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Must Have RTS

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 28 / 28
Date: April 24, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Dawn of War is, in my opinion, one of the best Real Time Strategy games ever.
For those who dont know what a real time strategy is;
It's a strategy game, (think chess or stratego)where players dont take turns but rather move their pieces simultaneously across the board or battle field. This results in the necessity to think very quickly and excersise strategies on the fly.

While a lot of Real Time Strategy or RTS games force the players to micro-manage resources in order to maintain/strengthen and increase their army, Dawn of War allots resources based on the capture and control of key points located on the field of battle.
This is what really sets the game apart from others of it's kind.
Rather than spend time making sure your pawns are gathering wood or gold, time can be devoted to focusing on the battle at hand and reassessing strategies as well as managing attacks and tactical retreats.

I would strongly recommend that a parent play the game before allowing younger children to play, while it is an excellent mental excersize, the game is set in a futuristic war and can be pretty grisly, blood can be turned off however and bodies can be set to dissapear as soon as they're defeated rather than lay strewn across the landscape.

The expansion pack included with the Gold Version includes and all new single player campaign as well as a whole new playable team or "race". Each Race has it's own individual strengths and weakness so learning these and exploiting them as a commander can be key in beating the game or winning against friends.
The game is also set to have another expansion in the near future that will add 2 more races to the roster for a total of 7 different armies to choose from.

The fighting is excellent and features some of the most intricate animations you'll see in any RTS, special attacks and deaths will happen at random giving the battles a sense of realism and really showcase the loving attention that went into the game.

The graphics are great and while they wont stack up to some of the newer titles being released they still give the game a great sense of atmosphere and individuality.

The online community is not as large as a few others but I'm the kind of player who prefers to play with close friends or against the computer anyway, since online communities can tend to get pretty immature and aggravating.

Again if you like strategy games or Real Time Strategy game this one is worth your time and money. I've been playing the game for about a year and a half now and have yet to get tired of it.

Very fun, enjoyable, and excellent value

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: August 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The gold edition is a highly recommended for RTS fans. The game graphics and animation is stunning, being able to zoom in full detail (with a computer with enough 3D graphics power) makes viewing the replay very entertaining.

The Winter War expansion includes the Imperial Guard, who are weak in ground troops (max squad size reduced from 15 in the original game down to 10. Their strength is in vehicles, more notably the artillery Ballisk and Russ tanks. Heavy infantry Ogryns gives them staying power, but are only available as their "tech" level develops.

Another downside is that the new programming reduces the strength and staying power of the Space Marines too. Their health upgrades only occur once they advance get to Level 1, no longer do they have the health upgrades at Level 0 and 1. This makes a big difference in multiplayer mode where Orks can simply rush and hack their way to victory, it is very hard to kill Orks in close combat with basic level units. It becomes very difficult to defeat the computer in Hard mode as they get their leader unit at the start. Trying to kill a leader unit with basic infantry units for any race is impossible. The only way to counter a quick rush is to quickly build listening posts and weapons platforms for defense against their avenue of attack.

The Winter War expansion campaign consists of 5 Order and 5 Disorder missions. The last two missions for each side can be played as one of four races, Human or Eldar for the Order, Chaos or Ork for the Disorder. Each mission for each race occurs on the same battlefield map, but each has separate mission objectives. Basically the player gets to fight each battle from each different side, pretty neat playability concept.

The fourth mission is perhaps the toughest one to complete as the player is not only competing against the other side, but also the other "ally". They key to finishing the 4th scenario is to pick one side to play and stick with it. It is not designed to have the player play both "allies" and win, only on side can win the mission.

The fifth and final mission pits the victor fighting one final battle against not only their arch enemy, but also the Necrons. Each race has to perform special tasks to win and defeat the Necrons. For the Imperial Guard, the key is to fortify and develop defense in depth before attempting to rebuild the Titan, landmines really slow down the Necrons. The player will also need a couple of Russ tanks and four artillery Ballisks to defeat the Necrons. The other races don't have the luxury of time and will have to balance developing their defenses and accomplishing the special tasks.

This game is very enjoyable if one want to simply play by building units and fighting battles. This is not a resource gathering game like Rise of Nations or Empire Earth. The player is often capped at three "builder" units, which fits the game really well, there are only two resources to collect (requisition points by capturing strategic locations and energy by building generators). Once a resource collection structure is built, it automatically generates so the player isn't distracted in having to assign more "workers" to harvest resources like in other real time strategy games.

Each race also gets a "super unit" if they are able to capture an artifact location. For the Orks (who are really fun to play) it is the Squiggoth, for the Imperials it is the Baneblade super tank, the Eldar and Chaos get their super warrior / demon while the Space Marines get the Rhino tank/ transported (personally prefer the Predator tank myself).

The game has relatively small armies and limited battlefields. The game is typically capped out to approximately 6-10 squads and 5-8 vehicles per race. The battlefields are well balanced, each starting area is given the exact same strategic locations and are a mirror image of each other. However, there are only a few main attack avenues and with the small number of units, it makes developing two attack groups and one defense group hard to perform. Once a player is able to advance and secure an opponent's strategic location, their forces are reduced and will need time to reinforce before continuing to advance, by then the opponent may have already recovered and will be ready to slug it out again. Had there been bigger battlefields and larger armies available, a player could continue to attack and exploit success with a follow-on attack, like in Starcraft of Age of Empires 2 (both can have max population of 200 with very large playing areas).

Bottom line, one of my friends described it the best, W40K Dawn of War is like playing paintball-speedball/ laser tag, quick and balanced playing fields. Age of Empires 2 is like playing a paintball game in a field, larger area to cover, more players, not always balanced terrain, and takes more time to finish. All are fun to play.

The Best RTS Ever!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: June 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is amazing. The races (Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Orks, Eldar, and if your playing Winter Assualt, Imperial Guard) are awesome and have a great backstory. The graphics well umm, I tried the game on my labtop and OMG the graphics were amazing, every particle and detail was seen! The campaign is great, considering the many RTS games that don't. It kind of plays like Warcraft 3, in a way. There is one simple rule BAK (Build And Kill) as I like to say, because that's what you really actually do. You start off on each mission with a stronghold or something else (depending on the race, but they work the same) and you build your worker, he builds stuff. You then send him to build a few buildings, and you can them make troops, this is how the game functions in a way. That's definetly not how you are going to win. There are Critical Points (Which depending on your objective can win you that mission,) Strategic Points (Which give you more requistion to spend,) and the Relics (which are things that are suppose to let you build more troops. You capture these before the opposing force does so he won't have much of a chance of winning.
This makes the game even more strategic and unique. One thing small that kind of sets this game apart from other RTS games is this game has gore! lots and lots gore, but it isn't to bad for a kid to get, thinking about other games like God Of War. Oh and another thing that's sets this game apart is the army painter. This as the name implies, paints your army and vehicles. The vehicles are awesome, ranging from tanks to a massive creature. This game has many cool weapons, like the flamethrower (which is one of my favorites.) Multiplayer is awesome and fun. This game is truly amazing and the best RTS ever.

A revolutionary RTS.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: November 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Me and my friends simply love this game. Even the ones who've never actually liked RTS games enjoyed it. Well instead of making long paragraphs overviewing the game i'm just going to give you a list of the pros and cons of the game :)

Pros:
- Amazing graphics!
- Runs very smoothly in any multiplayer game as long as you have minimum requirements to play.
- If the host dies or leaves the game the game doesnt end :)
- A team for every player. Some may like customization of their team, others like strategy, and some just want to blow things up with brute force :D.
- Interesting campaign for each team.
- Plenty of maps to play on and if you dont have anyone to play with theres always a challenging skirmish mode with AI.
- Game relies on capture points and power instead of gathering resources.
- Ingame mod manager so you can have multiple mods that you choose to activate.
- Little or no glitches in the game.

Cons:
- Inablity to increase the unit cap limit without downloading a mod.
- Installation is long with several disks
- Some of the ingame characters can be annoying when they talk.
- Game can become somewhat repititive over time.

Verdict:
This game delivers some great singleplayer and multiplayer action. You'll find that even those who wouldnt normally play RTSs' will find this game fun, addicting, and easy to get used to. The game simply takes everything great from the other RTSs' like Red Alert and Ground Control and leaves out the bad parts such as slow tedious resource gathering. The thing that makes this game different from any other game is the variety of teams, you wont have 1 or 2 but 5 teams to choose from (7 if you get Dark Crusade). Ill give this game 5 stars but 4 stars for fun because I'd like to see more multiplayer options such a better spawnpoint selector and a changeable unit cap limit.

I love this game and my friends agree as I quote "If you can get a bunch of people who hate RTSs' to like one, then you've got a pretty good game"

Not a DVD

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: April 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is great fun, but FYI this is not a DVD-ROM (despite item description) but 5 CD's. Again, great game, just not nicely compacted onto a single DVD as I assumed it would be from the listing.

Dawn of War > Command and Conquer

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: December 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War series is quite possibly the best RTS available at the moment. I've played every Command and Conquer title, Star Wars: Empire at war, Civilization and Age of Empires. Each of those games have their own merits, but Dawn of War comes out on top of the pile in my opinion.

It has an outstanding visual presentation as well as a novel resource system. Tired of your ore harvesters driving through an enemy base or refusing to automatically return with their full load? Not an issue here. The strategic point system allows for a one-time capture, assuming you can hold off your opponent, and provides a steady source of income similar to Age of Empires III villagers.

The tech tree follows the usual pattern, so fans of other RTSs like C&C won't get smashed by the learning curve. Dawn of War incorporates a unit cap similar to Blizzard's Warcraft and Starcraft titles, so you don't get buried under an endless wave of level one infantry. The AI is brilliant, however, so if you aren't careful they will still bury you with a finite wave of infantry. Multiplayer skirmishes against the AI can be brutal; the intelligence level at Hard and beyond is easily a match for most experienced gamers, while Easy is just too easy and Normal works just about right for a novice or casual player.

The game runs well enough on lesser systems, so long as the user isn't foolish enough to try and max out the video settings; the onscreen action gets rather involved during longer or larger matches. On higher end systems, Dawn of War absolutely flies. I'm running on an Nvidia Geforce 7900GT, Athlon 64 x2 3800+ processor, 2gb of Corsair RAM with an ASUS motherboard. With the visual settings maxed out, I've never experienced any technical issues with Dawn of War and it looks amazing.

Basically Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is one of the best, if not the best, RTS games on the market today.

Great game, but 5 CD's not a single DVD :(

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: May 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Quite simply, this game is one of the best RTS games ever made. It's complex though---learning a race will take you quite a lot of practice. But you can get good replays from sites such as Dawn of War Sanctuary. Anyway, I'm a huge Warcraft III fan and feel that Dawn of War is competitive in quality.

Dawn of War Gold Edition

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: August 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game lives up to the title of Game of the Year. I am very happy with the Game.

Excellent Game!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: November 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is hands down the leader of a new generation of RTS games. (With "Company of Heros" at it's heels.)

Whether you are a fan of Warhammer 40k or Starcraft this game will blow you away. (I only hope Starcraft 2 can hold a candle to this game.) You don't need to know anything about the 40k universe to enjoy this game. It has the best graphics I've ever seen in an RTS and will have you hooked instantly.

I could rattle on about all the pros and the lack of cons but you should be out buyng this game already!

Tight game, great with Dark Crusade Expansion

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: January 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Get this and the Dark Crusade Expansion to have access to 3 versions of single player and all 7 races in multi-player! Definitely worth it! (unless you plan to play exclusively Tau and Necron in multi-player, or without those 2 races).

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