Warhammer 40K DoW

[Shakan'Dar]

Anybody play this game? It's probably the funnest RTS I've played in ages, taking the best elements from almost every other RTS and shoving them all into one game. I've got Dawn of War and the Winter Assault expansion, and I'm working on getting Dark Crusade (stupid torrents). So far, my favourite team to play is the Imperial Guard.

I'd be interested in getting a multiplayer group together and maybe playing over Hamachi or something.

[My Final Heaven]

IG is by far the best, and they're even better in Dark Crusade because you get heavy weapons teams. They're absolutely unstoppable at the seige push, whereby you have a back line of basilisks providing the disruption against infantry while teams of heavy weapons deploy in tandum, one holding ground while the other moving forward, just like the seige tank push in Star Craft. Anchor the whole thing with your Kasarkin, HQ squad and Ogrin and you have a well nigh unstoppable combo, and you dont even need a relic to pull it off.

Add to that the fact that you can easilly deploy troops from one base to another using the building's underground tunnel system and the only chink in the armor is the fact that each of your units is weak as ****, but that's alright, cause you have high squad sizes so you can afford to take loses.

So yes, I play DoW. And it's great but I only have the dark crusade so it sucks only being tau or necron in multiplayer, cause they're my least favorite races.

[Shakan'Dar]

I'm pretty new to the game, and so is my friend. So far, he beats me really easily with space marines. The chaplain makes his squads really hard to kill. Should I have LOTS of guardsman squads upgradedto plasma, or should I try to tech to karskin quickly?

[My Final Heaven]

For space marrine killing, you'll want to have a good number of squads with plasma, and what you do is this.

Believe it or not, you want to force him to melee you if he's cheesing standard marrine squads. The thing about marrines is that they're expensive and there aint many of them. If you let him shoot you at range, his guns beat your toughness and your armor, but thier CC weapons are just as weak as yours. So the trick is to put his guys into melee so they can't shoot, and to have some guys left over to shoot the ones that you're meleeing. Try to outnumber him by at least 2 -1 which with guardsmen vs space marrines should be pretty easy to do. You also have the advantage of being able to call in reinforcements much faster as well.

Your other option is of course to bunker in and tech to basilisks. Basilisks have the same effect as the melee tactic because they throw his units in the air, stopping him from returning fire against you. You will definatly NOT want to try and combine these tactics because the basilisks will destroy your own stuff if you're in the melee with him.

Anyways, try those two things out anyway. Against the space marrines you want to bring lots of troops and hit them fast before they get to end game, because if you let the space marrines get terrminators, you're ****ed, end of story.

[Tom]

A friend of mine installed them all on my computer for me, I play the one that doesn't actually require the disk since I don't actually own the game. To me the most interesting faction to play as is the Eldar, but its easy to see that I do far better using the Space Marines. I've tried a couple of times to get a multiplayer game going but it never seems to complete the download for the multiplayer version, stupid Vista...

[Shakan'Dar]

I've got Dark Crusade now, and I've switched to Tau. I just find them more interesting to play than IG, and I love their units. At the moment, I use kroot to keep the enemy busy while my fire warriors just wreak havoc with their high damage long range guns.

The Tau Commander is practically a 1 man army. He held off an orc army almost single handed, until I could get my XV8 Crisis suit thingies. I haven't used the kroot tech path yet, coz the XV8's and the hammerhead gunship appealed more to me.

[My Final Heaven]

The main thing I hated about the Tau was actually thier Crissis suits believe it or not. Sure they're powerful and all, but did you notice they don't have any hp regen and that they cannot be repaired? Sort of gimps them a bit if your enemy attacks in waves, so it does.

While it's true that the fire warriors are godlike at range, they are so horribly vulnerable to assault type infantry that it's not even funny. This means they have a hell of a time engaging space marrines, chaos or eldar early game (Even fleet of foot guardians set to engage melee will make an absolute mockery of fire warriors by sheer weight of numbers and superior movement speed)

There's another brilliant counter to the Tau, and that's using anything stealth, because thier only detectors units are thier pathfinders which are pitifully weak and easy to kill. No simple HQ detection for the tau, not to mention thier bases are heinously difficult to defend early because they have no stand alone defensive turrets. Basically the way to beat the tau is to defend your base from thier fire warriors early game (simple, because anything that can tank thier fire will kill them and so heavy bolter turrets are a sure fire method of doing this) and tech building destruction vehicles to crush them mid game before they can deploy gunships and other big stuff to stop you. I have never had trouble defeating the tau using this method. For the Space marrines, I get them with dreadnaughts and assault marrines, with the chaos, I use vipers, IG is the easiest with striaght bolter turrets and tech to sentinels. I hate the necron so ignore them. I built enough of my units to defend against an early fire warriror rush, then I get enough anti building tanks and just kill thier main base. Presto Dead tau.

[Shakan'Dar]

I've recently decided that teching the kroot direction is very much better. I have AT LEAST 1 squad of kroot carnivores per fire warrior, to defend them in melee. Anybody sends melee units, my kroot engage them, and the fire warriors take 'em out from range.

Add some skyray gunships for missile disruption, and gg. True, it means I can't get the XV8 crisis suit, but I can get the XV8 one that fires missiles. I build a couple of those, and deploy them as an extra buffer for my fire warriors. It worked against a massive ork army. The killa khan's were easily destroyed with 4 skyrays taking them out, and my kroot carnivore squads stayed in battle, for ages. They were morale broken too, and at the end, each squad had 1 man left, but they survived.

We had an epic finish in front of his base, with his sqiggar taking on my gnarloc, but with all of my fire support, he eventually died.

[My Final Heaven]

That is true, if you go the kroot root, you get some wickedly good tanking stuff, because that is the advantage of the kroot I suppose is thier toughness. Their bloody useless at actually fighting, but give them plenty of corpses to suck on and they won't die easilly, and thier feral leap makes them good for disruption.

Orcs of course, have never been my favorite race for the simple reason that they only work as a swarm, and the AI and pathfinding of the squads is not favourable to a melee swarm. Everything tries to occupy the same spot at once and ends up blocking everything else, so anything that can shoot into it while drawing the AG of the main force is going to slaughter it. It's better now that you can get flash gitz, but they're so damn slow you and short ranged, you have a similar problem just getting them into range.

[Shakan'Dar]

I always hated the fact that if you have a large control group, clicking them to go to one location spreads them out too much. Similarly, a mass attack command leaves half of my fire warriors not shooting at anything, and I end up manually moving each individual squad into a combat effective position.

I find that base assaulting turns into a "feed your army slowly into a meat grinder" deal. If you feed in enough, the meat grinder breaks. At any one time, anywhere between 15-30% of my army is not actually firing at anything.

The kroot, as I said, are only useful for tying up their army. And tie up they do! My main kills were my 3 fire warrior squads, and my 4 skyray gunships pummeling the hell out of their army.