We recently had a chance to get up close with the multiplayer in Winter Assault, the upcoming expansion to last year's satisfyingly brutal strategy game, Dawn of War. Like the original game, the expansion will take place in the savage future of Warhammer 40,000--a nightmarish science-fiction universe where elves, orks, and marines tear each other to shreds using high-tech weaponry and armor 400 centuries in the future. Winter Assault will add an all-new playable faction, the Imperial Guard, a group of human soldiers who make their start on the field as infantry and can later commission powerful tanks and armor to join them.

　　At the start of a multiplayer game, the Imperial Guard will want to do something that no other faction in Dawn of War will do: hide out at the main base. While Dawn of War's basic gameplay includes great rewards for aggressive players who sally forth and capture strategic points on the map, the Imperial Guard are best served by hanging back at their starting fortress, maybe holding a point or two, and researching upgrades like mad. This is because the new faction focuses primarily on defense, a significant change of pace from the very offense-minded Dawn of War's factions. Like in other strategy games, you'll be able to research various upgrades that will let you build new structures and commission more-powerful soldiers and vehicles in "tiers"--but the guardsmen will want to hang back at their base at least until they hit tier two, if not tier three.

　　Many of the lower-level guardsmen units are gun-toting infantry with serious morale problems (which makes sense, considering that they share the battlefield with murderous orks, equally murderous and fanatical space marines wearing power armor, gigantic demons, and equally gigantic mechs and tanks). To solve this problem, the guardsmen can research the commissar unit, which makes infantry immune to morale damage (they can no longer be routed) and which can also use an "execute" ability to shoot one guardsman in the back, "inspiring" the others to be even more effective in battle. Infantry can also line themselves up in deep cover and wait for the enemy to come to them since, at least in the early game, the Imperial Guard will be at their best as, in the words of Relic lead designer Andrew Chambers, a "stationary wall of fire." In addition, infantry can be upgraded with grenade launchers--a weapon that Chambers refers to as a "disruptor." Disruptors, which are being emphasized more strongly in the expansion, don't deal a lot of damage, but they do knock enemies flat on their backs, which can be very handy against enemy leader units with powerful special abilities; if upgraded guardsmen pelt enemy leaders with grenades that knock them silly, those enemy leaders will never be able to use their powerful skills.

　　Of course, guardsmen can also commission their own powerful infantry units, like the general leader, which acts like a squad unto himself and possesses a "strafing run" ability that lets him call in air strikes on specific targets. The general, like other infantry squads, can be augmented with a psyker priest (which boosts hand-to-hand combat power) and a commissar, making him an unrelenting, hard-nosed killing machine. They can also use their network of tunnels, which gets automatically built for practically every single structure they build. Not only can infantry units be garrisoned in pretty much all of the Imperial Guards' structures, but they can also quickly mobilize from building to building using the tunnels--this means they can arrive at "undefended" expansion points much faster than an unsuspecting enemy might think.

　　Once the guardsmen have reached the upper tiers of research, they'll be able to commission vehicles like the sentinel walker (a swift but poorly armored antivehicle scout unit that can be devastating against enemy vehicles and settlements, and is useful for raids), the hellhound flamethrower tank (which bathes enemies in gouts of flame and inflicts severe morale damage), and the basilisk artillery cannon, the longest-ranged weapon in the game. They'll also be able to produce the only good melee unit among their ranks (besides the general), the Ogryns, which are ugly ogre soldiers that are exceptionally good at crushing enemies' skulls. However, the Imperial Guards' pride and joy is the baneblade assault tank, a massive tank with multiple cannons and huge firepower. However, with the exception of the sentinel, many of the Imperial Guards' vehicles aren't especially fast and can be defeated by swarms of enemies that get in close and repeatedly pummel them into oblivion.

　　In any case, Winter Assault's multiplayer, and its battles in general, will be much more balanced than in the original Dawn of War (in which players often finish games in as little as five minutes with highly aggressive rushes). Beginners should find that the Imperial Guard will be a good fit for a cautious play style, while experts will have to contend with this new threat. And all players will be dealing with a game that has lower unit costs and lower build times for its higher-end units, even though all players will still have unit limits (population caps, essentially). If you didn't follow that last sentence, here it is in plain English: All the game's most powerful units must still be researched and paid for in premium, but in Winter Assault, they will pretty much be cheaper and faster to build across the board, so players who don't take advantage of "climbing the tech tree" (that is, researching lots of new units and technology) will find themselves at a severe disadvantage against players who do and who end up with more-powerful armies as a result. You'll still be limited to how many units you can have on your side in total--so if you occupy yourself with building only low-level units as fast as you can, you'll run into real problems when the enemy comes rolling in with an upgraded army and you've already built as many units as you possibly can--and they're all too low-level and weak to put up a fight.

　　Otherwise, Winter Assault still looks great and still seems as fast-paced and vicious as ever. In addition to details like enhanced weather effects for rain, sleet, and falling snow on the battlefield, the expansion will also support "persistent decals," a fancy term that describes how the environments will reflect the aftermath of battles. Artillery salvos will leave blackened craters on the ground that remain there indefinitely, while slain soldiers' corpses will pile up on the battlefield (rather than simply fading away), and the stains of their blood will remain (but will fade slightly over time if the blood was spilled on snow). These minor details, along with major additions like the new playable faction and the retuned cost of high-level units, should make Winter Assault a must-have for Dawn of War fans. Fortunately, real-time strategy fans won't have to wait much longer for the expansion, since it ships later this month.