"Who is to judge what is right and what is wrong? Great and powerful foes surround us; unknown miscreants gnaw at us from within. We are threatened with total annihilation. In days such as these we can afford no luxury of morality."
- Unknown, Warhammer 40k
Dawn of War: Dark Crusade by Relic Entertainment and THQ is the second expansion to the award-winning Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game, Dawn of War. Relic has a history of making great strategy games, and the Dawn of War series has done nothing but enhance that reputation. Dark Crusade pushes it one step further by adding new features and even a new style of gameplay to the usual RTS mix.
Dark Crusade adds two whole new races to the Dawn of War universe, something that no other RTS to date has done. The two new races, the Tau and the Necrons, add to the already impressive five races that Dawn of War and DoW: Winter Assault contained. The game also adds a brand new planetary-conquest mode in lieu of a story-based campaign that the previous versions had.
One of the new races, the Necrons, are a very interesting and challenging race to play. They are, for all intensive purposes, the undead (skeletons and wraiths) who use energy to power all of their devices. They are slow to build and slow to move, expensive to reinforce, but very very powerful. If played properly, they are nearly unstoppable.
Two very cool features of the Necrons are the Necron Lord’s ability to resurrect Necrons nearby, even to the point of exceeding the population cap. In fact, this is a very good strategy for the Necron player to use and can reinforce an attacking army or create a secondary force behind enemy lines. The other feature is the Necron Monolith’s ability to move around the map. The Monolith is the main Necron base and the structure from which troops are generated, so you basically have a super-powerful mobile troop-generator which is a very welcome addition to any battle.
The other new race is called the Tau. They are a powerful empire composed of castes who believe in their right to rule the galaxy for “the Greater Good”. They are a fast-paced race to play in
Dawn of War as they have many offensive weapons. They also have some of the longest-ranged weaponry in the game, especially from their impressive selection of ships. Their long-range weaponry comes primarily in the form of missiles and has a greater range than even the Eldar.
Unlike many of the other races, however, the Tau do not put much stock into defense. They can do it, and some units have the ability to “dig in” and fortify their positions from which to fight. But the Tau have no defensive turrets or minefields and must rely on their listening post turrets and standard units for defense.
Campaign mode, for the majority of games, especially a RTS, usually consists of a series of missions telling a story. The first two campaigns for Dawn of War and Dawn of War: Winter Assault did exactly that. But with Dark Crusade, Relic decided to change things up a bit. Campaign mode is, in fact, a turn-based strategy game in which individual battles take place as standard matches. And you are competing with the other races of the Warhammer 40k universe for control over the planet of Kronus.
The world of Kronus is divided into many territories, each with a requisition value and a specific type of terrain. Each territory also gives bonuses, sometimes to your starting units in a battle, sometimes to your defense, and sometimes special abilities, such as the ability to jump to specific territories without having to take each one in turn.
You have one leader in the battle for Kronus. And you can upgrade him throughout the game, adding more equipment to him that boosts his stats, or by adding to his entourage with extra units. These begin each match with him already built.
Requisition points are used to reinforce territories for defensive purposes. You can buy units to defend a territory and if it is ever attacked, these units will be pre-built and ready for the defense. Any buildings you previously constructed will also automatically remain, which is a boon to your defense and a novelty for RTS games. Playing the Imperial Guard, there was nothing like starting out the match with the ability to construct the Baneblade.
As with the previous expansion and core game, this is where I feel Dawn of War shines as a RTS series. The Multiplayer experience is where I spend most of my time. The game itself is straight-forward and I primarily use DirectIP connection. But where DoW excels is the ability for players to create new maps. And boy have they created them! We routinely grab new maps and at last count I had close to 500 maps that amounted to almost 1.2 gigabytes of data! What this allows my friends and I to do when playing is to choose new maps nearly every game and we rarely replay the same map from session to session.
I have covered the new features of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, but there are many other changes that were also part of the expansion. For starters, there was quite a bit of balancing done by Relic on the other races. Space Marines, for example, can now only have one squad of terminators at a given time. And new units were added to many of the older races, to assist in their balance. The Orks, for example, get the Flash Gitz while the Chaos Marines get the Daemon Prince and so forth.
As a huge Dawn of War fan, I can say that the Dark Crusade expansion is definitely worth getting. I have gotten mountains of entertainment out of it with friends and it definitely mixed up things when playing skirmishes against the CPU. The single player campaign is good if you feel like playing general skirmishes but in a different type of setting and since you can play each of the races it offers quite a bit of replayability.
