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Dawn of War Gold; Demo Out
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Relic's Dawn of War has gone gold, and is due out on September 20th. Published by THQ, Dawn of War is a Real-time Strategy game based in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It's gotten a few previews so far - but why trust them when you can grab the demo? Unfortunately, a quick jog through Google didn't turn up any torrents."
3dgamers has a torrent running, I used it.. yesterday after reading about this on penny-arcade. It's a pretty quick torrent, and I should probably start seeding again for the /. crowd.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I agree - at first glance, this game is pretty well done. I don't know much about the Warhammer universe, but the ways resource gathering and troop building are implemented make a LOT more sense than other RTS games. Instead of having harvesters gather "ore" and "building" infantry, capturing and keeping strategic points gives the player an influx of "prestige", if you will, and troops are dropped down from orbit (for Space Marines, at least). One quibble I have is that the troops don't really exit from the building structures; they just sort of appear. But I also like the fact that individual Marine squads can be upgraded and reinforced.
Unfortunately, the demo does not even install under Cedega (The program formerly known as winex) - the installer hangs with 100% at the end :-(
I have found it to be a beautiful, and fun RTS game. That said, it is an RTS game, so those looking for something similar to the table top experience might be disappointed.
Some of the concepts like "cover" don't appear to be as fully fleshed out as they could have been. In general though the game plays well, and the units are diverse, interesting, and it takes time to recognize how to use each one well (things like "jump" abilities and grenades can make big difference if you use them right).
It is definately a game I will be picking up when it comes out.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
The devs yanked the 1.3 reinforce system because it ruined balance. A dev posted this on the relic forums:
"The reason we removed the reinforce time modifier in 1.4 is that it threw unit balance completely out of wack. We'd spent months balancing all the units against one another using an established reinforce time, and changing that time basically threw all that work out the window (the Orks in particular suffered with this change). We would have had to re-balance the units practically from scratch, and that was far too great a risk so close to shipping."
He also mentions his intention to try to see the "reinforcements come much more slowly in battle" system reimplemented at some point (in a different post)
"The most frustrating thing about this whole issue for us is that I think we're 'all' in agreement. Reinforcement mods were a great addition in 1.3, and I want them back right now. That very fact should show how serious we consider this balance issue to be that we would stall putting in a change that we all agree will make the game better in the long run.
I say stall because no, we aren't going to let this one rest. We can't re-visit this issue for release (which should give you an idea of how close we are), but unless lightning strikes me down we will re-visit it."
So there you have it, why the reinforcement system in 1.3 was removed.