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Made in us
Regular Dakkanaut





Illinois

So, I think the old fans and the new Fans can be satisfied with a compromise on DOW3.

I think I have a few ideas which may help Relic and DOW3. This is fully my opinion but I think its reasonably, cost efficient and has a huge amount of potentional to increase sales and bring back the community together.
Do something akin to Rome 2 Total War, effectively redo the entire mechanics under the hood and radically change the game design but keep all the assets and engine building done. Make this "revamped mode!" an option, so you can launch "Classic DOW3" or "Revamped!"

Revamped Ideas to win back some of the fans.

The engine is too far along to do any overhauls with terrain, so no dynamic maps for us. Simply not an option. However, if you guys remember DOW1 had a very simple map and terrain feature system of a few types: light, Medium, Heavy and Negative cover. Which simply added bonuses or penalties to the units inside them. This could easily be reimplemented as all they have to do it put down a texture on the ground, maybe add a new icon and adjust the game's innards to grant these buffs or debuffs. Yes I am suggesting the complete removal of the Dome cover.

Redone Dome cover: Remove the dome and make it a building. Literally just put a 3D model box where the Dome currently is and call it a garrison. Units inside either do not take damage/or is mitigated until the building is blown up or the units inside take extra damage from explosive damage/grenades. Bam super easy conversion and fuffly.

Reapply a Moral system. This is arguably the easiest thing to do, as there are already soft moral mechanics in the game, which just need to be turned up to give better effect. The heavy bolter on Space marines are a prime example: they slow enemy units. Simply adjust this effect for all weapons/heavy weapons to do this: All units have a moral bar which constantly recharges, each unit may have its own amount such as Ork Boys may have 100 moral (arbitrary number here) but for each other squad of Orks they are within 10meters (also another arbitrary number here) their max moral is boosted by another 100 and recharges faster. This feature can be customized and manipulated by hero units who increase the moral bar or increase the rate units recharge their moral.

How is moral affected? Small arms fire inflict slight but mostly insignificant moral losses. However concentrated fire such as maybe from three or four squads may strip the squad being shots moral faster than its passive recharge. Heavy weapons and artillery do extra moral penalties. These also could be bolstered or inhibited by global abilities, tech research or even heroes passives.

What does moral do? Units with High moral functional fully, those who are suppressed move slower and suffer either aim penalties or ROF penalties or maybe even both. There could even be middle ground like in COH2 where there is suppressed and pinned.

This is a feature that everyone liked and would be quite easy to reimplement as almost all of the features here would just be tweaking and applying modifiers to units which the game engine is already capable of doing. Meaning, it'll cost very little to have your coders and game designers readjust this and add great depth to the combat, tactically.

Make squad sizes bigger. This may be impossible or the hardest to implement since I don't know how to code such an advanced engine. They can keep the squads as they currently are, but allow tech or like in DOW1/2, you can add in sergeants, or add more units to your squads (pay for them). This will make line infantry significantly more useful as they can absorb much more damage.

Reintroduce sergeants. I recommend doing the exact same thing as Relic did in DOW1. Sargent has a special weapon set, which could be upgraded based on tech or just purchased for the unit directly. The Sargent should have more health than the average member of the unit and should grant higher leadership (moral) and maybe an accuracy buff to the squad when under suppression or something of the like.

How would Moral work in practicality? This would be up to the developers and game designers, though I think something straightforward would be best (and cost little!). Here is my idea, but in no way am I suggesting this is the only way.

Space Marines have the highest moral number (at least by standards; an Ork Warboss may be immune to moral but a space marine squad would have 300 moral vs something like Guardians having 100). I would say Space Marine units as a faction bonus, are immune to small arms fire moral penalties; meaning no matter how many Ork boys or Guardings are peppering them, their moral bar takes no damage. Maybe give them a higher moral regeneration that other units as well. This can further be bolstered by Sargents, Squad banners, Tech, Heros and the like. Especially here I can see Diomadies granting a high moral regengeration rate to all those around him. Make bolters do more moral penalty than other baseline troops to help represent them being mini grenade launchers.

Orks Moral works as it does in the table top. The more Orks are in the squad the higher the moral bar. The more Ork squads around another squad makes all the Orks moral higher. Orks might even be made to ignore all moral if enough ork units are around it. This like spacemarines can be upgraded or boosted by Tech, heroes and Nobs. Waaaaghh banners can give a moral boost or a temporary immunity to moral within distance or a time frame.

Eldar Moral: Eldar do not take moral penalties at all, until their shields have been broken. Squad Moral can be increased just as the same above: tech, sergeants, heroes.

I think that could be an easy and simple but greatly appreciated moral system.

Tone down heroes. Quite a bit. In the revamped version, we don't need the current core mechanic that the heroes provide. Make them more akin to DOW2s heroes. Customizable units which grant interesting passive buffs to your forces and have a few micro abilities to help sway skirmishes or late game tide of battle. The exception to this should be the Titans, they can keep their absurd stats, as I feel they should be.

Make most Elites buyable units for the armies. Remove most of the fancy skills and whatnot and just make them units you can buy, even if only limited to 1 per player. This will allow players to take all their favorite units from their favorite factions as well as their Hero units.

Remove or change Elite points. With my idea, change them into Command points: Command points generate command points at a fixed rate (like elite points!) Each faction has a global ability it can use with these command points: here are some rough ideas. All factions can spend 2 command points for a unit to instantly break free of suppresion for 10 second. A player may spend 5 command points to have a squad reinforced back to full health for free (must be out of combat for some odd seconds) and they could make faction specific ones for each race.

Remove or radically alter Doctrines. I feel as if this was an vestigial carry over from COH2s, no one liked it in COH2 and no one likes it in this game. Either remove them outright, or just give most of these abilities to the units as passives. If they did something similar to COH1 I could see it being good, but that may require too much redesign and making of new assists which would cost more and make this less likely.

I would love to see a return of leveling up in the game as well, but don't know how practical that would be. Other than the obviously benfits of higher moral and health and maybe ROF/ accuracy for units. The Doctrines could be unlocked such as in COH2. Units unlock those abilites when they reach certain levels, such as a Space marine tactical squad which reaches level 2 gains the move and shoot ability. At level three they gain frag grendades (though I think that should be a tech for all the factions) but just follow that train of thought for all the units.

With all of these changes, I think the base game will be radically changed and more in tune with fans of the first two DOW games. It has (relatively) simple reworks and requires no new assists. I presume Relic could have a few member of the team rework the numbers behind the guns and health to polish it which make take time to balance it, but the cost and time required to actually implement all the changes I have listed is minimal. So I hope this grabs one of the Devs eye and maybe they can take it up to their team leader and maybe try these ideas out. It will be good for the community as its more inline with what people were expecting and will be good for the game as it will bring back players who have left DOW3 and more importantly, if it turns out to be good and fun. Will sell more copies.

I am not exaggerating when I say I really do hope Relic sees this post. As DOW3 has a great potential and I think what I have listed here could be done and more realistically for minimal cost. Thoughts? Feedback? Please no mindless hate or exxagerations, I'd like to keep this thread constructive.

8th Overhaul!
Over 18,000 SM
Over 7000 Tyranids
About 3000 Genestealer cult
About 6000 IG
About 2500 Chaos
About 5000 Skitarii/Admech *Current focus
About 3000 Deamons
2 Imperial Knigts... Soon to be a third

 
   
Made in gb
Longtime Dakkanaut





Outer Space, Apparently

DOW3 was doomed from the start as a Dawn of War game by trying to copy a RTS model that wasn't what it was known for. I don't entirely believe in "too little, too late" but I feel like even with a revamp, Dawn of War 3 has already left a bad taste in the mouths of many who will likely not be willing to give it another try.

Dawn of War 2 was really the game that needed to be taken forward to make Dawn of War 3, not this strange hybrid of DOW1 and Starcraft that Relic opted for. DOW2 was the perfect foundation for improvement; a large amount of criticism of Dawn of War 2 was that it couldn't really represent a full on conflict - Relic could've simply taken the formula for DOW2 and scaled it up.

You're reasoning is sound, but I don't think implementing these ideas is either practical or something that will save Dawn of War 3 from itself. All we can hope is that Dawn of War 3 hasn't tanked the whole franchise, and that a dev team in the future will do a better job of things in Dawn of War 4.

G.A - Should've called myself Ghost Ark

Makeup Whiskers? This is War Paint! 
   
 
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