As you know, I recently bought Dawn of War and its first two expansions through Steam as part of my on-going pledge to keep PC gaming alive, so long as my consumer dollars somehow benefit Valve. (Confidential to Atari: Maybe you could put Neverwinter Nights 2 and its expansion up on Steam so I don’t have to deal with Direct2Drive? Thanks in advance!) As such, you poor bastards will be forced to read through painfully uninteresting Dawn of War updates. Sure, you could just ignore them and press your back button, but let’s be honest here: This is about as good as the Internet ever gets without someone getting naked.

So, without further ado, I present The DORK Club’s First Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War Mod Roundup of Happiness, Rainbows, and Broken Dreams: Be Gentle It’s My First Time Edition. I’ll refrain from using bullet points to mask my poor organizational skills.

Dawn of Skirmish

What that boring screenshot so effectively communicates is that this mod brings some welcome AI improvements to Dawn of War. Most notably, it makes it not suck. But the mod also greatly optimizes the AI, allowing for some noticeably improved performance for poor folks like me with pathetically outdated PCs.

Interestingly, Dawn of Skirmish is included with nearly every other available Dawn of War mod. It allows the AI to actually use the more interesting abilities of various races and for some extreme customization, including providing the AI with resource bonuses or allowing them to ‘dance’ entire armies in and out of melee range. It’s more or less perfect for people like me who are too afraid to deal with all the scary Europeans that dominate the game online.

Inquisition: Daemonhunt

I know next to nothing about the Warhammer 40k tabletop game. I know it involves tables, their tops, and is restrictively expensive. I also know it involves many different playable factions, some of which aren’t represented in Dawn of War. Daemonhunt tries to rectify this by bringing the Daemonhunters to the PC game.

Sadly, it’s not particularly impressive, despite the tremendous amount of work that went into it. It’s easy to see where other races’ units have been hijacked and modified to fill out the Daemonhunters’ ranks, with none of their individual units feeling wholly unique. Still, there are some impressive features, including an AI that actually play the race well, entirely new building architecture, and a handy little structure that slowly saps the health from any unit within its range.

Witch Hunters – Adepta Sororitas

Despite still being relatively early in development (the public beta was just released on December 2, 2007), Witch Hunters is already hugely impressive. The race’s character models and textures are more detailed than those of any other race from vanilla Dawn of War, and unlike Inquisition’s Daemonhunters, the Witch Hunters’ units actually feel entirely new. Because they are. Many of the units can even use extremely powerful faith abilities, assuming your squads meet reinforcement requirements.

Sadly, the entire mod will be rendered moot in March when Relic/IronLore’s official version of the Witch Hunters, called The Sisters of Battle, make an appearance as a playable race in Soulstorm. They certainly won’t look as good, however.

Depending on how lazy I am, expect another mod update later in the week. With any luck, it should prove just as uninteresting for everyone who reads this site.