Sid
4th April 2008, 22:42
I’m fairly bored and so I’ve decided to write a Dawn of War (multiplayer) tutorial. I don’t intend on proof reading it, nor do I intend to follow any set structure, so I apologize if there’s any silly errors.
Dawn of War takes a long time to get good at, and requires hours upon hours of practice, and trial & error. It isn’t as simple as just working out a certain build order and always doing that. You will need to change your build depending upon the race of your opponent and be able to adapt quickly depending upon the units your opponent throws at you. I’m not going to be able to get anywhere near explaining half of Dawn of War, so I’ll just try to cover the main points, and hopefully provide a few eye-openers for folk who are just beginning to get into the game.
The first thing that needs to be stressed to new players is: this is not ‘Command & Conquer’. You should not be trying to build up a massive army and then attack; you should be constantly harassing the opponent from the first minute of the game. If you sit and “turtle” (hide inside your base “teching” / massing troops), you will lose “map control” i.e. the opponent who has pressured early will hold the majority of the Strategic Points (SPs) and will have a requisition (req) advantage. If you let your opponent have a req advantage for any length of time, the game is already lost.
Secondly, you must take the time to establish what all the units are and what their strengths are. For example, Space Marines (SM) have Scouts (which are cheap, fast, and quick at capping SPs), Tactical Space Marines (TSM) (which are the standard SM unit and do a decent amount of ranged and close combat (CC) damage), the Force Commander (FC) (who is the first hero unit, is insanely tough and deals an insane amount of CC and ranged damage), etc. When I first started playing Dawn of War I couldn’t believe it when someone informed me that the my single FC could kill an entire squad of TSM in both ranged and CC. Similarly I couldn’t believe it that folk would even bother using scouts for anything other than SP-capping, given that they’re so weak, but in fact, scouts in numbers can do serious damage, or sending a scout squad into CC with an enemy ranged squad can help ease the fire from some of your other troops.
There are far too many different unit types to talk about and I’m not going to, it’s up to you to work it out. To help, if you click on a unit / squad during a game it will tell you the unit’s damage in both ranged and CC, and it will tell you the health of the squad. By doing this, I can see that a Chaos Raptor squad does 49-59 damage per second (DPS) in CC and has health of 1620; a squad of TSM does 32-39 DPS in CC and has a health of 1560 – this tells me that under no circumstances do I ever want to let a raptor squad get into CC with my TSM squad, which leads nicely onto the next item – micro.
The term “micro” is short for micro management, which refers to managing each of your squads’ movements, attacks etc. The scenario that I painted above, with the Raptors CCing the TSM should never be allowed to happen. The difficulty comes when the Chaos player simply needs to select his Raptors to attack your TSM squad, and then they will constantly chase the TSM around trying to CC until one of the squads is dead. This means that, in order to keep your TSM alive, you need to constantly run them around the map (dancing), to avoid CC. Dancing is a skill that isn’t too hard to master. The main problem arises when you need to do this for 2+ squads simultaneously, for example, his Raptors are trying to CC your TSM meanwhile his Cultists are trying to CC your scouts. It is likely that this area of the game will be a complete mess at first, it just gets better with once you really practice. Dawn of War enables you to “hotkey” squads to numbers which can help, but that is outside the scope of this tutorial.
So far, I’ve just blabbered on about the basics of requisition, unit combat and microing, but how does this all fit together, what should you be doing when the game starts? Well, it really depends upon the race you are and the race you’re playing against. I’m going to assume that you’re a SM player. You start with a Stronghold, a builder, 1000 starting req, and 100 starting power. From your Stronghold you can build either Scouts or more builders. Assuming I ignore a few of the more extreme tactics, your initial task is to build your Barracks with your first builder, and you will want to start building scout squads to cap your SPs. As a general rule, you want a minimum of 2 scout squads, or up to 5 of them on a bigger map. At first, you want to practice getting good at capping SPs quickly. Learn how to queue units from buildings and how to queue scouts to cap SPs one after the other. Practice against an easy computer player until you can get all your SPs capped in the optimum time – your scout squads should never be sitting around doing nothing! In addition to capping your SPs with your scouts, you must micro your builders (after your barracks is finished) to place Listening Posts (LPs) on the SPs the instant that every point has finished being capped – this prevents an enemy unit de-capping your point and it earns you extra req once the LP is finished.
You may find that while you can cap and put LPs on the SPs around your base fairly easily, you may run into your opponent when trying to cap the SPs near the middle of the map. Unless you’re particularly clever, or your opponent is particularly bad, you aren’t going to be able to cap the SP that you’re fighting over unless you’ve got a better army (and remember, you don’t want to let your opponent get a req. advantage) so what units should you build to ensure that it’s you that caps that SP? Well, now that your barracks is finished, you’ll have the option of either the FC or TSM. The FC costs 260 req and 50 power, takes an 57 seconds to build, and is a complete beast – doing 157-192 DPS in CC, 66-80 in ranged and having 1875 health. A TSM squad costs 190 req, takes 26s to build, and does 32-39 DPS in CC or 28-34 DPS in ranged. There are lots of potential builds to go for but I’m going to step up and say that, as a beginner, you should always build the Force Commander as soon as the Barracks is finished building and then follow him with a TSM squad, and maybe a 2nd if needed.
So you’ve build your FC and 2 TSM squads. It is now essential that you make these purchases worthwhile. If you aren’t going to use these units straight away, you would’ve been better spending the resources on improving your economy or teching. That is to say, you must be constantly using / doing damage with the troops that you have built.
That’s it for now. More to follow later perhaps.
Dawn of War takes a long time to get good at, and requires hours upon hours of practice, and trial & error. It isn’t as simple as just working out a certain build order and always doing that. You will need to change your build depending upon the race of your opponent and be able to adapt quickly depending upon the units your opponent throws at you. I’m not going to be able to get anywhere near explaining half of Dawn of War, so I’ll just try to cover the main points, and hopefully provide a few eye-openers for folk who are just beginning to get into the game.
The first thing that needs to be stressed to new players is: this is not ‘Command & Conquer’. You should not be trying to build up a massive army and then attack; you should be constantly harassing the opponent from the first minute of the game. If you sit and “turtle” (hide inside your base “teching” / massing troops), you will lose “map control” i.e. the opponent who has pressured early will hold the majority of the Strategic Points (SPs) and will have a requisition (req) advantage. If you let your opponent have a req advantage for any length of time, the game is already lost.
Secondly, you must take the time to establish what all the units are and what their strengths are. For example, Space Marines (SM) have Scouts (which are cheap, fast, and quick at capping SPs), Tactical Space Marines (TSM) (which are the standard SM unit and do a decent amount of ranged and close combat (CC) damage), the Force Commander (FC) (who is the first hero unit, is insanely tough and deals an insane amount of CC and ranged damage), etc. When I first started playing Dawn of War I couldn’t believe it when someone informed me that the my single FC could kill an entire squad of TSM in both ranged and CC. Similarly I couldn’t believe it that folk would even bother using scouts for anything other than SP-capping, given that they’re so weak, but in fact, scouts in numbers can do serious damage, or sending a scout squad into CC with an enemy ranged squad can help ease the fire from some of your other troops.
There are far too many different unit types to talk about and I’m not going to, it’s up to you to work it out. To help, if you click on a unit / squad during a game it will tell you the unit’s damage in both ranged and CC, and it will tell you the health of the squad. By doing this, I can see that a Chaos Raptor squad does 49-59 damage per second (DPS) in CC and has health of 1620; a squad of TSM does 32-39 DPS in CC and has a health of 1560 – this tells me that under no circumstances do I ever want to let a raptor squad get into CC with my TSM squad, which leads nicely onto the next item – micro.
The term “micro” is short for micro management, which refers to managing each of your squads’ movements, attacks etc. The scenario that I painted above, with the Raptors CCing the TSM should never be allowed to happen. The difficulty comes when the Chaos player simply needs to select his Raptors to attack your TSM squad, and then they will constantly chase the TSM around trying to CC until one of the squads is dead. This means that, in order to keep your TSM alive, you need to constantly run them around the map (dancing), to avoid CC. Dancing is a skill that isn’t too hard to master. The main problem arises when you need to do this for 2+ squads simultaneously, for example, his Raptors are trying to CC your TSM meanwhile his Cultists are trying to CC your scouts. It is likely that this area of the game will be a complete mess at first, it just gets better with once you really practice. Dawn of War enables you to “hotkey” squads to numbers which can help, but that is outside the scope of this tutorial.
So far, I’ve just blabbered on about the basics of requisition, unit combat and microing, but how does this all fit together, what should you be doing when the game starts? Well, it really depends upon the race you are and the race you’re playing against. I’m going to assume that you’re a SM player. You start with a Stronghold, a builder, 1000 starting req, and 100 starting power. From your Stronghold you can build either Scouts or more builders. Assuming I ignore a few of the more extreme tactics, your initial task is to build your Barracks with your first builder, and you will want to start building scout squads to cap your SPs. As a general rule, you want a minimum of 2 scout squads, or up to 5 of them on a bigger map. At first, you want to practice getting good at capping SPs quickly. Learn how to queue units from buildings and how to queue scouts to cap SPs one after the other. Practice against an easy computer player until you can get all your SPs capped in the optimum time – your scout squads should never be sitting around doing nothing! In addition to capping your SPs with your scouts, you must micro your builders (after your barracks is finished) to place Listening Posts (LPs) on the SPs the instant that every point has finished being capped – this prevents an enemy unit de-capping your point and it earns you extra req once the LP is finished.
You may find that while you can cap and put LPs on the SPs around your base fairly easily, you may run into your opponent when trying to cap the SPs near the middle of the map. Unless you’re particularly clever, or your opponent is particularly bad, you aren’t going to be able to cap the SP that you’re fighting over unless you’ve got a better army (and remember, you don’t want to let your opponent get a req. advantage) so what units should you build to ensure that it’s you that caps that SP? Well, now that your barracks is finished, you’ll have the option of either the FC or TSM. The FC costs 260 req and 50 power, takes an 57 seconds to build, and is a complete beast – doing 157-192 DPS in CC, 66-80 in ranged and having 1875 health. A TSM squad costs 190 req, takes 26s to build, and does 32-39 DPS in CC or 28-34 DPS in ranged. There are lots of potential builds to go for but I’m going to step up and say that, as a beginner, you should always build the Force Commander as soon as the Barracks is finished building and then follow him with a TSM squad, and maybe a 2nd if needed.
So you’ve build your FC and 2 TSM squads. It is now essential that you make these purchases worthwhile. If you aren’t going to use these units straight away, you would’ve been better spending the resources on improving your economy or teching. That is to say, you must be constantly using / doing damage with the troops that you have built.
That’s it for now. More to follow later perhaps.