The RTSC Guide to Dawn of War
Part 11: Armour

DoW Basics

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Dawn of War has only one theatre of operations: ground forces only. There are no air or sea units to shake things up; and with little or no "proper" game physics the developers have resorted to all kinds of weird and wonderful weapon types, armour, tactics and other arbitrary rules to keep things interesting. There are six types of unit in the game, each represented by their armour types: infantry, heavy infantry, monsters, commanders, vehicles and buildings. If you select a unit you can see this displayed in the game GUI (right). Your unit's armour class is displayed under its name, and the armour types that it is designed to counter are shown to the far right of its stats.

Armour types are simply categories. They're used describe a unit, not place it on some innate scale of superiority. You usually find lighter armour is less durable than heavier armour. I don't believe there's anything in the game code that arbitrarily determines that one type of armour naturally trumps another. For example, Shoota Boyz are anti-infantry units, so they can take on anything deemed to be infantry or heavy infantry. But they're all but helpless to any vehicles in the field, and they don't affect monsters as efficiently. Fire Dragons are anti-vehicle units; their big splashy Fusion guns go great damage to vehicles, good damage to buildings... but can barely scratch infantry.

Or, to put it another way, the amount of damage a weapon does to different units is preordained within the weapon's description itself, not by the armour.

There's also very little consistency between the same weapons. For example, the Ork's Big Shoota machine gun looks the same on the Waaagh! tower, Listening Post, the Shoota Boy and the Wartrukk, but they all have wildly different effects on different armour types. The double Big Shoota on a Waaagh! Banner or Listening Post does not have double damage as a single one, thanks to all the modifiers and numbers in play. The Bolter guns on Chaos and Space Marine units fall into the same boat. Scouts, Chaos Marines, Space Marines, Bosses and others all use Bolter guns that look and sound ostensibly the same, but all do completely different amounts of damage to each other. As does Plasma. And Flamers. And Heavy Bolters.

This even applies units. As another example, the Imperial Guard's Priest (the loony monk with the giant chain saw) has completely different stats when he's a member of the Command Squad or whether he's created on his own at Tier 2.


	Infantry armour types Regular guys and gals in armour. Dawn of War makes a distinction between light and heavy forces. Some forces, like the Eldar, are considered "lighter" in weight to others, like the armoured Space Marines, who tend to use heavy infantry.

	inf_low		This is builder armour. As far as the game is concerned, if most weapons so much as burp in the direction of a builder, they'll all but kill it. It sits on all builders except for the Imperial Guard's TechPriest.

	inf_med		This is Light infanty armour. Or, the basic cladding on the first fighting units that pop out of your Headquarters at the start of the game, usually the lighter than light capping units that come from your headquarters, like Scouts, Cultists, Guardians, Imperial Guardsmen, Tau Pathfinders and .

	inf_high		This is regular infantry Armour: Tier1 fighting unit's for "lighter" (in weight) races in the first half of the game. All of Ork's Shootas and Tankbustas, and Eldar's Banshees, Reapers and Rangers.


	Heavy Infantry armour types "Heavier" races, like the Space Marines and Chaos seem to have battleship plate by comparison. Lighter forces tend to have a lot of inf_high soldiers, while the bulk of heavier races have more inf_heavy_med. Since Heavy Infantry doesn't have any builders in its class, there's no inf_heavy_low.

	inf_heavy_med		This is Marine Armour. The heavy infantry races wear this stuff, as well as the second half of the "lighter" armies like Orks and Eldar. Those races' lightweight Squad Leaders wear this stuff too. Its shown as Heavy Infantry in the game GUI. Its worn by Space Marines, Assault Space Marines, Space Marine Sargeants, Raptors, Chaos Marines, Khorne Bezerkers, Warlocks, Warp Spiders, Nob Leaders and Nob Squads.

	inf_heavy_high		This is Terminator Armour. Heavy Infantry's extra heavy armour is reserved for the more advanced units found in Tier3 and beyond: Terminators, Assault Terminators, Obliterators and Possessed Space Marines. Interestingly enough, Eldar's Fire Dragons and those strange Eldar grav platforms use this armour type as well. I think Nob Squads might gain this armour when the Orky Settlement is upgraded? (Probably not!)


	Monster armour types This is for all the mutants and demons in the game. Monster armour is simply a different category to differentiate between the monstrous units in the game from the regular infantry and vehicles.

	monster_med		This is called Daemon Armour in the game GUI. Chaos's Horrors and the Imperial Guard's brutish Ogryns are the only units in the game to wear this armour type. I'm really not sure how good, bad or indifferent it is in relation to any other armour type.

	monster_high		This belongs exclusively to the non-vehicular God Units: Eldar's Avatar, Chaos's Bloodthirster and Ork's Squiggoth.


	Commander armour All the big bosses in the game get their own armour class. As a general rule of thumb, its the toughest armour in the game, and a Boss can seem to wade through the most intense combat against horrific odds without falling - well, for a while at least!

	commander		Reserved exclusively for any standalone big boss. Commander Armour is generally considered by the game to be the toughest of the lot. Its used on any attachable Leaders: Force Commander, Librarian, Chaplin, Chaos Lord, Sorceror, Big Mek, FarSeer, Command Squad, Commissar, Psyker, Priest, etc. It's also found on the special squads like the Seer Council and Ork's Mega Armoured Nobs. You can only ever have one of these elite squads in a game at any moment. Strangely enough, the Imperial Guard's Techpriest builder unit also wears Commander armour.


	Vehicle armour types Its pretty straightforward here: there are three armour class that literally describe light and fast vehicles, regular vehicles and heavy end-game vehicles.

	vehicle_low		This is your basic Light Vehicle Armour for the first light vehicles you can churn out. Usually these guys are fairly cheap and fast moving, they lord it over light infantry (in numbers) but invariably croak at the first sign of any anti-vehicle (AV). This is for the light and speedy Landspeeder and Vyper, and the easily wiped out Sentinel.

	vehicle_med		The bog standard Vehicle Armour for most walking mechs and vehicles in the game, including most of the high end tanks as well: Dreadnaught, Hellfire Dreadnaught, WhirlWindDefiler, Chaos Predator,

	vehicle_high		This is reserved exclusively for the God level vehicles: the Space Marines' Land Raider and Imperial Guard's BaneBlade. It also includes the Ork's Killa Kan.


	Building armour types ...as are the buildings.

	building_low		This is your basic armour type for all resourcing structures, turrets and population cap buildings. In other words: Listening Posts, Plasma Generators (both big and small); any type of Turret (which is why you can never hide behind them after Tier 2); the Ork's Waaagh! banner and the Eldar's Webway Gate. Building_low is the easiest to demolish.

	building_med		The bog standard armour for most regular buildings: the barracks, armouries, vehicle plants and so on. Its the "everything else" Armour outside of your HQ and your resourcing buildings.

	building_high		This is reserved exclusively for the headquarters building in every race. Headquarters are big on points and heavy on hardened armour.