Caltrops - Gamerasutra - Re: Warhammer: Dawn of War demo out

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by FABIO 09/13/2004, 2:14pm PDT

Fussbett wrote:

Generals doesn't have ragdolls, it has canned animations for those explosion-thrown troops. The animations look great though.

Oh :(

I guess I got carried away remembering the time my migs dropped tactical nukes in the middle of multiple angry mobs and it started raining bodies all over the map for the next 30 seconds.

Catch your opponent, who has all machinegun infantry, by surprise with a bunch of tanks? Oops, he just upgraded all those machinegun squads with anti-tank missiles in the middle of the battle.

I think surprising a heavy weaponless squad with tanks is still a win for the tanks, despite the squad being able to upgrade to missiles, due to the queue and wait times for the weapons acquisition.

I just queued up missiles and ran away until the missiles were built then turned around and blasted them. Seemed to work fine.

As individual units in a squad die, you can reinforce them back up to full strength (for a cost) right there on the field. As long as at least one unit in the squad is still alive you can queue up replacements until it's back at full strength. This strikes me as a feature catering to the needs of Kohan players. It's also extremely annoying to reduce a squad to one unit then watch them run off only to be back at full strength a little later.

Isn't that the very essence of "reinforcement"?

That would be new forces coming up. Replacements just teleporting in as long as one unit is still alive just feels cheap. Completely wiping out one squad becomes more effective than decimating two or three down to a single man, which is dumb. Plus, anything that reminds me of Kohan is an instant negative.

Balanced? I guess. Though the assault infantry seemed way too powerful. They're the best at hand to hand combat, have jetpacks that let them quickly close with anyone so they can avoid the ranged combat that they're weak at, and carry anti-vehicle/building grenades that decimate tanks many times more than an anti-tank missile. I never got a single standard infantry squad and seemed better off for it.

Assault squads are the best of the Space Marines and it's their biggest strength, supposedly. Hopefully the other THREE (3!!!) teams have counter units.

There just doesn't seem to be a reason to getting anything but assault squads. The orks didn't have an counter that I could see, unless you count that giant elephant thing that fucked up EVERYTHING I had. I hope in the final version that thing costs a billion dollars and takes a year to build.