I was a big fan of Warhammer 40K as a teen and still have a soft spot for it now, however I’ve never been a big fan of RTS games. But after seeing the trailer for the first Dawn of War, I’m seriously considering giving it a try. So what’s it like? Is it any good? How faithful is it to the tabletop game? Is Dawn of War 2 any better?
It has no relationship with the tabletop game whatsoever besides the setting, units and weapons. Dawn of War is a quick paced real-time strategy game, and DoW2 is even faster paced (albeit focusing on fewer units at a time).
As RTS go, I liked them, both because I’m a 40k fan, and because they’re good games. I utterly suck at them, but I like 'em 
I’d rank DoW 1 above Company of Heroes, if that speaks to you. DoW 2 is a different beast - you start with 4 squads, and that’s all you’re going to get. No buildings to construct, no resources to harvest, no teching up. The entire focus of the game is on the real time tactics aspect : using cover and buildings, using the right abilities at the right time, flanking, laying suppressive fire etc…
Note that I haven’t played either in multiplayer - like I said, I’m rubbish at RTS’s But in any case, I believe there’s a demo for DoW 1 out there, why not try it out, see if you like it ?
Oh, and if you do end up getting DoW 1 : the Winter Assault expansion is all right, the Dark Crusade is even better (and stand-alone, though you’ll only get to play as the Necrons and Tau if you don’t have the previous games) - but do NOT get Soulstorm, under any circumstance.
It’s rubbish, unbalanced, breaks half the game, the new armies don’t bring anything to the table and the voice work is… err… well I can’t find an adjective worse than “abysmal” so I’ll settle for that, as a euphemism. Even the devs agree : in the second game one of the Space Marines mentions the Soulstorm campaign in character, and says something to the amount of “one of the darkest pages of our chapter’s history. Let us not speak about it again.”
DOW2 sounds like much more my thing then - I’ve never been one for harvesting resources, etc. I assume the graphics are fantastic, but are you stuck just playing Space Marines or do you get to command squads from any of the other races?
The single player campaign is Space Mehreens or nothing, as is the Chaos Rising expansion. You can play Eldars, Orks, Tyranids and Chaos in multiplayer (or single player skirmishes).
Note that what I said applies mostly to the single player game - skirmishes do involve resources and teching up to some extent, although not as pro-eminently as, say, Command & Conquer or Starcraft.
Keeping in mind that the resources especially in DoW1 are gathered on a “stream” basis, and mostly by owning territory–that is, you build power plants and forget about them, and you get “requisition” points by taking and holding territory points, not by building peons.
I am a bigger fan of DoW1 solely because I like having reasonably large battles, although the battles are still on a very personal scale–on the order of one-two command units, eightish squads of infantry and 3-6 vehicles.
I loved DOW1 because you could build credible defensive strongpoints, which is rare in a RTS game.
You could simply get the demoes for both games off Steam and try them out for free.
As has already been pointed out but not entirely clearly, there is no “resource harvesting” in Dawn of War. To clarify further, there are two resources Requisiton and Power(Okay, except for the Orks, who have some sort of “Ork” resource I don’t care to explain, and the Necrons, who don’t actually use requisition at all.)
Requisition is “gathered” by controlling strategic points on the map by claiming them with an infantry unit, and you can increase the rate of resource gain from those points by building fortifications on top of them. Not exactly “Send peons (SCVs) to chop wood (Gather Vespene Gas)”.
Power is gotten by…building generators. There are two types “standard” generators which you can build anywhere, but only up to ten (I think, it’s been a while), and “special” generators (Names are deliberately vague here, because everyone’s buildings are called something different) which can only be built on specific locations, but which generate more power and are outside your maximum generator cap.
So really, resource gathering in DoW consists of: Building/defending your base (Power) and controlling and fortifying strategic points on the map (Requisition, Power to some extent.).
Thematically, DoW is a lot of fun and very stylish. Unit caps are a bit lower and units are a little easier to manage than some RTS games due to most infantry being on a “squad” basis, where troops are automatically commanded as groups.
As has been said though, no relation to the tabletop game at all. There was never any intention of it - lets face it, the tabletop rules are…uh… tabletop wargame rules. They’re built and tuned with that in mind. The only way to adapt them faithfully would have been to just build the tabletop rules with, essentially, an automatic dice roller, which, I can assure you, wouldn’t have sold like DoW did. 
This is a different kind of game set in the same universe.
Although there are some very credible mods that push it much closer to a tabletop-type experience in realtime, or else just rebalance the game to make it more fun/competitive. DOWPro is practically required in my group of players, for example.
i’m not really sure I can -grasp- the concept of a “tabletop experience in realtime” since one of the defining characteristics of the tabletop game is its utter non-realtimeness. But yes, there are doubtless a jillion mods and fan patches you can get that will adjust the rules. That’s par for the course these days. The downside is that they all fracture the community - if you like the LongLiveTheEmperor mod, and someone else prefers the Waaaaagh mod (All names invented), you can’t play one another, unless you both revert to the vanilla game. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it’s something be aware of when thinking about how awesome mods are.
oddly enough I literally was asking myself this question the other day, as my friend has just gotten me into some Warhammer 40k stuff, so I borrowed DOW off him and installed it on the win7 partition of my macbook (I dunno if it’ll handle DOW2). I haven’t had time to play more than the first part of the tutorial, though.
That’s disappointing. I had a Dark Eldar army back when I played the tabletop game and one of the things that attracted me to Dawn of War was getting to play with them. Are there any mods that rebalance the game if you’ve added on Soulstorm?
AFAIK, the only attempt at a computer conversion of the tabletop game was Final Liberation 13 years ago.
Yeah, but it wasn’t even a faithful one at that. And it was over too quickly :(.
BloodBowl is pretty much a 1:1 conversion though, and as far as I can tell it had some success, so there’s hope yet. If only they’d do one for Necromunda. I wouldn’t care if it was an ASCII art buggy freeware that only ran in Swahili on a specific version of BeOS : it would be the best video game of all time. Of all time !
ETA @**wolf **: no idea. As I said, I don’t do multiplayer and the single player campaign is really, offendingly atrocious. It would still be so with stellar game mechanics.
I haven’t played Dawn of War 1 yet, but I am playing DoW 2 right now and it’s awesome. It isn’t at all faithful to the 40k tabletop rules, but it does definitely give the feel that tromping around with a buncha space marines ought to.
Just be advised that DoW 2 is definitely Real Time (squad-based) Strategy. You only get four fireteams of 1-5 peeps per mission, so it’s less about sweeping grand strategy and more about knowing how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your 4 fireteams in any situation.
There is a bit of an action-RPG component to it as well, as you pick up random gear drops each mission and increase each fireteam leader’s stats and special abilities as he gains experience, but I think that actually vastly increases the replayability, since the levelling scheme is flexible enough to let you take most characters in a number of directions.
Case in point, my first game had 3/4 main squads as melee experts chainsawing their way through the map- now three of them are ranged experts, and their job is to set up a killzone and wait while my jetpack-powered melee guy lures enemies into the dakka.
So I think you would enjoy it. ^^
I gather that part of the problem with SoulStorm was that it was out and out buggy, and I’m not sure if that’s something a modder can fix. There certainly are mods out there that claim to fix the balance issues - I found this in about 15 seconds of google time, so I daresay you won’t have any trouble.
Well, the virtue of DOW1 is that literally almost everyone either plays stock or DowPro.
As for the “more like tabletop”, I meant in things like “slower movement speeds”, “increased effects of morale and cover”, and “more customization options”.