BACK TO WAR

Return to Kronus in DAWN OF WAR IV, an ambitious sequel to the greatest 40K RTS ait, so how many Bomb Squigs can I make?”

- By Sean Martin

Wait, so how many Bomb Squigs can I make?" I ask Elliott Verbiest, senior game designer on Dawn of War IV, as I gaze hungrily at a squig icon in the Orks’ ramshackle recruitment centre. We make some quick calculations—if each Bomb Squig squad has five models and costs a very reasonable three cap, then taking into account the game’s total 300 unit cap, that makes...

“500 bomb squigs!” Verbiest proudly exclaims. Now, that’s a whole lot of explosive pink death. Whether I’ll actually be able to make that many with my fledgling Ork camp is questionable—Dawn of War IV has a unit upkeep system, after all—but I’m told late-game technologies for the Orks reduce some units’ cost to zero, letting you field an endless tide of basic boyz to feed your ever-expanding waaagh. Apparently, the player before me made so many Necron Warriors, he actually managed to crash the game. But such pioneering RTS spirit is what Dawn of War has always been about.

Dawn of War IV is attempting to put a lot of units on the screen. So many, in fact, that you would have needed mods to accomplish it in the previous games. Verbiest, who originally hails from the RTS modding scene himself, says they’re trying to lower the barrier for people to tweak things to play the way they want. “I know how much of a big deal this is,” he explains, “Especially for Dawn of War players.” Besides the increased scale, skirmish battles are highly customizable, with sliders that let you experiment, even raising the unit cap further. All of which is to say, Dawn of War IV is bigger.