of War.

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW while the story in the campaigns is super generic the Warhammer lore makes it a bit amusing. Like the part in Dawn of War where the priest is asking for forgiveness and if this was Starcraft or any other game the commander may have tried to save the priest but here he just shoots him in the face lmao.

I also enjoyed both the commander in Dawn of War and the general in WInter Assault being super racist against the Eldar. Fucking space elves all they know is treacery.

 

[markec]

I think visually they look rad as fuck. Just the tanks look somewhat the same.

When the main game launched I played pretty much only Eldar because I enjoy winning. But Imps just stole my heart when WA got released. I find them with both gameplay and design wise the most interesting faction. They are the most fragile faction in the game but i also find them the most satisfying to play.

Its like walking on a tight rope where single mistake can ruin your game.

I had no idea Soulstorm actually changed shit i though it just added some stuff and the campaign was bad. Isn't this where all the multiplayer is concentrated? I assumed it was basically the same base game just with more races.

When we had LAN parties we would just skip on Soulstorm as new units and factions are forgettable and the game just felt different in a bad way.

 

[whocares]

I will not eat the bugs. I will not live in a pod. I will not use 2FA.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Mmmh, i wonder why all the mods and multiplayer is for Soulstorm then. I thought it was because it had all the most complete content but if it's as shit as you say why not work on Dark Crusade as a base instead.

I wonder if the skirmish AI mod works for Dark Crusade as well.

 

[whocares]

I will not eat the bugs. I will not live in a pod. I will not use 2FA.

 

[what am i doing]

I had no idea Soulstorm actually changed shit i though it just added some stuff and the campaign was bad. Isn't this where all the multiplayer is concentrated? I assumed it was basically the same base game just with more races.

When we had LAN parties we would just skip on Soulstorm as new units and factions are forgettable and the game just felt different in a bad way.

The whole Soulstorm thing was a fuckup of W3 Reforged proportions. They were finally getting the multiplayer balance right at the tail end of Dark Crusade, things were looking up. But then the publishers pull it from WCG, the one big tournament at the time, and switch the dev team from Relic to Iron Lore for Soulstorm.

Coming from Titan Quest, those guys have no clue how to make an RTS, fuck up the balance something fierce, and introduce a couple of such minor bugs like infinite requisition for SoB and observers being able to use Dark Eldar global spells. Takes them about a month to hotfix those before even starting to address the other problems, and by that point, the game was dead, so was Iron Lore. Not sure if they did or didn't make it playable in the end. I lost all interest by then.

Also nerfed Necrons into the ground because their simplicity and ease of use for new players had generated a false impression that Necrons were overpowered in Dark Crusade. When in practice, yeah, in a match between new players, Necrons had the upper hand, but among experienced players they were already underpowered, and the nerf made them extremely bad.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I see, so far i got Dark Crusade if i want a more "perfect", Blizz-killer like experience and Soulstorm is where i shove all the mods (since if you can't have quality you might as well have quantity).

What playing Unification blind is like:

 

[TemplarGR]

Dawn of War is too shitty to play in 2021. Small maps, bad graphics, etc. Just play Warhammer 40K Gladius, much better.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Bad graphics my ass the game looks awesome and who gives a fuck what year it is.

Gladius is a different genre and i ain't paying for 20 thousand DLCs. Sorry. Mechanicus only had 3 for fuck's sake.

 

[TemplarGR]

Bad graphics my ass the game looks awesome and who gives a fuck what year it is.

Gladius is a different genre and i ain't paying for 20 thousand DLCs. Sorry. Mechanicus only had 3 for fuck's sake.

Yeah, it is not like Dawn of War had DLCs.... It is not like the base Dawn of War only had 4 factions too.... You can get Gladius and all the DLCs for 46 euros right now in a sale, and they have 3x times the units per faction dawn of war did. It has 8 factions in total, including tyranids, and we are expecting a 9th this year, so it is going to reach parity with Soulstorm. More units, more strategy, more faithful to the tabletop.

But yeah, go play an obsolete 2 decades old game cause you are an old fuck.

 

[Lyric Suite]

They are not the same genres so who gives a fuck. This ain't about Warhammer retard Dawn of War is an RTS, not a rapresentation of table top. This is like barging in a Starcraft thread telling people to go play Anno: 1800 instead. I mean, it has better graphix!

Also, Dawn of War didn't have "DLCs", it had expansions, with new campains and all that kind of shit. Number of factions is also a different deal for RTS games. Starcraft had 3, Warcraft III had 4 and putting more isn't easy because you gotta worry about multiplayer balance. 4x games always allowed for numerous factions because you don't have to be so anal about that kind of shit. You don't have to worry for instance how a certain unit behaives in action, in terms of movement, animaiton etc. It's the same difference with making guns for a game like Unreal Tournament as opposed to something like Systen Shock 2. That firing guns in the latter doesn't feel as good as in Unreal Tournament doesn't matter because the focus of System Shock isn't slick multiplayer action. And in game where action is static you can have a billion guns but how can you possible make a comparison?

Mods like Unification are best suited for singleplayer because it's impossible all the factions are up to the standard set by Starcraft which Dawn of War did match originally (until Soulstorm fuck it up apparently, which i had no idea).

 

[Dexter]

Playing this too, felt like some Warhammer 40k and I remembered I never played this (did play II for a dozen hours in CoOp though). Got about half-way through the main campaign on Hard, and it is indeed not very hard. Had some issues with lag/stutter, but the disabling "hardware cursor" thing seems to have helped: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4570/discussions/0/2996548176270352877/

Given I don't really care about the Multiplayer, and it's most likely dead, which other parts should I get? I understand "Winter Assault" got a campaign, any of the others?

 

[Lyric Suite]

Isn't Winter Assault bunbdled with the Game Of The Year Edition? At least in my steam version they share the same folder.

I don't think the campaigns in either are bad they just feel underwhelming considering how little you get compared to Starcraft or Warcraft. Sure the missions are relatively long winded, and at least in Winter Assault they are pretty variety, where you get to switch sides within the same mission and it feels like a completely new mission on the same map, but still.

The story is not bad just a bit generic. Voice acting is great though and so are some of the characters. Gabriel was good, and so was Sturnn. Goregutz is just hilarious, and i liked Sindri as well.

Now if you google around it seems everyone's favored campaign is the one in Dark Crusade, which has little story but has this whole big set up where you have to control a whole planet and everything you do in a map stays so if you have to fight there again all your structures will be there again. Haven't got there yet but it seems people liked it the most.

As for Soulstorm, everything has been said in this thread. Guess the only reason to get it is mods.

Honestly, the game was for multiplayer first and foremost. However, skirmish may be an option especially with that AI mod around.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Now if you google around it seems everyone's favored campaign is the one in Dark Crusade, which has little story but has this whole big set up where you have to control a whole planet and everything you do in a map stays so if you have to fight there again all your structures will be there again. Haven't got there yet but it seems people liked it the most.

but there's a problem, stemming from the interaction between maps and ai: the maps in dark crusade are all soulless, specular, boring, huge 8-12 players maps and ais love to resettle *A LOT*, so 99% of the time in dark crusade is spent whacking moles all across the map, wondering where the hell is the enemy hiding this time, and if you're not fast it'll rebuild enough to being an annoyance and expand more, despite never being a threat.