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So, having been swept up in the WH40K mania, I decided to go ahead and dust off my WA and finish the "Order" Campaign, as I haven't even seen the Necrons left.

I'm reminded as to why I stopped with the campaign: It's friggin' Hard, I don't remember vanilla DoW being this hard (I plowed right through the SM campaign). I'm stuck on mission 4 (or so) where you have to escort the Titan crew to the other end of the map. Finally getting frustrated, I switched over to Eldar and seem pinned down in my base.


...Help!

Lonestar wrote:So, having been swept up in the WH40K mania, I decided to go ahead and dust off my WA and finish the "Order" Campaign, as I haven't even seen the Necrons left.

I'm reminded as to why I stopped with the campaign: It's friggin' Hard, I don't remember vanilla DoW being this hard (I plowed right through the SM campaign). I'm stuck on mission 4 (or so) where you have to escort the Titan crew to the other end of the map. Finally getting frustrated, I switched over to Eldar and seem pinned down in my base.


...Help!

It's not that bad, but let's see. You get unlimited reinforcements from that dropship once you lose the units you get, so keep throwing them at the enemy. If you want to let the imperials play, use the eldar to support them by building say... prisms or falcons and having them swoop ahead and take out enemy positions. You've got unlimited money practically, so go wild. Be sure to use your enginseers to repair the land raider, though.

The Eldar need to tech up to warp spiders, and use them and their teleportation to raid the back side of the enemy bases. The Falcon is also integral, as with a Bonesinger in its belly it can use its jump ability and speed to bypass a lot of defenses. Just concentrate on blowing up the Thrmo-Plasmas and then delivering your builder to build the webway gate you need. Just switch sides right off the bat and pray that Chaos gets the Land Raider so you can have all the time you need. Otherwise, you might just be cutting it close.
The Guard don't need to do much except repair that Land Raider, and tech up to a level where they can get Karskins(why wouldn't you want them?) and some tanks. Leman Rus help a lot, but you won't get them until late in the level.

I just played it yesterday and did it slightly differently.
Basicly I was trying to triger the damn mars pattern and other things to get a baneblade. You can just park one of those things at a chokepoint in front of the infinite spawn with a techpreist behind it and it'll NEVER die...but I think I had to kill all the buildings or something first. So that failed. I had done it when I first brought the game, but just couldn't remember.

While I was doing that I had parked my land raider in the first base as I leveled up (just keep using the call convoy button if the Marines start to move off), using the techpreists to deploy minefields, replacing the guard with commandos, filling out the command squad, fully outfitting everyone will the maximum upgrades and weapons and so on.

The squads I had up the top trying to cap the mars pattern I moved back down to a couple of importiant crossroads in the rear and secured, helping the AI guard. If you help them this wa,y they become much more useful in countering the other AI's I found. And secures the route which follows.

When I was ready, I eased out behind the base, completly ignored the gates and that objective by skirting around behind it, then up and right until I connected to a series of roads that got me right to the warp gate. Along the way I captured the strategic points and plonked down heavy bolter turrets and fully upgraded listning posts. NOt really for any reason, but I thought it was cool.

My command squad upgraded were perfectly able to deal with the horrors that kept spawning while my commandos along with the marines killed any troops that came after me. The Land Raiders las cannons along with my sentials delt with the Obliterators, Predators and so on, while my techpreist kept repairing them.

In the end I halted the convoy just short of the area that triggered the 'final approach as I approached it from the right.

First I had my techpreist mine the CRAP out of the ramp the AI spawns down for kicks.

THEN I approached. It was rather funny watching the orks and chaos grunts all spawn then suddenly all go flying everywhere

My stunt was to switch to Eldar, then cloak the first base.

I wound up deploying my base (except for the power generators, they all stayed at that original crater) to the first location point, and using that place as a virtual fortress. Use the Webway gates to cloak all your buildings, and the Chaos/Ork forces never even attack (until my waves of turrets kept firing and killing them all).

I built up my vehicles until I had 5 Fire Prisms, then set them out to make a clear path along the edge. The Fire Prisms cleared a path, the Bonesinger teleported to their location, then built a Webway gate (which gets cloaked as soon as it is finished). Troops arrive through the gate, and capture the point. Bonesinger then builds a Shrine on top of it.

From there, I teleport in defenses in case anybody tries anything, and build up more at my main base. Repeat until you get to the Psychic gate.

From there, you get to the final battle, where you have to deal with Imperials, and . . .

Honestly it was quite easy. Eldar + cloaking + teleporting makes many of the missions damn easy.

Get the tech thingy which allows webways to cloak buildings around them, then put a bunch of units in the webway. Port 3 Bonesinger to a your new intended location and power build a webway then cloak it. If needed deploy troups from the new webway.

Port the cloaked turrents in for more fun. Rince & repeat for any Eldar missions, trivial.

On the final mission, make sure you build cloaked webway gates near each of the titan's weapons(just out of sight of the Imperials). Makes shuffling units around for the final turkey shoot easy.

And fully teched prism tanks are your friends

What's all this about teching up as the Guard in that mission? You don't get to control the buildings, you know. Or if you do, I kicked the mission in it's ass with no teching required and managed to completely miss the Guard bunkers not controlled by the AI.

Beat it on my first try after reading the responses...It simply had not occured to me to switch between Eldar and IG repeatibly, using the Eldar as distraction/cannon fodder. Ended up only needing one Sentinal and Techpriest following the Landraider around, while my command squad and commandos (Plus 1 Leman Rus) fought their way to the pyschic shield.

Okay then. So, how do you like the Necrons?

Haven't beaten the next level(Power teh Titan!) yet, and as I'm floating off the coast of Southern California and my Computer is in San Diego I don't have a whole heck of a lot of options.

Rogue 9 wrote:Okay then. So, how do you like the Necrons?

Sir! Unusual Xeno activity!

(Necrons waltz in like they own the fucking place and rape the IG)

Lonestar wrote: Well, shit.

As I recall, the trigger for the Necrons to show up is completion of the fourth power generator (I think it's the fourth). Build the first three, then start the last three but stop just before they're done, that way you can finish them all together and have all the titan weapons ready. I recall having a glitch there, though, when I finished the last three simultaneously and the Necrons didn't show up, so you might want to finish number four and wait for them to land before finishing the last two. One of the Monoliths will try to get into your base though the southwestern route, outside the titan weapons' line of fire. Put a Baneblade and a few Russes there to deal with it. Kasrkin are good for dealing with the warriors.

I've got a WA question, since I haven't picked up the expansion as of yet.

How is the skirmish/multiplayer AI compared to regular DoW, and in what way did they change the control and functionality of the Army Painter? I'd received word from a couple places they essentially screwed up both in the expansion.

Utsanomiko wrote:I've got a WA question, since I haven't picked up the expansion as of yet.

How is the skirmish/multiplayer AI compared to regular DoW, and in what way did they change the control and functionality of the Army Painter? I'd received word from a couple places they essentially screwed up both in the expansion.

Skirmish AI to me in WA seems pretty challenging. I can play it to a standstill on 'Hard' on most maps, with a slight edge.

I dislike the changes in skirmish play, namely the tech-trees, rebalancing, and the way the AI uses them, but that's just me. The AI is definitely harder. In vanilla I could take on Hard AIs reasonably well, now I have trouble with Mediums.

The army painter is actually improved (IMO). It swaps a few of the colors around for better paintage, although it does mean that Marine eyes are always red now.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:I dislike the changes in skirmish play, namely the tech-trees, rebalancing, and the way the AI uses them, but that's just me. The AI is definitely harder. In vanilla I could take on Hard AIs reasonably well, now I have trouble with Mediums.

The army painter is actually improved (IMO). It swaps a few of the colors around for better paintage, although it does mean that Marine eyes are always red now.

Chaos Marines still have changable eye color however (Not that you can see it unless you're up real close, and if you're in a fight why are you in that close?).

XaLEv wrote:As I recall, the trigger for the Necrons to show up is completion of the fourth power generator (I think it's the fourth). Build the first three, then start the last three but stop just before they're done, that way you can finish them all together and have all the titan weapons ready. I recall having a glitch there, though, when I finished the last three simultaneously and the Necrons didn't show up, so you might want to finish number four and wait for them to land before finishing the last two. One of the Monoliths will try to get into your base though the southwestern route, outside the titan weapons' line of fire. Put a Baneblade and a few Russes there to deal with it. Kasrkin are good for dealing with the warriors.

For the Monolith that approaches in that direction, I just park a baneblade and engage it when it arrives, with the marine squads ripping the Necrons appart.

All the baneblade has to do is hold the Monolith in position while my three Basilisk platforms drop Earthshaker rounds on it.

The left and right flanks which were simply covered in heavy bolter turrents to deal with the ork and chaos marine attacks, before I finished the last of the power generators I changed them all to missile launchers. I found that way they were quite good at knocking down Necron warriors with massive missile strikes and could even damage monoliths a little. Though the Titan weapons were the main thing of course.

Although I find with three Basilisk platforms, I only needed to use the titan weapons to blast the Necron warrior squads. The monoliths stopped whenever they had to deal with my turret lines, letting me drop the 3 Earthshaker rounds needed to knock them out.

Either that or the baneblade, which serves as a rather nice 'brick' to stop Monoliths long enough for the Earthshaker rounds to impact, then finish the Monoliths off.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:I dislike the changes in skirmish play, namely the tech-trees, rebalancing, and the way the AI uses them, but that's just me. The AI is definitely harder. In vanilla I could take on Hard AIs reasonably well, now I have trouble with Mediums.

Does this mean multi WA isn't the same as the campaign? I found many of the tech tree and balance changes from vanilla to suck... is it better in single?

Stark wrote:Does this mean multi WA isn't the same as the campaign? I found many of the tech tree and balance changes from vanilla to suck... is it better in single?

Well, I notice them most in Marines (which I tend to play), which aren't in the WA campaign, so...

They did however, fix up the Eldar. Which is what they needed. Now there's an actual alternative to spamming banshees, or crying as your reapers are eaten alive by an equal number of scouts.

The only difference to the marines was tweaking their tiers slightly, making the tank different and making heavy bolters tier 2, right?

Nephtys wrote:The only difference to the marines was tweaking their tiers slightly, making the tank different and making heavy bolters tier 2, right?

Fucking them up their genetically superior ass, more like.

On one hand, assault Terminators get a much-needed boost and are appropriately nasty in hand-to-hand combat and no longer break like sissies.

On the other hand, they're totally fucked from the ground up.

• Tac Marines, overall, suck more.
• Assault Marines really suck more. (I saw a squad of them get chopped up by the same number of Guardsmen... in hand-to-hand. Tier 1.
• The Captain is fucked. Whatever they did, they managed to reintroduce weapon bugs, so his thunder hammer gets fucked around with when you upgrade your sergeants to power swords, etc.
• Armory upgrades are dumbed down. Now there is one bionic upgrade you buy, then at the next tier you can get one weapon upgrade (which requires you to get the bionic upgrade first), both giving a cute little cosmetic effect on your Marines.
• Predator Destructors are removed entirely for Smurfs and Predator Annihilators removed for Chaos. Super lame.
• "Tier 4" is such bullshit. One is required to research some dumb thing after Tier 3 just to be able to build Predators and Land Raiders, and some other junk.
• Various other upgrades and options are removed. Basically, WA's bottom line is "Less customized 40K armies, more StarCraft for the 13-year-olds!" Way to kill the spirit of the game, guys.

That's what I was afraid of. I'd heard about the disparaging difference between Easy and Medium+ difficulties (the two now being 'sit there doing nothing' and 'unrelenting pounding'), but weren't the DoW tech trees simple and streamlined enough as it was?

And although minor I think the loss of the eye color option is inexcusable. So now Blood Angels and Imperial Fists are stuck with red eyes just for separate tac symbol colors? And Blood Ravens' eyes are green as well no matter how the 1.3/1.4 patch borked it up. They've apparently gotten sloppy, and I can only wait and see if the next expansion reverts the trend.

Nephtys wrote:They did however, fix up the Eldar. Which is what they needed. Now there's an actual alternative to spamming banshees, or crying as your reapers are eaten alive by an equal number of scouts.

The only difference to the marines was tweaking their tiers slightly, making the tank different and making heavy bolters tier 2, right?

I should slap you, foul xeno lover.

j/k

DoW boiled down to two units when it came to eldar: Reaper and plat mass for teh winzorz101010010101. And boy did it rip the assholes out of other races. Now Warpspiders utterly replace all other Eldar ranged troops when they come out. More balanced, I'll agree, but the recent trend of unit obsolesence is quite disturbing.

Heavy Bolters were made into more of an allaround troop killer, good against both infantry and power armored troops, but need setup like before. Plasma became the alternative for those who wanted mobile ranged firepower.

And I hate the borderline anemic "fourth tier" Relic tacked onto the tech tree. What were they smoking?

Ah, but DoW reapers did practically no damage vs Light infantry. It was all about Banshee swarms, overrunning enemies expendably.

Four scouts can take out five reapers in a gunfight, so they have issues that means with 2 of the races. That got fixed at least. And don't forget, Spiders are mega-feeble in hand to hand.