Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. Let's talk about the Space Marines.

I'm back! I'm still alive people, I was just vacationing somewhere with no internet connection and I'm also terribly lazy. But today I'll continue my tradition of rambling about old video games not a lot of people play anymore and then returning to my slumber for several weeks.

Today, we have another episode of "Let's talk about a race of Warhammer 40k that appears in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade"

If you remember, last episode explains what all of this is about; Me talking about all of the races available in the game, things like who are they?, what do they do? and finally the stronghold, their "special mission" in the game which uses certain themes of every race in order to make it feel like an actual base used by them.

In this episode we're going to talk about Warhammer 40k's poster boys, the SPESS MEHREENS Space Marines (Also known as Adeptus Astartes, because Latin is cool).

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DISCLAIMER: Warhammer 40k has some good amount of blood and violence, if you don't like these things I recommend you stop reading from here.

Who are the "Space Marines"?

To explain what a Space Marine is I actually have to tell a little bit of their story, an abridged version of it, because they're a little more complicated than the Imperial Guard.

You can easily explain the Imperial Guard because they're just normal humans who fight against aliens and defend their home planet, but you can't easily explain how Space Marines are just angry super soldiers who do crusades in space to kill anything and anyone they don't understand.

Their story goes like this: Long, long ago in the 40k universe a guy appeared his name was Emperor and he decided he wanted to make humanity the best race in the entire universe of 40k. He also decided he wanted to be the Emperor of the human race.

However, it wasn't so simple: by the time the Emperor was trying to unite humanity, they were also fighting against aliens and other humans from different planets, considering that the Imperial Guard (an army of normal humans) is usually utterly destroyed by aliens how are humans supposed to fight these beings?

The Emperor gets an idea, he decides to make super soldiers, strong enough to be able to fight against anyone who stands in his path. He also creates his children in a laboratory, with the idea that they will be the ones to lead his legions of super soldiers into battle so that he can chill at Earth and watch Netflix.

However, the tubes contaning his kids were stolen by actual hell demons and scattered all across space. So he would have to wait a little bit until he could chill at home. When the Primarchs (that's the name given to the kids of the Emperor) were found each one of them was given command of their specific legion.

You see, to make a Space Marine you need a "gene-seed" which is kinda like the super soldier thing they gave Captain America except the gene-seed allows the creation of several extra organs which make a normal human into a Space Marine. Each legion's gene-seed was different from one another because they were based around their Primarch (basically, before they were stolen as kids, the Emperor was already making their legions based on the DNA of their sons, or something).

This is their beginning, each Space Marine belonged to a Legion which was lead by a Primarch. But THEN... a war happened, half of the Primarchs turned against the Emperor and his Imperium and after this whole fiasco happened the legions were divided into Chapters. Which is were we are right now.

While in both the lore and the tabletop each chapter has different sets of rules -or traits- that define them, in Dawn of War the different chapters are nothing but a different color for the marines. It doesn't take anything from the experience though, you can still enjoy "playing" as different chapters since the game has a lot of the units of the tabletop Marines.

Here's some examples of Space Marine Chapters, as seen in Dawn of War:

_{Ultramarines, the poster boys of the Space Marines. Their trait is being the vanilla marines.}

...Notice the symbol on the right (left...?) pauldron, which shows the chapter they belong to.

_{Blood Angels, their trait is being the space vampires, everyone loves them.}

_{Imperial Fists, like the Ultramarines, but better. They like fortifying stuff.}

_{Blood Ravens, Dawn of War (and its sequels) protagonists, their trait is being kleptomaniacs.}

This is only a few of them, really. But if I wanted to talk about each Space Marine Chapter that would take an eternity and probably make this post almost as large as the bible (because there's that much backstory).

Let's focus on the "game" part of the Space Marines.

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So, what do they do?

The space marines are the... easiest army. In that it's very easy to learn how to play them, but it's a different story when you try to learn how to play them, as in play them to the best of their ability.

In Dawn of War (the original game with no expansions) they're the only race you play as in the campaign, which serves wonders because they're the jacks of all trades. Space Marines excel at being the jacks of all trades, their basic infantry is the Tactical Squad:

_{A normal Squad of Marines.}

Which is perfectly capable of doing what I just said, being masters of everything. A Tactical Squad can be given 4 different weapons to fit different situations, for example: they can use a flamer (flamethrower) to deal damage to an enemy's morale, thus making it easier for other squads to pick them off, or they can use a heavy bolter (think minigun) to shred the enemy's squads, they can use a plasma pistol to deal with the heavy infantry or rocket launchers to deal with the enemy vehicles and/or structures.

When you start a game with Space Marines you have a different type of infantry, Scouts. Scouts are really weak, and they're not meant to be used as constantly as your Tactical Marines or other squads. However, Scouts can later infiltrate (which makes them invisible to any unit that can't detect infiltrated units) and attack while infiltrated. If they have sniper rifles, this basically makes them into a dangerous sniper unit.

Since you start the game with the scouts, you may be thinking "but Guub, how come the marines are the basic infantry if scouts are the ones you start with?" because, dear reader, the scouts are too fragile and will die when fighting anything, so long as they don't have their infiltration abilities or a sniper rifle and even then they need some luck on their side.

Next to the Tactical Squad you have the Assault Squad:

_{A fully upgraded Assault Squad, note their jet packs and chain swords.}

Assault squads are the perfect helpers of a tactical squad; these guys can jump right into your opponent's formations and distract them with melee combat while the rest of your squads shoots them. They're also really good at blowing up structures with their grenades, which can kill several vehicles with just two of them. Pretty good if you ask me.

Then we move on to their commander, or "Hero", unit: Brother-Captain Davian Thule of the Blood Ravens 4th Company:

_{Brother-Captain Davian Thule of the Blood Ravens 4th Company in the flesh.}

Sorry, I just really like this guy, the actual name of the commander unit is "Force Commander", this is because the Hero unit changes with every expansion:

The Space Marines have Gabriel Angelos as their Force Commander for the normal game (no expansions) and for the second expansion, Davian Thule is the Force Commander in Dark Crusade, and Indrick Boreale is the Force Commander of the final expansion Soulstorm (we don't talk about him).

As a unit, the Force Commander is a pretty decent one, he's one of the strongest commander units in the entire game and gets some pretty powerful skills, like the ability to call down an orbital bombardment in any spot of the map that you can see, and can also boost the damage output of units around him.

But like the Imperial Guard, the Space Marines have a lot more units they can use in a battle, and if someone playing this game wants to play the Space Marines right (like me) they better learn about all of them. Here's one of my favorites:

_{A Dreadnought, a literal walking tomb.}

This is a dreadnought, we have two of these, the hellfire version (which is cheaper but "weaker") and the regular dreadnought (which can be equipped with 1 weapon that can change how he affects the battle).

Dreadnoughts are cool because they're not mechas, but rather a Space Marine that's too wounded to continue fighting with his body, so they're put in little tombs that are connected to the Dreadnought and that allows the Marine to keep fighting from their "grave" , hence their battle cry: "Even in death I still serve."

_{Hellfire Dreadnought, not as strong as the other counterpart but cheaper to produce.}

Then we have Terminators (No, not the robot):

_{Here we have two terminator squads: A melee squad (right) and a ranged one (left).}

I absolutely love Terminators, they're the reason I play Space Marines. Bonus points because they come with "drop pods", this gives you the ability to deploy them at any part of the map you can see. For example, right at the enemy's base when you're doing a surprise attack, or if you're feeling riskier right where your infiltrated squad of scouts is waiting to surprise the enemy.

_{Here the termies drop from their drop pods, ready to rain down destruction on whoever I point them at.}

God, I can really spend all of this post talking about the Space Marines units...

Just to make this quicker, I'll just show every unit and explain a little of them:

_{Chaplains, they're there to make sure the Space Marines remain good christian bois faithfull to the Emperor, which they workship.}

_{Grey Knights,they're kinda like black-ops soldiers? they kill demons, mostly. they don't exist.}

_{A Librarian no, not that kind. They're like the Space Marine wizards.}

_{An Apothecary, the medics of the Space Marines. Responsible for keeping the gene-seeds safe so that more Marines can be made.}

_{A Predator Tank, A powerful tank. This thing packs a punch. Kills stuff dead.}

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Let's talk about their stronghold.

_{This is my favorite character in Dawn of War.}

In Dark Crusade, a stronghold is the main base of operations of a specific race. Each one of them is unique in its different way and some of them represent the themes of each race.

Before I start though, let me say that it was quite difficult to enjoy fighting against the Marines in their stronghold as Necrons, not because it was difficult but because it was terribly easy. I mean, yeah i play on easy mode just to be able to focus on taking screenshots instead of having to focus on tactics and screenshots at the same time, but this is just too easy...

Don't get me wrong I still liked the stronghold, a lot actually. While you fight the space marine forces you can hear Davian Thule yelling and ordering his marines around, which gives a very good atmosphere to the stronghold, but aside from that there isn't much else.

It feels more like a normal skirmish map rather than an important map in the campaign, it's also pretty small, compared to the size of the Imperial Guard's map and some others we'll talk about later.

But god, Thule's voice actor makes this stronghold really good. The Force Commander doesn't really give up, no matter what you do, no matter if they're outnumbered or if they're in their last legs, the guy just keeps fighting and trying to rally his troops.

_{He's either dead or trying to make a snow angel.}

Compare this to Lukas Alexander (the commander unit of the Imperial Guard), in his stronghold you can feel him grow desperate as he fights, even as he tries to keep his army together. Thule on the other hand, never does break when fighting him, this guy represents what it means to be a Space Marine, someone who meets their enemies head on even if it means death, you could say he doesn't know what fear is.

I really want to say this entire level is good, but i just can't. I know I've said that Thule's voice acting is a big part of this why I like this map but not everyone who plays games like this wants to hear a guy yell about an Emperor and his Brothers. It just feels normal, like there's nothing special here that screams Space Marine.

Looking back at the previous episode I can say that the Imperial Guard stronghold screams Imperial Guard because of the fact that is completely filled with IG soldiers and that they constantly send them at your base in the hopes of drowning you in corpses. Basically, they do what makes the Imperial Guard the Imperial Guard.

Compare that to the Space Marine map and tell me which one has the best atmosphere.

Overall, I'd say this is a pretty normal map, aside from Thule there's not a lot going on in it. But it is kind of enjoyable, it does show how the Space Marines fulfill their duties in that they will fight until they die to accomplish their missions but it doesn't show much else.

I can say this though, this map made me like Davian Thule even more than before, seriously the guy's a badass.

To end the post, I'll just put some pictures here of the final assault, just like the last episode.
As always, thank you for reading and I hope you have a great day. See you next time!

<sub>The Necrons march towards the Space Marine headquarters.

The Necrons arrive. The Space Marines fight back.

The Necron Lord leads the charge and slaughters an entire squad himself.

He then proceeds to slaughter a poor Space Marine Scout.

The battle report, necrons are kinda genocidal.</sub>

_...

_{...That was so fast I didn't even get to use the Necron Monolith...}