Spring, a Dazzling Display of Flittering Flowers Over a Blue Sea, Beats Down

So, want to know why I haven't posted in over a week?
This is why.

It has totally enslaved my life. I come home from school and I play until I go to bed. However, while that might sound like a serious problem, it is in fact a pretty clever strategy: My second round of midterms starts next Friday. If I don't have the campaign beaten soon, there's no hope of my being ready for said midterms. So that's why I've been playing like a demon. And, in fact, I was about to finish the campaign yesterday. I had swept the few remaining provinces on the campaign map under my jack-booted Tau hoof, and was assailing the final enemy stronghold. I was approximately 2/3 of the way through this mission when the game had its first ever error which caused it to close unexpectedly. It was replaced by a dialog box asking me to fill in any relevant details and send off an error report to the lovely folks at Relic Entertainment. So I put in "I was about to beat the damn campaign!" and clicked send. Then, of course, it couldn't establish a connection. Sure, Dawn of War,
[Edit: No idea what I wrote here, but it sure did disapear somehow...]
ur stronghold, and unless you really really suck, it's pretty hard to get beaten at your stronghold. It's a map designed specifically for you to defend exactly according to your race's special strengths. Now, I've only played as the Tau because, in the words of Ctrl-Alt-Del, I'm "totally gay for the Tau", and I'm good enough that no other species even came close to my stronghold. So, what, for me, might be the most interesting map in the game is the one that I've never played on.

However, blowing through every other stronghold (and regular province) in the game was pretty fun. I had to formulate a grand strategy at the start of the game, but before I could do that I had to understand a few key elements of it:

The Commander is similar to a hero in Warcraft III, in that you have the same one throughout the entire campaign. However, instead of gaining experience and leveling up, your commander meets certain conditions (conquer 5 enemy territories, win with 3:1 kill ratio, etc) and receives Wargear. Wargear is pretty equivalent to getting a new spell for your Warcraft Hero. The Commander's Wargear is either an upgraded weapon (My commander went from one plasma gun to a heavy plasma rifle, heavy flamer, and missile rack) or some sort of ability enhancer (New armour, jet pack, stealth field). By the time your commander has earned all its entire complement of Wargear, it's a force to be reckoned with.

Honour Guard units are special upgraded versions of your regular units that you can "win" by taking over other provinces. For me the first HG unit that I picked up was a squad of 5 Fire Warriors (the basic Tau foot-soldier) who'd had their max range, damage, and health all tweaked up nice and high. So high, in fact, that they could shoot farther than they could see on their own. If my commander was a screen-length ahead of these troopers on the field, he could still count on their cover-fire. Sound overpowered? You bet your ass. A player can have up to 12 honour guard units at a time. By the end of the campaign, basically all I had to do was rush the enemy base with my commander and honour guard, and the match would be finished in 10 minutes. The only exception to this rule were the strongholds, where I had to keep my forces back at my starting base for the first minute because the computer would always rush with a huge force.

Lastly, there were certain territories that granted special bonuses to the way the game was played. There was a territory which possessed a space-port, this allowed your army to attack anywhere on the planet (except strongholds) from anywhere else. There was a territory which gave you extra resources at the start of a mission, one which let you attack twice in one turn, and a couple of others which I can't remember right now.

So, back to my amazing over-arching strategy. Here's how the map looked at the start of the game:


Amazing, hunh?

Carl will be happy to know that the first victims of my new reign of terror were the Eldar. I considered them the most challenging as the Tau have a pretty limited selection of "detector" units. A detector is a unit which can see "stealthed" (invisible) units. Since all of the Eldar's buildings are, in fact, stealthed, it became pretty clear that I wanted to nip them in the bud. They certainly gave me one hell of a fight. In fact, I had to downgrade my campaign difficulty level from hard to normal due to their stubborn refusal to stop charging into my massed fire for long enough to reach their base. I've still got a game saved on the hard difficulty fighting the Eldar. There's no way that they'll breach my base, but the constant stream of their soldiers running towards me leaves me no time to regroup and take the fight to them. I've probably logged 8-10 hours of time on that one conflict alone.

Anyway, their stronghold was hard...ish. Not really that difficult because the game kept giving me new honour guard units whenever I would eliminate a section of the Eldar forces.

My next targets were the Necrons. However, situated as I was in the far north of the map, I decided to steam-roll the Space Marines on my way down. One of the Space Marine provinces that I gained had the space-port ability, so once I'd mopped up the rest of their territory, I went on a shopping spree for all of the other provinces with special abilities. These, coupled with my growing honour guard, were a major advantage to me in my game-play. Once I'd collected all of the special ability provinces, I shit-kicked the Necron stronghold, which eliminated their ability to attack for the rest of the game. All they could do was defend the other provinces still under their control.

From there I used to space-port to move to the west coast and sweep across the Ork terrirories. There was really nothing hard there. I can see why the Tau are always feeding it to the Orks in the real Warhammer 40,000 table-top game literature. From there, I began my assault on the forces of Chaos. They too didn't really present a challenge (my honour guard rush strategy was in full swing by this point, and the AIs didn't seem to have the resources to field very strong HGs to oppose mine). Until I got to their stronghold. Chaos gets very special mention for decimating my honour guard and my entire starting base with their initial rush. The only survivors were my commander, 2 squads of honour guard fire warriors (at somewhat less than full strength), and a single Barracks building. This building could only produce regular fire warriors, but not if I didn't have any access to resources. With just my three units, I retook a single strategic point, which allowed a very very slow trickle of resources to come into my hands. From there I rebuilt and conducted a slow campaign of guerilla warfrae across the entire map. I couldn't rebuild my base, and none of the units I had were even remotely useful in close-combat. It was slow going, but I'm very happy that I finished it off. Although there were definately come close calls, Chaos was overcome by the firm faith of my forces in the Greater Good.

This left the Imperial Guard, or, as I ended up thinking of them, my favourite opponents in the game. Why my favourite? A combination of 2 factors: 1) The Imp Guard had had it pretty rough for the whole game. They really couldn't catch a break, even with 2 of the special ability provinces under control for the first third of the campaign. 2) I could brutalize them easily. They were the race where I developed my honour-guard rush skills. Since they had almost no territory, their honour guard was pathetic. I could even usually rush them using regular forces. It was ridiculous.

So, finally, I'd pulled every other renegade province under my control. 24/25 of the world was mine. I rebuilt my honour guard (some of whom had passed on in more frantic battles), and maxed out the abilities granted me by the special ability provinces. I assaulted the Imp Guard stronghold, and it was glorious. Except for the part where Imp Guard are maybe one of (if not the) best races for defense in the game. So I had to take it slow. As I mentioned above, after slicing through about 2/3 of the objectives for that mission, my computer froze, my screen went blank, and up came my desktop with the error box. Insert look of horror and maniacal cursing here.

My last save-point was back fighting inch for blood-covered inch in the Chaos stronghold. I'm not eager to go all the way back through that again, so I'm not sure what I'm gonna do right now.

And that's been my life. Feel free to leave commentary below.

Ooooh, and, for some reason, the picture I drew of the campaign map isn't showing up in the preview for this post. So, if it doesn't show up on the actual page, I'll be a little unhappy. However, if you click on where the picture should be, you should be taken to a separate page where it is visible.