Tech trees still need to be unlocked, and racing to build tanks before your opponent is still the best tactic. Though it reduces the importance of base-building compared to other games of the era that staple is still there, with pre-fab buildings dropped from orbit to add drama to what the designers obviously realized was a boring element of the genre. You can see that in Dawn Of War with its meatgrinder battles and necessary twists on resource-gathering-it’s hard to imagine Space Marines collecting crystals to pay for their next round of upgrades-but it’s still recognizable as a classic RTS at heart. In 2004 the RTS genre was in an odd place, no longer thriving as it had in the 1990s and starting to change to fight its growing irrelevance.

I keep trying to pull the camera out further and then realizing what once seemed like a god-like omniscient skyview is actually kind of dinky, but even so the base game’s appeal remains obvious. Returning to vanilla Dawn Of War after modding it to hell and back is an odd experience. Only 1997’s turn-based Final Liberation let you control Titans until the Ultimate Apocalypse mod came out. But the tabletop version of Warhammer 40,000 goes even bigger than that in the “Epic” line of games, in which skyscraper-sized mechs called Titans stomp into battle with each other. Part of what makes Dawn Of War more appealing than other RTS games (and particularly its sequel) is its scale, putting you in charge of entire squadrons and eventually building up to fleets of tanks that rumble across the terrain. Ultimate Apocalypse comes closer than anything else to bringing that imaginary game Warhammer 40,00 players dream of to life. Even when I tried to stack the deck in my favor by choosing the wimpy space-elf Eldar as my opponents (sorry, Eldar fans) they eventually swamped my position with spindly-limbed walkers and laser-spitting Brightlance platforms, breaking my Marines’ morale over and over till they had nowhere left to fall back to. Its maps throw hordes of enemies at you in growing numbers until by the end of it they’re swamping you with vehicles as your last turret’s about to fall.

While one of Dawn Of War’s design aims was to push players into early conflict by forcing them to squabble over strategic points and relics, the Warhammer 40,000 fiction is full of doomed last stands in which small numbers of Space Marines or Imperial Guard hunker down while endless waves of enemies fall on them, and those are the scenarios Survival recreates. If you’ve ever set up a skirmish battle in Age Of Empires or the like just to turtle in your base and fight off any attackers who dare approach, you’ll understand the appeal of Survival: The Art Of Defence.

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