Please tell me Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War sucks

Cafe Society
1

…so I won’t feel bad for not being able to play it.

You see, back in the depths of my roleplaying youth, one of the guys in the group’s brother kept babbling about this game Warhammer 40k. Whatever. Then, I took a look at the books. For some reason, my mind was in the perfect set of conditions to become obsessed with the peculiarly British artwork, feel and general mood of the game. The pictures were cool, the setting was so over the top as to move beyond self-parody and the miniatures were freakin’ beautiful.

So, we swiped a couple of the books and tried to play. We estimated that it would cost about $100/player to actually work up an army to even start the game, not including time and money painting. So, we tried adapting it to some 1:72 guys I had laying around.

That failed.

So, I gave up and over the years kept picking up the various books and etc., seeing what was available and generally saying, “one of these days, I should get into this.” Of course, Jr. high turned into high school, high school turned into girlfriends and then college happened and I lost interest in that sort of thing completely. Of course, I stopped thinking about 40k after having seen a tournament. At first I thought that they went too far in getting the atmosphere for their jungle-planet battle just right, what with strange scents and mists and the humidity.

Then I realized that this was what happened when you put hundreds of 40k players in a room together for days.

Then I realized that this is what happened when you got two 40k players in a room for half an hour.

Fast forward some years and I find out about the Dawn of War. Wow, it looks beautiful. I hear that the game play is very close to the actual game without all the dice rolling and that the flavor (special units, strengths, weaknesses, etc.) is exactly what the players have been imagining for umpteen years. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars and countelss hours painting shit, I now have [most of] the entirety of the game at my fingertips. In short, it is the perfect game.

Except that I have a PIII 1 gig and the game needs at least 1.5 Ghz (I also need a halfway decent video card although I think my sound card might be able to handle it). Desperate, I tried downloading the demo to see if that would work, but alas, it gets saved as an extensionless file.

So, please, please please tell me that this game sucks and I won’t feel bad for not being able to spend $1,000 to upgrade my computer to play it.*

Maybe it’s just that Warhammer is getting it’s final revenge on me.

*Alternately, you could chastise me for whining about a video game. I’m cool with that.

2

I’ve only played the demo, but based on that, I’m afraid to report that the game totally rocks.

3

Well, I can’t say anything about Dawn of War, since I’ve never been interested enough in Warhammer40K to take a look at the demo. I’ve been focused on Kohan: Kings of War instead, which comes out tomorrow. However, I will point out that you hardly need to spend $1000 to upgrade your computer. You can probably spend less than half of that.

A good graphics card is ~$150, and you can get a motherboard and 2.0+ GHz CPU, plus 512 Mb memory, for ~$350. Or, alternatively, you can go pick up the bottom-end Dell for $500 and just plug in a better graphics card. But the graphics card is the key piece, and will probably give you enough graphics oomph to play the game, if a bit slowly.

Just trying to be helpful. :slight_smile:

4

If you need a Warhammer 40K fix, try Googling for Final Liberation. It’s an older game (1997) so it should have no problem with your P3.