Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is a fast-paced, real-time strategy game based on the popular Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game. But don't expect a straight translation of the tabletop game, because developer Relic was given the green light to interpret the rules as it saw fit to make an exciting game. However, anytime a designer deals with something as large and complex as Warhammer 40,000, the challenge is to make a game that's fun and fair. In this edition of our designer diaries, three of the game's designers discuss the complex challenges that Warhammer presented.

Is it better to have a power saw or a rifle in a fight? That's the question Relic's designers had to face.

Finding the Balance

Jay Wilson
Multiplayer design and game balance are really the core of real-time strategy gameplay. You build your multiplayer game before you create a single mission or even start work on your artificial intelligence, and you base your gameplay around the concepts you establish during the initial design and play-testing of your multiplayer sessions. This diary is going to cover how we went from concept, to implementation, to final with the multiplayer aspects of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War.

One of the main advantages in the initial design phases of Dawn of War was that we could utilize the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop wargame as a jumping-off point for defining game intent and unit statistics. The downside to this is that the tabletop gaming system has many incompatibilities with a real-time strategy game, and we wanted to make sure that we didn't get hung up on trying to turn Dawn of War into something it could never be.

With this in mind, we established a few basic goals that would govern how we wanted the multiplayer game to play:

First, we wanted unit effectiveness and unit counters to be straightforward and easy for players to grasp. A lesson we learned through extensive balance iteration on Impossible Creatures is that just as important as having a solid system for establishing unit effectiveness is having that system be easily understood by players. Knowing that our other goals were focused on modifying this system was another reason to keep it very simple.

Luckily, this is an area where the tabletop game gave us a good set of examples to work from based on weapon effectiveness. Heavy bolters are effective against units with light armor, but they're not nearly as effective against units with power armor. Plasma guns are prized as weapons that are designed to take out units with high armor. And weapons like lascannons and missile launchers are valued for their ability to counter vehicles. Most weapons in the tabletop game fit into one of these three conventions: anti-infantry, anti-heavy infantry, or anti-vehicle. So we used this basic and easy-to-understand triangle as our foundation. Every weapon in the game would be focused on countering a specific unit type. We later added other unit types, like daemons, buildings, and commanders, which allowed us to diversify our counters a bit. However, the system remained relatively straightforward and easy to understand.

Second, effective tactics, like morale-killing units or gameplay elements (like cover), should allow players to alter or reverse counters. A primary goal of our game was that we wanted players to be able to use more than just typical real-time strategy unit counters to defeat their opponents. Two systems were primarily focused on this goal: morale and cover.

Cover, as a system, would allow players to utilize terrain to increase the survivability of their troops by placing them in specific locations on that terrain. This has obvious advantages, and it rewards players for smart use of various areas on the map. Early on, we were concerned about the power of infantry versus vehicles, so we made sure that this system benefited infantry far more than vehicles. Balance for cover was primarily a map-based issue, so once we got the system in the game, it pretty much stayed as is until we hit the final map design stage.

A space marine catches some air after he's hurled into the atmosphere.

Morale, as a system, is designed to allow players to use specialized units, like snipers, or concentrated fire to overcome a superior foe. With units collected together in squads (and subsequently sustaining morale damage at a squad level), it is possible for a player to counter the effectiveness of a squad by breaking it and therefore making it combat ineffective. With this system, players would have an alternative to wiping an enemy out--an alternative that is much simpler to accomplish. Morale acts as a good foil for cover as well, since cover provides little benefit from morale damage.

Our third goal was that close combat versus ranged combat should be a major component of unit balance. Close-combat units should be able to negate the effectiveness of ranged units by engaging them. One of the main tactical concepts of the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game is the use of close combat versus ranged combat. Close-combat units in the tabletop game are quite powerful, because they not only deal a lot of damage but also they can stop ranged-focused units from firing their weapons, consequently forcing them to fight in a manner that does not suit them. This concept does not really exist in real-time strategy, because--generally--the only way to stop a unit from doing what it is good at is to kill it.

We knew this was definitely a concept we wanted to transfer over to the real-time strategy game, so we determined that all infantry needed to have close-combat attacks. If infantry units were engaged in close combat, than they would prevent most ranged units from being able to shoot. However, we also put in several simple systems to change the dynamic of ranged units so that some could fire on the move while others were most effective when stationary. Again, these were all concepts from the tabletop game that we pulled into Dawn of War to increase the level of its tactical gameplay.