Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is a real-time strategy game developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ on September 20, 2004. It is based on the Warhammer 40,000 series, a futuristic fiction universe. In Dawn of War, four races compete for dominance in a single universe: the Eldar, the Marine Spaces, the chaos and the orks. With the game’s expansions (including two standalone), five new factions are added: the Imperial Guard, the Necrons, the Tau, the Battle Sisters and the Black Eldar, leading to nine playable factions in total. The violence and fierce realism of the game’s battles are one of the reasons the Warhammer 40,000 games are so great.

An economy-builder? Nope!

In many real-time strategy games, the best known of which are the Age of Empires, Warcraft or Command and Conquer series, you often need to collect resources (wood, stone, gold, ore, food, etc.) to build bases and units. In Dawn of War, however, the game focuses more specifically on fighting. The player still requires builders, however, to build his/her base to improve their units and overcome the enemy’s armies.

The main types of resources in Warhammer 40,000

Where Dawn of War stands out from the competition is in acquiring the resources needed to build the units. The player must order his infantry units to take so-called “strategic” points, which represent passages forced by his enemies to come to you. These strategic points are represented on the mini-map by a blue square, and allow to increase the requisition rate, which is one of the three resources of the game necessary for the construction of units. In this sense, the more ground the player holds, the better that player’s economy. These points are also vital for the expansion of the bases, because you can not build everywhere on the map, but near key elements of the base, constituted by your command center or listening stations, which need to be precisely built on captured requisition points. Energy is provided by power plants from technologies of each race. Each has two types of plant: a plant to be placed anywhere on the map near the outposts or a command center (main building), and a thermal power station, to be built on special and critical locations.

What is Waaagh!

A third resource is available, but only for Orks players, and this is the funnily-named Waaagh!. Waaagh! is the power that the Orks generate when they are numerous, the more Orks and the more the Waaagh! is powerful, then the more Orks are strong and numerous, and so on. In terms of the game, the Ork player must build a special building called the Waaagh! Banner, which then increases the power of his Ork clan and allows him to recruit more troops and have access to better equipment. This resource, considering the fact that other players have population limits, makes Orks a very powerful and unpredictable race. However, they are surprisingly not played that often in multiplayer games.

To make the solo campaign, the player takes the lead of an army of Space Marines: the Blood Ravens, for the multiplayer game, a player has the choice between Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Eldar and Orks.