Caltrops - Gamerasutra - Warhammer: Dawn of War demo out

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by FABIO 09/13/2004, 1:17pm PDT

Available on filerush.

This and Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth were the two RTS games I was really looking foward to. DoW seems like Starcraft meets Rise of Nations (or any of the "age of" games really). The graphical effects are very cool. Instead of constructing buildings, they fall out of the sky from orbit and crash into the ground where they unpack. Units are delivered with the same "drop pod" method.

RAGDOLLS! They do indeed make every game better. C&C Generals had them, but not to this extent. In melee really powerful units can send other flying back hundreds of feet with a single blow (the designers claimed to be aiming for the "blowback" effect with Sauron in the first LotR movie), or your dreadnaught (miniature mech) will lift an enemy up with its claw and simply crush him into a bloody pulp then toss the corpse aside, or the Orc dreadnaught will do the same only replace "crush" with "eviscerate with buzzsaw".

Resources are gathered by capturing "critical points" scattered around the battlefield. Capture a critical point, receive income. The income screen is set up exactly like Rise of Nations.

One aspect I'm not sure I dig, you can modify and reinforce units on the fly. Click on individual infantry squads and choose from a bunch of heavy weapons you can outfit them with (up to 2 or 3 each): flamethrower, longe range heavy machine gun, anti-tank missile, etc. That kind of seems to go against any idea of strategy; just blindly get a bunch of units then modify them once you see what the enemy has. Catch your opponent, who has all machinegun infantry, by surprise with a bunch of tanks? Oops, he just upgraded all those machinegun squads with anti-tank missiles in the middle of the battle.

As individual units in a squad die, you can reinforce them back up to full strength (for a cost) right there on the field. As long as at least one unit in the squad is still alive you can queue up replacements until it's back at full strength. This strikes me as a feature catering to the needs of Kohan players. It's also extremely annoying to reduce a squad to one unit then watch them run off only to be back at full strength a little later.

Combat seems to suffer from what I call "rock, paper, scissors mayhem" where, just like the "Age of" game, Homeworld, and Rise of Nations, there's little hope of controlling all your units once they're engaged in combat so most of the "strategy" is just sitting back and hoping that you have the right combo of scissor units to take down his paper. Combat is 100% setup and zero execution. Which infantry squad had the anti-tank missiles and which one had the heavy machineguns? Fuck if I tell without clicking on each one individually and looking at the tiny weapon loadout icons in the middle of a battle. Sure the infantry in C&C Generals looked goofy, but at least the rocket infantry carried giant bright red rocket launchers so you could tell who was who at a glance.

Balanced? I guess. Though the assault infantry seemed way too powerful. They're the best at hand to hand combat, have jetpacks that let them quickly close with anyone so they can avoid the ranged combat that they're weak at, and carry anti-vehicle/building grenades that decimate tanks many times more than an anti-tank missile. I never got a single standard infantry squad and seemed better off for it.

I'll probably pick it up and have some fun screwing around with it, just like Rise of Nations. Then I'll put it down and go back to C&C Generals, just like Rise of Nations.