Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Winter Assault | |
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Developer(s) | Relic Entertainment |
Publisher(s) | |
Designer(s) | Andrew Chambers |
Composer(s) | Inon Zur |
Platform(s) | PC |
Release | September 23, 2005 |
Genre(s) | Real-time strategy |
Mode(s) | Single-player, multiplayer |
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Winter Assault is the first expansion to Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War for the PC developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ. Based on Games Workshop's tabletop wargame, Warhammer 40,000, Dawn of War: Winter Assault was released on September 23, 2005. Some time after its initial release, Winter Assault and Dawn of War were coupled together in a double pack which featured some art on a fold out cover, an Ork with a flamethrower, or a group of Imperial Guard tanks lined up for attack.
A new faction was included, the Imperial Guard, with some units previously available in certain single player missions of Dawn of War.
The Imperial Guard specializes in defense and attrition warfare, and therefore has the strongest defensive structures of all the factions in the game, as well as garrisonable production structures and a tunnel network between them, allowing stealthy transfer of troops. Their infantry tends to be of lower quality than that of their opponents in terms of weapons, armor, and morale, due to Guardsmen being regular humans. However, the Imperial Guard makes up for this with a range of powerful armoured vehicles, such as the Leman Russ and the Baneblade, as well as the Sentinel walkers, which until the Dark Crusade expansion were the only vehicular unit in the game which could uncapture strategic points. Also, uniquely, the Imperial Guard features not a single primary hero but a Command Squad staffed by a General and up to four secondary heroes, as well as up to 13 stand-alone secondary heroes, 8 out of which are Commissars or Priests that are much more effective when attached to squads (e.g. a Commissar helps to combat morale problems).
There are two new single player campaigns, both of which involve each faction attempting to recover a lost Imperator-Class Imperial Titan. All races from Dawn of War (Orks, Eldar, Chaos, and Space Marines) are available in addition to the new Imperial Guard, with each race trying to find and gain control of the Titan for their own reasons. Although the Titan as a whole is not controllable, its weapon systems can be used to assist in the destruction of the Necrons, who make a cameo in the final mission for each faction. In this campaign at the beginning the player has a choice to either go with "Disorder", personified by the Orks and Chaos Space Marines, or with "Order", which comprises the Eldar and Imperial Guard with the odd appearance by the Space Marines.