The Video Game Revue

Dawn of War - Early Impressions

This rant is particularly for my friend Matt. I've been saying some good things about Dawn of War in the last few days since picking it up (along with New Super Mario Bros., which also rocks), and I wanted to explore some of the reasons that I've been enjoying it--and perhaps even convince Matt himself to partake. In case anyone else is interested in reading this, I'd better toss off a couple of qualifications. First up, I am familiar with Warhammer 40k and think fondly of it, but I am not a devout fan, nor am I well versed in Warhammer 40k as either a game or a fantasy world. This is primarily due to lack of exposure to it. Secondly, I am not a hardcore RTS fan by any stretch of the imagination. I'm well versed in the development of the genre to an extent, particularly in that I've spent hours playing a wide variety of RTS games (WarCraft II and III, StarCraft, Rise of Nations, Age of Empires III, Z, and Highway to the Reich are some of the highlights), but I'm the kind of guy who only has a shot at winning a round of StarCraft at a LAN party if nobody of any real skill shows up.

As for Matt, he's not the kind of guy who wins the StarCraft LAN party either, but there's a very good reason for that. Matt is specifically the kind of RTS fan who loathes heavy micro-management and resents that most RTS games boil down to the winner being the player with the best mouse skills. Matt wants an RTS game that lets him play the role of the military strategist--where smart planning, knowing how to best employ the equipment in the field, and tactics are the factors that win the day. He especially enjoys turn-based games like Master of Orion II, The Operational Art of War, and Galactic Civilizations II. I admire his taste in strategy wargames, and I myself experience a lot of the same rush that he gets out of them.

On the other hand, there is that part of me that kind of enjoys the busy-body appeal of micro-management heavy RTS games, otherwise I could never have had as much fun with Age of Empires III as I've had. AoE III is extremely micro-management heavy: all at once you have to manage large numbers of civilian units gathering several different types of resources (fishing for food, hunting for food, gathering berries for food, chopping trees for wood, mining for gold), constructing buildings (houses to manage your population cap, barracks for infantry, stables for calvary, a machine shop for seige weapons, a livestock pen for even more food, various structures for technological advancements, military constructions including watchtowers and forts), a technology tree with various dimensions (cycling through your buildings looking for various upgrades), scores of military units (easily dozens at a time), and all kinds of odds and ends (an explorer unit capable of gathering treasure, a system of organizing supply shipments sent to the new world from your home land, diplomacy with other players, and even moving individual livestock units to be fattened and slaughtered for food.) AoE III is a fun, addictive game with great production value that offers a very entertaining experience when you're up for it, but it is also a textbook example of a micro-management heavy RTS. Personally, I find AoE III to be the single most micro-management heavy RTS game that I've ever played, and I think that it's actually intened to be part of the appeal. For reasons that are obvious to Matt, I would not recommend AoE III to him.

A much more interesting question is whether or not Matt would enjoy Dawn of War. I'm convinced that he would, and in particular I'm going to outline some reasons why I think that the micro-management in Dawn of War isn't out of control. In most ways, Dawn of War conforms to the standard RTS format popularized largely by StarCraft. The period key cycles through your contruction units (civilians in most RTS games), although not just your idle ones (as is the case in AoE III and others) which, amazingly, turns out not to be a big problem (more on that in a minute.) CTRL-# makes a group out of the units you have selected, and you use the corresponding number key to select that group again. You get the idea. What's really different about Dawn of War are the measures that it takes to alleviate the sheer amount of clicking around that such an RTS game typically demands, which lets you focus on tactics and strategies.

There are only two types of explicit resources that need to be gathered in Dawn of War: Requisition and Power (meaning electricity, not "power.") Requisition is constantly being accumulated, but the rate depends on how many strategic points you control--a system that reminds me of Z. You can also construct buildings on captured strategic points to increase the rate at which you gain requisition. As for Power, like Requisition it is constantly being accumulated, but you must construct power generator buildings to create any. You are not required to assign any units to the task of gathering requisition or power--the most that you ever have to do is order the construction of some buildings, and not in large numbers. One very nice effect that this immediately has is that you usually don't need very many civilian units to construct buildings. I've played small maps with as few as three constructor units managing all of my needs for the entire game. This stands in stark contrast to games like Rise of Nations, Age of Empires III, and even the classic StarCraft where my first move is usually to select the Town Hall equivalent and hit SHIFT-V to queue up the building of 5 civilian units (usually followed soon after by another 10 builders and harvesters, no matter what the map size is.) In an RTS like AoE III, civilian resource gatherers frequently make up a large portion of the population of my empire right up through the late stages of the game. Not having to deal with that in DoW frees up a lot of time and attention for fighting.

I imagine that the game designers for Dawn of War noticed that having lots of military units is part of what makes RTS games fun, because people love seeing those massive armies charge at each other like the warriors in Braveheart. The problem is that micro-managing between 20 and 60 individual units is a pain in the ass, even when you can group them and easily sub-select the units by type within that group (which, admittedly, helps a whole lot.) DoW's solution is that you do not construct individual Space Marines or other infantry types; rather, you construct entire squads, and manage each squad as a unit. Space Marine squads start with three Space Marines, and to add more you select the squad and hit a button to queue up the addition of reinforcements. These reinforcements spawn with the squad in the field, thereby helping a great deal to alleviate the annoying problem of having an army group in the field and having to move more units from your home base out to bolster that force (perhaps even in merely wanting to replace units that were killed in battle.) This squad-based system works well, although it is not applied to vehicles--but then, vehicles are not constructed in numbers counting in the dozens, so this is not really an issue.

Another thing that the creators of Dawn of War noticed is that quite often you want to construct a special unit--a commander, healer, or whatever--and have that unit tag along with a larger group to fill a special role. Dawn of War formalizes this process by having an "attach to group" command for special units that has them join a squad (these units can also detach so you can reassign them or use them individually.) One limitation imposed by Dawn of War, to prevent you from creating unreasonably strong squads, is that you can only attach one special unit to each squad. This system is fairly convenient, although it does add some complexity.

There is one aspect of Dawn of War which I've so far found to be fairly micro-management heavy, and that is in technology and upgrade management. Staying on top of your squads is not a huge task given that you're generally keeping close tabs on what they're doing at all times anyway, so it's easy to track which ones are not at full strength and which ones need new equipment--you can even check up on that in the heat of battle. The main factor here is that squad management does not generally require zooming back to your home base, unless it's to replace a special unit or a squad that was eliminated. Zooming back to your home base in order to construct new buildings and research new tech, on the other hand, is a definite distraction from the action occuring on your frontlines. DoW does not have a massive tech tree or a particularly large set of buildings to manage, but relative to the amount of micro-management that is present in the rest of the game, this is one area that conforms more to the stereotypical RTS.

Of course, the advantage to having some meaty tech management in a game like Dawn of War is that it creates interesting strategic decisions. In much the same manner that the order in which one chooses to research tech in a game like Civilizations or GalCiv II influences one's military strategies, how one manages one's tech tree in DoW is an important aspect of the game. One has to balance whether it is more important to spend resources on building more military units versus researching better military tech, and one has to make decisions on which military techs deserve priority over others. With the Space Marines, for example, one generally starts with a few scout squads to grab territory early on. Once the regular marines hit the battlefield, though, the scout squads generally only survive by staying out of sight (they can be equipped with sniper rifles, which is awesome.) Similarly, while those regular Space Marines will serve you well through the middle stretch of the game, you can't survive on them alone once your opponents start deploying vehicles and, especially, Space Marine Terminators. Essentially, Dawn of War has a tech race element, and I've known Matt to enjoy a good tech race.

There is a big question mark here in that Dawn of War does require a fair amount of micro-management, by what I imagine Matt's standards to be. After all, DoW is a relatively stereotypical RTS experience (except, perhaps, in-so-much as that it's one of the most exceptionally enjoyable RTS games I've personally ever played), by which I mean to say that it isn't as strictly strategy-oriented as an RTS like Z or Highway to the Reich. It's just that relative to Rise of Nations and Age of Empires III, both of which I've really enjoyed over the past three years, Dawn of War has relatively little micro-management, which is a big part of its explosive appeal for me personally. Underscoring this question mark is the fact that I've only played a few hours of DoW so far; only time will tell how I end up feeling about this game down the road.

In any case, it was a damned good deal at the value-pack price of $30.

posted by Parappa @ 8:24 PM