Over the holidays me and my brother were playing a lot of Dawn of War over the LAN. Its tons of fun even though I’m getting my ass royally kicked cause Ark has beat this game like 7 times by now, and is able to win skirmish battles with 8 computer enemies on hard almost every time.
I haven’t really played it much, and it is very different from the tabletop game (DOW is an RTS). I usually play Eldar because that’s what I play 40k. After being mercilessly demolished several times I decided to try other races and see how would it be to play Space Marines or Chaos. Ark picked Eldar, and holly shit!
In the tabletop game the Eldar Fire Prism tanks are overpriced and marginally useful. At least in the old Codex. I think their new value is less prohibitive, but still – I never really fielded them. But in DoW they kill! Or at least they do if fielded in large squadrons. What Ark did was to max out his vehicle cap on them, forgoing Wraithlords, Falcons and Vypers. I never really thought about that cause I always liked to have 3-4 of those large wraithbone constructs in the game.
A squadron of 6-8 Prisms is almost unstoppable though. I couldn’t believe how effective they were. Basic troops could barely scratch them, and because the prism area attack most units in combat were dispersed. Furthermore, it only took 2-3 combined salvos to total any SM tank/dreadnought I could throw at them. When supported by an infantry raid from a nearby cloaked Webgate a Prism squadron could take on anything.
I tried the same strategy in a skirmish game against the computer, and I managed to zoom around the map destroy 4 enemy bases with the same 6 prisms without taking any losses (other than the life bar of few vehicles being in yellow).
Which brings me back to the tabletop game. I’m now considering actually fielding a Prism in a game to see how it functions on the battlefield under the new rules…
I did some research and the Fire Prism thing is a well known nuisance among DoW players. In fact, it is so annoying that online players coined a special term for it: FP Spam. If you look through various forums you will see it mentioned all over the place.
In fact if you look at the DoW patch changelogs, you will see that each successive patch slightly decreased the effectiveness of the Fire Prism by reducing the prism cannon damage, area of effect, and making the time between jumps longer.
[tags]warhammer, 40k, warhammer 40k, eldar, fire prism, space marines, skirmish, games, dawn of war[/tags]