I have discovered WH40K.....

Faqa · Post by **Faqa** » 2005-10-11 04:40pm

Or at least the game, Dawn Of War. Damned awesome at this point. SD.net doesn't universally love this for nothing......

I've only played a few campaign missions so far, but....

- Actual, inaccurate artillary. Wheee!

- Customizable squads.

- Knocking down asshole Ork hordes with missile launchers.

Then wake up to my Heavy Bolter special!

I cannot find a bad thing to say..... but questions, plenty. So, to that....

A - Is it just me, or are Assault Marines just this side of useless? They last for next to no time before going down, and thus far seem to primarily be useful as a damage screen for my Space Marines.

B - Is equipping squads to specialize a good way to go? As in a missile squad, a Bolter squad, etc? It seems to be the most effective, at the admitted cost of pushing the squad cap....

C - Turtling. Game seems to bloody well encourage it. Grab the point, and fortify it seems to be the way. Just a thought - I'd figured on it being "out" in this RTS generation.

D - Where can I find out more about the mythos? Space Orcs, Religious whackjobs with laser guns.... sounds interesting.

So..... yeah, basically. Will the generous of spirit please step forward?

SylasGaunt · Post by **SylasGaunt** » 2005-10-11 05:22pm

Turtling isn't really encouraged since it's pretty much a requirement to drive forward and take points if you want to keep your req. points going while denying them to the other guy. Of course there's nothing wrong with setting up a defensible position on your caps, and I'd certainly reccomend it.

Elheru Aran · Post by **Elheru Aran** » 2005-10-11 05:24pm

*rubs hands together in glee* Welcome to the fold, Brother! Soon ye shall understand the Divine Light that is the Emperor of all Mankind, and yea, His holy Hand shall direct thy forces to their victory over the xenos, heretic, and mutant!

Ahem. Now that that's done.

A: Yes, they're useless. Don't bother with them for the most part. They got severely nerfed; they're only useful for melta-bombs, which you'll need on a later level with the Orks...

B: Specializing is *very* good. Learn the Heavy Bolter. Use the Heavy Bolter. LOVE the Heavy Bolter. *nods emphatically*

A good way to go, I've found, is two squads of heavy bolters coupled together with a squad of missile launchers. That way you can keep a torrent of hot death upon your opponents while the missile launchers take care of the heavier foes.

C: Yeah, the game kind of encourages turtling. Don't give it any mind, though-- but I will warn you, it's good to have extra missile turrets handy, at least as many as you've heavy bolter turrets. When in doubt, have the missile turrets in close to the SP/CP/Relic, the heavy bolters on the outer ring (less range than the missiles), and minefields around.

That's another point there: minefields are GOOD. You can build them quick, and with them, you'll know instantly when people are approaching your posts. Very useful, trust me. I remember this mission where I spammed the fuck out of them... ended up with something like 40, 50 minefields... ah, those were the days

D: Will have to wait on this till I get home to my bookmarks... but just you wait, you'll have more about this pouring out your ears than you ever wanted to know, before you know it

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » 2005-10-11 05:32pm

C: Yeah, the game kind of encourages turtling. Don't give it any mind, though-- but I will warn you, it's good to have extra missile turrets handy, at least as many as you've heavy bolter turrets. When in doubt, have the missile turrets in close to the SP/CP/Relic, the heavy bolters on the outer ring (less range than the missiles), and minefields around.

Imho, I prefer to place missile turrets on the outer ring: there is nothing more annyoing to see our nice defense line being destroyed cause the bolter turret have such a limited range.

Elheru Aran · Post by **Elheru Aran** » 2005-10-11 05:34pm

Mobius wrote:
C: Yeah, the game kind of encourages turtling. Don't give it any mind, though-- but I will warn you, it's good to have extra missile turrets handy, at least as many as you've heavy bolter turrets. When in doubt, have the missile turrets in close to the SP/CP/Relic, the heavy bolters on the outer ring (less range than the missiles), and minefields around.
Imho, I prefer to place missile turrets on the outer ring: there is nothing more annyoing to see our nice defense line being destroyed cause the bolter turret have such a limited range.

Yeah... with the minefields, though, that's not an consideration as when the units start getting blown about crossing it, the bolter turrets should 'see' them and start firing. But yeah, that is a valid concern-- the main problem I have with the missile launchers is they fire too slowly... :/

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-10-11 05:35pm

Turtling Who ME!?

None of those stupid chaos marines made any progress against this!

Elheru Aran · Post by **Elheru Aran** » 2005-10-11 05:53pm

Oh yeah. Is it me, or does the latest DoW patch kill all those cool camera angles and zooms?

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-10-11 05:56pm

Elheru Aran wrote:Oh yeah. Is it me, or does the latest DoW patch kill all those cool camera angles and zooms?

No idea, I have Game of the year edition and it had the latest patch preinstalled.

Edit

This is the closest zoom I can get.

Terminators ready to kick ass.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » 2005-10-11 06:01pm

the best race to Turtle is by far the Eldar:

take place-> build warpgate-> turtle-> go back to first

Lancer · Post by **Lancer** » 2005-10-11 06:01pm

erm, artillery is only crazy-inaccurate when you don't have a unit spotting.

In mission 4, I filled my vehicle cap with whirlwinds, infiltrated a pair of scout squads (leapfrogging them so that if I accidentally ran into an Ork commandre unit, I wouldn't lose all my progress) into the first Ork base, then took it out with artillery, keeping my marines (mostly assault but I kept a pair of tacticals) around the whirlwinds to kill anything that got too close to the vehicles.

From there it was a pretty simple matter of setting up a forward position. I moved the whirlwinds and assault marines to the ledge near the river crossing, infiltrated my scouts into the second orc base, and let the whirlwinds clear an area for my assault marines to jump into. I then had the assault marines do a quick strike on the mek shops, then jumped them back into my whirlwind position when they were in danger of being overrun. rinse, repeat, kill off most of the orc base without having to deal with the squiggoth.

Elheru Aran · Post by **Elheru Aran** » 2005-10-11 06:11pm

Faram wrote:
Elheru Aran wrote:Oh yeah. Is it me, or does the latest DoW patch kill all those cool camera angles and zooms?
No idea, I have Game of the year edition and it had the latest patch preinstalled.

Edit

This is the closest zoom I can get.

Terminators ready to kick ass.

That's much better than I can get for some reason... perhaps they reset the zoom settings to default or something? I would so appreciate getting my lovely zoom back... :/

Post by **weemadando** » 2005-10-11 07:04pm

During one game of DoW when it first came out, I had turtled in my base at the bottom centre of the map and made a minefield that covered a 1/3 of the map in total. That was funny.

Lancer · Post by **Lancer** » 2005-10-11 07:08pm

I never really used minefields as much as turret emplacements.

Once I covered my entrance so totally with bolters and missiles that I left the game running, came back with a few thousand requisition and power to build a massive army, then curbstomped the AI despite it constantly throwing out stuff like killa kans.

Akhlut · Post by **Akhlut** » 2005-10-11 08:38pm

Hard to do the turtling thing with Orks. However, it is much easier to just totally beat the ever-living bejeezus out of anything and everything with 40 Nobz equipped with power klaws. Even the Avatar of Khaine gets PWNED by them.

Lancer · Post by **Lancer** » 2005-10-11 08:44pm

Akhlut wrote:Hard to do the turtling thing with Orks. However, it is much easier to just totally beat the ever-living bejeezus out of anything and everything with 40 Nobz equipped with power klaws. Even the Avatar of Khaine gets PWNED by them.

You'll find that 40 nobs equipped with power klaws will kill any single unit. However, it becomes a much different story when that Avatar is supported by a few squads of Warp Spiders (which make up for the massive point-cost difference between a single Avatar and 40 Nobs).

Akhlut · Post by **Akhlut** » 2005-10-11 08:49pm

Matt Huang wrote:You'll find that 40 nobs equipped with power klaws will kill any single unit. However, it becomes a much different story when that Avatar is supported by a few squads of Warp Spiders (which make up for the massive point-cost difference between a single Avatar and 40 Nobs).

Warp spiders don't do well in CC. The Avatar goes down quickly enough for me to soon make mince-meat out of dem silly Eldar. Especially if I have backup. Like a squiggoth. And looted tanks.

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2005-10-11 08:55pm

Give me one Predator and some open ground and I will pwn your Nobs six ways to Sunday.

Akhlut · Post by **Akhlut** » 2005-10-11 08:58pm

Gimme a Big Mek wif superstikkboms and a tellyporta and your pred is busted.

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2005-10-11 09:05pm

I should say give me one of the old Predators. The Predator Annihilator default of the expansion pack is idiotic; I prefer some antipersonnel capability on my tanks.

Lancer · Post by **Lancer** » 2005-10-11 09:06pm

Akhlut wrote:
Matt Huang wrote:You'll find that 40 nobs equipped with power klaws will kill any single unit. However, it becomes a much different story when that Avatar is supported by a few squads of Warp Spiders (which make up for the massive point-cost difference between a single Avatar and 40 Nobs).
Warp spiders don't do well in CC. The Avatar goes down quickly enough for me to soon make mince-meat out of dem silly Eldar. Especially if I have backup. Like a squiggoth. And looted tanks.

Warp spiders in CC???

Excuse me while I laugh at you for a long time.

Anyways, if your bringing Manz and a Squiggoth into the battlefield, then expect the Eldar player to either jump Fire Prisms into your base, FoF Fire Dragons in while your distracted, or just let the FP's rip through your mobs.

Akhlut · Post by **Akhlut** » 2005-10-11 09:12pm

Matt Huang wrote:Warp spiders in CC???

Excuse me while I laugh at you for a long time.

Anyways, if your bringing Manz and a Squiggoth into the battlefield, then expect the Eldar player to either jump Fire Prisms into your base, FoF Fire Dragons in while your distracted, or just let the FP's rip through your mobs.

I gots no WA yet.

And why is it funny to get Nobz into CC with Warp Spiders? They will get beaten to an absolute pulp by the Nobz! The teleporting might pose a problem but the Nobz have the HP to buffer the hits while running to them again, especially if its with the Big Mek and his force field generator.

And this is also assuming that I don't have a few kans with rokkits guarding the homestead.

EDIT: fixed up my BBCode for the quote

Lancer · Post by **Lancer** » 2005-10-11 09:37pm

Akhlut, to get Nobz into CC with Spiders means you have to get past an Avatar of Khaine, to a unit that can teleport twice without recharging, has no weapon setup time, does good damage vs infantry and heavy infantry alike, and to top it off has a squad member cap much higher than that of Reapers.

And at this point, the Eldar player has almost certainly out-econed you (YOU LET HIM GET TO TIER 4!!!), so expect to see a flood of Fire Prisms either on the battlefield or at your base. Killa Kanz are decent against infantry, but against FP's, they're at best a stopgap.

Akhlut · Post by **Akhlut** » 2005-10-11 09:50pm

Matt Huang wrote:Akhlut, to get Nobz into CC with Spiders means you have to get past an Avatar of Khaine, to a unit that can teleport twice without recharging, has no weapon setup time, does good damage vs infantry and heavy infantry alike, and to top it off has a squad member cap much higher than that of Reapers.

And at this point, the Eldar player has almost certainly out-econed you (YOU LET HIM GET TO TIER 4!!!), so expect to see a flood of Fire Prisms either on the battlefield or at your base. Killa Kanz are decent against infantry, but against FP's, they're at best a stopgap.

As I said earlier, I've still only got the original version; I don't have Winter Assault yet, so, the Avatar and the Nobz are equal as far as which tier they're at. I also mentioned the existance of the squiggoth and tanks, which would be useful against the Avatar.

Manus Celer Dei · Post by **Manus Celer Dei** » 2005-10-12 09:30am

Question: The minimum specs for DoW say that you need at least a 32Mb graphics card with T&L. Now, I've been told that unless the game actually checks for a T&L, you should still be able to run it if your graphics card doesn't support T&L, only your performance will be worse. My graphics card is an 64Mb integrated one; will I be able to play DoW?

Lancer · Post by **Lancer** » 2005-10-12 10:07am

Akhlut wrote:
Matt Huang wrote:Akhlut, to get Nobz into CC with Spiders means you have to get past an Avatar of Khaine, to a unit that can teleport twice without recharging, has no weapon setup time, does good damage vs infantry and heavy infantry alike, and to top it off has a squad member cap much higher than that of Reapers.

And at this point, the Eldar player has almost certainly out-econed you (YOU LET HIM GET TO TIER 4!!!), so expect to see a flood of Fire Prisms either on the battlefield or at your base. Killa Kanz are decent against infantry, but against FP's, they're at best a stopgap.
As I said earlier, I've still only got the original version; I don't have Winter Assault yet, so, the Avatar and the Nobz are equal as far as which tier they're at. I also mentioned the existance of the squiggoth and tanks, which would be useful against the Avatar.

there's still the matter of points-cost. Your still pitting a much more expensive force against a single unit. If a halfway-competent Eldar player were to make up for the point-cost discrepancy (and since he already has the Avatar, his entire tech tree is available to him) by sending out a few more of his own units, he could utterly crush the guys you have assigned to take down his avatar.