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No offense taken, Dendrobius, but my complaints were leveled against the nerfing of the Basilisk and the fact that the Imperial Guard Leman Russ simply doesn't compare to the Looted Leman Russ the Orks can build. I haven't mentioned anything at all about the Whirlwind -- Rogue 9 was the one who brought that point up. Besides, I'm mostly an Eldar player in any regard, so consider my rants a token gesture of sympathy towards the stubborn and intractable players of the mon-keigh races.

However, you have to admit that some of the IG nerfs have not been received well in the community: as can be seen in this thread over at the Relic forums, veteran IG players are now abandoning their race in droves, and there is clearly quite a lot of dissatisfaction (to say the least) with the new patch.

Your other observations, however, are valid. I freely admit that I'm not the sort of person who really thrives on competition, which is why I never play any games online. The general unfriendliness of DoW community, in particular, reminds me far too much of the hyper-aggressive, "frat boy" sort of demographic that Halo enjoys, and I avoid that franchise's online games like the plague as well. Also, one of the unpleasant legacies of I picked up from other RTS games like Age of Empires was the compulsion to turtle and only attack with "pretty" and "complete" (fully upgraded) armies, which DoW punishes quite severely...

Heh. I tend to turtle too; that's why I play Guard. As for the AI mod, I personally enjoy it because I can stomp the hell out of the standard AI all the live long day, and of course you can only have one mod activated at a time... so if the mod you're using doesn't have the AI mod built in, you're kind of screwed in that department if the existing AI isn't a challenge. Besides, the existing AI wouldn't take advantage of all the new units.

And I don't play online in the general server population either. There are too many morons who will drop at the first setback on there. I arrange games on the boards I post on with people who I'm at least sort of familiar with; it's much better that way. Speaking of, I'm looking for a game right now if anyone wants to play.

And I'm putting this here so as to not clog the board with more Dark Crusade threads. One of the mod team guys on the Relic forums is reworking the FX for the Tau railguns to make them look more like railguns rather than Buck Rogers lasers. Different angle.

Indeed, I like turtling with the Imperial Guard as well, but the Necrons can do it so much more effectively in vanilla DoW. When I'm playing vanilla and want to turtle, I always go with the Necrons, because turtling with the Guard in vanilla is downright suicidal.

I wouldn't mind joining one of your server games, Rogue, but I deliberately exclude myself from online play because my laptop is an ancient POS whose frame rate is downright abysmal -- it drops into the gutter as soon as the shooting starts (or when large armies start appearing on the screen, or complex animations begin, and so on), with the end result being a DoW that runs as if in constant slow motion. My participating would probably cause everyone else to lag something horrible, so I just don't bother.

As to that other point, for lack of a better phrase, that is utterly awesome. What mod is it being developed for, by the way?

None in particular at the moment, though he says he hopes DoWXP will adopt it.

Since you asked, the new Tau railgun effects are in DoWXP 3.8 Beta 4, and will certainly be in the 3.8 public release. (I got in on the beta testing, mainly as the team punching bag, but hey.)

Thanks for the information, Rogue, and congratulations. Now you can feed us secret and proscribed information on the inner workings of this most popular of mods. For inquisitorial oversight, of course.