Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War MODS Showcase - PART 1

this video is sponsored by World of Tanks well here it is the fabled mod video I talked about doing way back during the soulstorm retrospective better known to Modern viewers as the Middle Ages when dawn of War came out it contained a slew of maps gameplay options and races to choose from alongside a wellth thought out and varied unit roster to provide you dozens of hours of potential play time but even this Cavalcade of Carnage had its limits sooner or later you're going to exhaust everything the game had to show and stoop to the lowest flow of human emotions border there was room to expand the cast of characters to the other Graces of Warhammer 40,000 alongside even more environments for your battles to be waged in and that's exactly what happened with the release of expansion packs but does adding more onto a game really make it better sure it does yeah yeah it definitely does wait [ __ ] go back but before any official continuations released an eager Legion of fans were doing this all by themselves by modifying their copies of the game mods which is short for video game modifications are essentially a player's own additions or alterations to a game that weren't done within the game itself which is sometimes as easy as throwing some new files into the games directory and other times requires half the game source code to be reverse engineered by three computer scientists and a priest it's a do-it-yourself solution to your favorite games growing stale allowing you to tweak the experience to your liking add something you felt was missing or find an entirely new way to enjoy your favorite series The modding scene that forms around the game can vary depending on the genre popularity platform the game is on and how much people want to [ __ ] the characters and the way Dawn of Wars developed over time has been rather interesting to me so I wanted to start this journey by finding the oldest mod I could find the earliest case of the game being altered that can still be accessed on the internet and what I found was cheat codes basically cheat codes this trainer was available just over a week after the first game launched and is just free money the mod you can press a button to add extra requisition or power at any time to brute force your way through the campaign if you're struggling with it I guess well congratulations trainer plus 3 you were the first modification made for dawn of War that I can still find without getting a virus unless you count whatever pirated version made the round shortly after launch but if that counts as the mod then kicking your door down counts as interior design but the next thing to surface very quickly were custom badges and banners for the Army painter loads of packs exist online but it's really easy to do these yourself you just have to make these tiny TGA files with the right compression settings and Chuck them straight into your directory I made dozens of these over a decade ago that are still in my Steam folder and uh they get a bitd weird I don't know why I made these since then players discovered numerous ways to improve dor of war in small ways that make a big difference such as changing the hex code to a loud widescreen support this doesn't always work or widening your camera's field of view I never noticed just how close the camera really was to the battlefield until I installed this and holy [ __ ] did I have horse blinkers on this whole time I have so much more breathing room now I might actually know what's happening 30 ft away from my units another common hack around that surfaced pretty quickly was the race unlocker for dark Crusade and the Soul storm winter assault needed to remain surgically attached to the original game at all times but the later expansions were entirely Standalone so you could buy them on their own and save your hard drive some dis space however the arbitrary trade-off was that you couldn't play as most of the races online if you didn't have the older versions installed so it wasn't long before someone found a way to flick these internal switches back on and let you swarm your friends with the free Sluggers upgrade and in the spirit of sending an endless tide of units against your friends and foes was the No Limit mod which takes the unit capacity and throws it into the sun limits like these usually exist for practical reasons either to keep an RTS game balanced store to ensure it can actually run on the hardware of the time but I've got an Nvidia card with four numbers at the end and a big brain solded into my motherboard so do away with that lousy limit of one on my Terminators cuz tonight we're going to party like spacehulk is still in style this exists entirely to let you make a stupid amount of Squig offs and monoliths to be honest maybe this was how General stubs was hoping to get his 100 ban blades during Soul storm that or car one as a literal planet of Tanks although it doesn't quite look the part that's more like it I would have also accepted this commanding battalion of war machines is fun from the bird's eye view but there's nothing like being behind the guns yourself and World of Tanks offers exactly that you feel like a real tank commander behind the authentically recreated Vehicles portrayed in the game with an emphasis on historical accuracy and Variety in the vehicles and artillery at your disposal whether you like them light medium or heavy your choice of over 800 tanks and how you play them is up to you and it's just as much fun to set an ambush as it is to go in guns blazing upgrade and modify your Mighty Machine to roll out over more than 40 battle arenas whether those be deserts forests hillsides or Urban centers in a community of over 100 million players online World of Tanks is accessible to hardcore Gamers and newbies alike and you can sign up and install the game for free using the link in the video description use code combat to get the tier six Cromwell B tank 250,000 credits 7 Days of Premium access and three rental tanks for 10 battles each those being the tiger 131 t78 and type 64 all of which are tier six as well so join us on the mechanized warfront now the machine Spirits are willing modding for dawn of War didn't stop here however people are adding new maps of the game new models are being produced to fix the scaling issues between certain units and some were hoping to create Skirmish based story modes before dark crade had even being announced but once winter assault ignited the fires a speculation for new races to be added to the game so many fans of Warhammer 40K were eager to add their favorite faction no matter how obscure and boy there were a lot of these so I've gone through the painstaking effort of collecting up each of them and putting them in this room behind us to go through one by one and enjoy the history of all right we're moving on yeah it's impossible to discuss this game without mentioning the larger Mega mods that have eclipsed the modding scene for more than a decade I wanted to make this video a deeper dive into all the smaller projects that culminated into these much bigger ones but to be realistic when people chose for me to cover this topic before dawn of War I I don't think that's what they had in mind hell the reason I mentioned these smaller quality of life changes at the beginning is because many of them are second nature to those who play nothing but the highest profile mods they just bundled in right from the start but as a compromise I'm going to at the very least mention some early ones which arguably pave the way for their successes and I'd like to open with the first mod I played for dark Crusade Firestorm over cronis Firestorm over cronis or cower if you're Soul storm inclined had a lofty goal of making dawn of War feel more like the tabletop game without pausing the game to roll dice or pull out a big stick to measure line of sight those used to double as a cane to punish nauy players if they kept hiding their dice rolls Jerry you cheating rather it applies some of the rules from the tabletop game and adapts them into the realtime framework already established by dawn of War while packaged with a bunch of community Maps optional game rules new character models and an expanded unit roster it also changes a lot of the smaller bits of combat buildings and vehicles are impenetrable to Small Arms fire making early game rushes much less effective and requiring you to field heavy weapons if you hope to claim your opponent's listening posts reinforcements can no longer be conjured during the thicker battle either so your units need to be close to buildings or a transport vehicle to call in more soldiers which makes things like the Space Marine Rhino way more valuable than it was in the base game there's also a few optional rules borrowed from dawn of War I like forcing units to flee to the nearest friendly structure if their morale breaks while gaining experience for engaging in combat and staying alive but perhaps the biggest influence from the tabletop rules is the unit roster including not only just about every Rule's legal option from the game at its time of release but also following the Army structure of limited troop fast attack Elite heavy support and headquarter [Music] choices you can also steer most factions towards a specialization depending on your play style with chaos getting the marks of the four Gods alongside going Renegade and Space Marines taking doctrines resembling chapters like the salamanders or red scorpions or you can ignore these and stick to the ultramarine doctrine if you're boring hell it even includes the black Templars a distinct chapter of Space Marines as an entirely separate faction because what better way to demonstrate that your mod is closer to codex than by contrasting it with the Space Marine chapter that saw the in Universe codex aartis and chose to implement it into their army by using the pages for toilet paper funnily enough the black Templars branched off one of the most regimented stubborn and by the books Legions from the first founding of Space Marines so it's really funny to me that they commit to the Crusader theme so hard that their units are these disorganized hordes of Scouts and Marines mixed together I honestly just play them the same way I would Orcs burying my opponents in a wave of big Angry Men and their local youth pasts seems to work well enough I'll not as well that should you choose to play the most recent version available for soul storm the sisters of battle are removed from the game entirely in favor of the Inquisition there is no sisters of battle there is only the gray Knights the emperor protects come to think of it the last full version of this mod is an unusual Time Capture the fifth edition Warhammer which is pretty cute given what it sets out to do I'm pretty fond of Firestorm and not just because it beat Hypno dis once about so much as a weapon God bless you you beautiful door stop the alterations to Thorn of War's rules are an interesting change of Pace while saying true to the core design of the bass game and it was fun to relearn my all favorites for a breadth of new Army choices even if it barely works sometimes some units in the beta builds just never spawn but maybe these changes to the Core Design are a bit offputting and you want to have more units to play while still being able to dismantle your opponents with nothing but cultist so let's move on to another major mod for soul storm and dark Crusade tiberium what [ __ ] okay sorry I I sometimes instinctively call this mod tiberium Wars like CNC it's titanium Wars I really wonder if that was done on purpose since it was like one RTS and another RTS actually come to think of it that other mod is called Firestorm I'm so HED for the next big mod to come out to be called like sy's revenge or something this mod doesn't change the mechanics of dawn of War to a significant degree rather focusing on adding new units to each faction such as jet bikes orc battle fors the godamn rip tide and the nekron Quant the model work is pretty damn impressive on the new units being introduced and there's even a bit of new music too which is nice for those who've gotten tired of dawn of Wars Bay soundtrack I don't know how you could personally but you know to each St it's still being updated even 15 years on unless you bring this new Arsenal Into The Campaign which Fire won't even invite to Thanksgiving anymore it's a pretty tall order to tackle a campaign of one of these mods not only does that come with its own infuriating bugs and scripts to get working but you also have to rise to the challenge of living up to dark Crusades campaign and can you truly improve upon Perfection I wouldn't give Perfection an 8.9 it will at least freshen things up having played this campaign far too many times myself and in the case of Soul storm it gives enough window dressing to make you forget you're playing Soul storm toia why the hell are you beon now did you want to take the first turn in chess that being said this isn't exactly a mod for newbies strongholds ramp up the difficulty a lot and switching the objective from destroy HQ to annihilate or increasing the cators in the godamn Spaceport Mission makes missions a lot less short and snappy which I liked about the original Honestly though it's worth it to be able to rock up to elas the inheritor front door with the storm blade and make even his Dark Masters feel bad for him no this is a pretty good alternative to Firestorm and probably one of the best available on dark Crusade since Beyond this point most of the high-profile mods for dor of War are made for its final expansion Soul storm it makes sense to me why it's the one with the most stuff in it to build off of and it's also the one with the biggest room for improvement so any shot at making it better or more stable is welcome since I don't really play Soul store much I develop an odd rash when I get my hands on it I must be allergic I trust the community to have recommended plenty of mods for it since 2016 so I'm going to check all the Vari suggestions in the comments sections they've made and oh my God ultimate apocalypse if fire storm was pulling ideas from Warhammer own codexes then ultimate apocalypse took its inspiration from the apocalypse rules and Imperial Armor and most of the Codex is too really it's an ambitious total conversion which aimed to up the scale of the battles you fight and places an immense amount of emphasis on super units and large armies with a total of 12 playable races and a plethora of options for each this even includes the popular tyranid mod that finally lets me play as these buggy Boys in dawn of War I hooray its mechanical changes aren't as drastic as firestorms but it does alter how relics work relics were these points on the map which allow you to spawn your Race's super unit they're not essential to winning the game especially for the tow God but they give you an edge if you successfully secure one ultimate apocalypse replaces this binary restriction with a new resource type needed to build super units a small pool that you invest into units but you will get these back should they die capturing relics gives you more of that resource so they become key to winning the game because if your opponent conceives more of them than you they can create something so overwhelmingly powerful that you may have no chance of reversing the odds this makes playing some of the base Game maps feel a bit boring as relics aren't a given on every single one so I recommend playing against solely the custom maps package of Apocalypse since they take this into account and plant a generous crop of relics in them Fields the increase in scope that ultimate apocalypse aims for is a pretty good fit for The tyranids Who function largely as a light infantry Army supported by bigger and bigger beasts I called that one gumbo although with just how many units you get to choose from you'll have a biobug to cover everything and can swarm your enemies with relative ease joining them are the Imperial Inquisition the Secret Service of the human government who have an absurd amount of assets to apply their Authority and the Demons of chaos coming in flavors of nurgle corn zinch and I can't show this on YouTube yet even if you choose the original nine factions you'll have an overwhelming array of different infantry squads tanks and aircraft to choose from there's an actually decent selection of air vehicles this time around that's another point for UA that gives you some alternative of the most common options of the base game tired of summoning the Avatar of Kane again try the Laughing God and get down the clown your Basic Land Raider getting stale here's one with rocket pods on top sick of the looted tank make a dozen of these grot driven Bob simples they're not very good but they're funny it's been musing to see some of the more obscure deep Cuts fully modeled and animated here such as the sisters of battle cross between Norwich castle and the sand crawler or the Giant flameer on a ban blade chassis which can be air dropped for some FR forsaken reason there is far far too much cover about this mod in good time not even touching upon custom music voice acting or changes to the AI but if you want a more measured summary of ultimate apocalypse and its features check out mandala's video it's really good this mod was mindblowing to many folks who jumped straight from the base game to this but as someone who had played Firestorm and titanium Wars beforehand I was already familiar with the major Visual and interface changes those mods had made so my reaction to UA was much less enthusiastic if anything I'll be honest with you I don't like Tim apocalypse I think the Doomsday Clock just got closer to midnight apocalypse's goal was to expand the scope of battles which means having more bodies to hit the floor and more Super units to crush them but that means that for every unit that's a cool unique addition there's another which does almost the exact same job as the guy next to it in the building tab roster blow is an issue amongst all three of these mods but I lost my patience with it by apocalypse I loved the Bane blade because it was a one-of a kind among every race in the game but now there's a whole bunch of them even the elar get one maybe a couple of Varian as fine but when there's enough of them that I can assign them all a month to make a pinup calendar out of them I think it's gone too far actually I would buy that that sounds pretty funny all of these require more models too which look really good for the most part but the ones pulled from other 40K games pop out way too much and I can't get immersed in this when I'm going oh that's from dawn of War I and has a completely different art style that one's from Space Marine is that from fire warrior but I guess what does it matter if I'm going to be turning Graphics down to low anyway just to keep a decent frame rate the sheer weight of this project means I don't get to enjoy this running smoothly and I know it isn't my computer's fault this engine just cannot manage what the mod wants to accomplish it's like strapping three rockets to a bob sled to break the land speed record also why the hell does everything appear twice in the game settings I have to scroll through all of this to find out when the hell I turned on assassinate by mistake but to be fair these are all nitpicks many of which are given with any game mod but what really puts me off UA are two of its biggest selling points Titans and super weapons winter assault and dark Crusade presented Titans as these utterly massive weapons of war so mighty and or inspiring that it's worth fighting a planetary campaign just to secure one they build a Mythos around what little we can see of them with the husk of a fallen Titan taking up an entire Battlefield ultimate apocalypse doesn't Grant you the dominatus mind you but it still gives you Scout Titans and units like the imperator the former just sort of diminished the word Titan for me which I guess is my own gripes with Scout Titans existing in general it's like pulling the curtain to see The Real Wizard of Oz while the imperator is impressively big but just sort of stands there wiping bases off the field while an inconsequential swarm of ants run around it to many that's what makes Titans cool to see in this game but what pulled me into dawn of War was this and this and this watching these armies clash and seeing the right unit in the right place turn the tide whereas Titans like the dark elar force just about everything to flee from it without a single shot fire is that an appropriate tactic for the dark elar to employ in a mega battle Yeah but is it fun to fight no I think Titans would work better in a game like Supreme Commander or0 K which are much better built around the scope of combat where Titans still feel imposing without making the battle surrounding them borderline irrelevant timate apocalypse was so successful that it felt like everything had to copy this part of it now and titanium Wars you thought you could sneak a scout Titan past me did you learn this from watching him how could you do this to me appealing to a much larger group who wanted these units rather than me and my weirdly specific Vision on what dawn of War should be you're both grounded for a week and I'm taking away fire warrior it's a bad look on you the other one is super weapons a staple of many RTS games but absent in dawn of War dawn of War was designed around aggression encouraging you to push into new territory with strategic points producing your primary resource and putting your most devastating weapons of war in your units requiring your attention to be on your army and keeping them involved with battles you can still turn your base into a fortress but if you want to drop an orbital strike you've got to F your Force Commander to your neighbor's front garden to do so but ultimate apocalypse gives you much more defensive options including straight up walls to build across choke points so if you've got even a slight resource Advantage you can just hunker down and launch super weapons while your army waits for their next lunch break the Inquisition can even call in an extermin nus which outright ends the game because you can't lose control of the battlefield if there's no field left to battle on this just isn't what drew me to this game if I wanted to end a match in the comfort of my own home base I'd have booted up Age of Empires and build a wander not dawn of drop poting demon killing unit wailing War but I can choose to completely ignore these if I want as you do have options to turn these off if you don't want to play with either of them which is a pretty good compromise damn it you win this time ultimate Apocalypse at its worst ultimate apocalypse is bloated inconsistent and antithetical to the design of the game it's built upon but at its best a phenomenal achievement and a real game changer for the modding scene out of the big three I've covered today I think I've enjoyed revisiting Firestorm the most because it shook things up rather than piling on the most stuff although I don't want to discourage anyone from trying any of the other mods nor act like it isn't a good thing to like them I mean come on you can create some incredible looking battles with UA and tww make your big battle robots and don't let my grumpy ass tell you it's the wrong way to have fun but more than anything I want to commend anyone who has put the hard work in to be able to make these things for free and encouraged or inspired others to do the same doing just about anything with the impossible creatures engine ain't easy and so much of this work to allow people to see see even more of the universe they love running in real time can only come from a place of passion which is something the Warhammer Community has by the gigaton so thank you modern Community for everything you've done for this game and continue to do so there's still so much more to talk about and I thought I could cover everything in one video but nah this is going to have to be a two-parter I can't do this in one sitting I'm definitely going to highlight unification and Crucible in the next part but if you can suggest any other mods for the first da of war that I should look at please leave your suggestions in the comments section but before going to credits I want to make an observation about the dawn of War modding scene where the [ __ ] is the non Warhammer stuff so many games get modded to have a bunch of weird characters stuffed into them but every attempt to do that with Dawn of War just never got off the ground and these look really cool stuff for BattleTech Gundam Halo Starship Troopers there's even two different projects for Resident Evil of all things I'm sorry but a Resident Evil RTS in the dawn of War engine that sounds weird and I want to play that so badly obviously the big PLL of dawn of War was how it depicted the Warhammer universe so of course that's why it's so unanimously Warhammer focused but come on can you really be called a game with mods if no one's imported a low poly Goku model at least once if anyone wants to do that please send it to me I don't even watch Dragon Ball I just think it'd be funny to see him punch a blood thirster in the meantime the next retrospective I'll be working on was chosen by my patrons and that'll be vampire the Masquerade I'm giving my patrons and channnel members the chance to vote on the next game series I cover for a retrospective in about a week so consider visiting my page if you want to steer the course of the Channel's future I'm also planning to revisit Legacy of Kane soon as well so keep an eye out for Soul Reaver for now I remain the Beast I am lest a beast I become thanks again to World of Tanks for sponsoring today's video which you can try with the link in the video description

Channel: ThunderPsyker

Views: 91,647

Keywords: Warhammer 40k, Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War, ThunderPsyker, Relic Entertainment, Games Workshop, Warhammer, Sega, Davian Thule, Eliphas, Orks, Eldar, Tyranid, Tyranids, Chaos, Chaos Space Marines, Demon, Demons, Daemon, Daemons, Review, Reviews, Real-Time Strategy, Video Games, Video Game, Gaming, Games, PC Gaming, Gaming Retrospective, Space Marine, Imperial Guard, Black Templars, Inquisition, Daemonhunters, Inquisition Daemonhunt, Ultimate Apocalypse, Titanium Wars, Ultimate, Apocalypse, Necrons

Id: PuDf_ZNkgX0

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024