sesshomaru's Journal: Imperial Guard Skirmish Tactics

Recently I got the expansion to one of my favorite RTS games, Dawn of War by Relic, based on the Warhammer 40K games by Games Workshop. This expansion, called Winter Assault, contains a new army, called the Imperial Guard. The main difference between the Imperial Guard army and the other four armies is that unlike the other armies the Imperial Guard are just ordinary humans who had the misfortune to be born in the year 40,000. They aren't fanatic, genetically engineered supermen like the Space Marines (and their corrupted brethren, the Chaos Space Marines), giant fearless monsters like the Orks, or sophisticated technologically and magically superior aliens like the Eldar. No, they are just Joe Smith, "Private first class, sir!" who really doesn't relish dying horrible while facing unspeakable warp spawned terrors.

Owing to a comment I got in response to one of my comments on the review of the game DragonShard, I decided to try playing the IG in skirmish mode. Incidentally, I agree that the stupid AI tends to use rushes rather than more sophisticated strategy. However, if the IG defenses work, I should be able to laugh at rushes as the enemy breaks against my fortified lines.

So far, however, I haven't been able to use them effectively in a single player skirmish mode against Red Destiny (my computer) playing as the Chaos Space Marines (on "Hard" AI level). It's my own fault, I wasn't paying attention to the buildings that the IG use, so I did what I normally do with regular Space Marines. I chose my favorite defensive map, Dead Man's Crossing, grabbed the two strategic points near the main chokepoint, and started building listening posts and bolter turrets.

Well... my IG are quickly made sacrifices the the Chaos Gods using this strategy. However, today at work, during a break I decided to look up strategy for them on the Relic forums. The Relic forums post I read makes it clear that the main defensive building for the IG is the Infantry Command, which seem to be the equivalent of Starcraft bunkers combined with barracks. In fact, the writer of the post does not think highly of turrets.

So next chance I get, between work and studying, I'll try building more infantry commands, and less turrets. I'll post the results here.

Part 2

Dawn of Steel: Very well done Steel Legion mod for the Original Dawn of War, praise the Omnissiah