The Dawn of War: Strongholds mod unlocks all seven Dark Crusade and all nine Soulstorm campaign stronghold missions, allowing them to be played directly from the skirmish menu. Compatibility is included for all vanilla and most mod races, which means that the Dark Eldar and Sisters of Battle can be used on the Dark Crusade missions, blue-on-blue match-ups are permitted, and support is included for the following mods:
Any other new race mods that are released will be added to this list. This should be a fairly easy process, as I have re-coded all the mission SCAR and NIS files to make it as simple as possible to add extra race compatibility.
Full instructions on how to get this mod set up correctly can be found in the readme file accompanying the most recent release version including a list of all required and optional mods with download links. I strongly advise that you check it out before you get started.
Firstly there is an updated installation tutorial for anyone who has been having difficulty getting started with the mod:
Secondly, there are two gameplay videos, showing a Grey Knights raid into the Thur'Abis Catacombs and a Vostroyan Firstborn assault on the Dussala Precinct:
This is in addition to all the older Strongholds videos on his channel. Although they were created using out-of-date versions of the mod, many are still well worth a look. The full playlist can be found here:
Of course he also has videos of vanilla Dawn of War, other mods like Ultimate Apocalypse, plus a host of other games. Check them out here:
I have created this list to try and address the most common questions that are asked about the Soulstorm: Strongholds mod. Please read through this before...
Looks like it's patch time again. Ensure you have v1.7.0 installed (other v1.7.X patches are not required but won't do any harm if you already have any...
Probably the biggest update ever for the mod, as many missions have received major updates, new bonus abilities are available for Soulstorm missions...
Just a quick patch to address a few issues missed in the last update. Ensure you have v1.7.0 installed (other v1.7.X patches are not required but won't...
Well then, I think two years is long enough, so here we go. Ensure you have v1.7.0 installed (patches v1.7.1, v1.7.2 and v1.7.3 are not required but won't...
Another set of bugfixes for Strongholds. As before, ensure you have v1.7.0 installed (patches v1.7.1 and v1.7.2 are not required but won't do any harm...
Patch 1.7.2 brings some more vital fixes for various stronghold missions. Ensure that you have v1.7.0 installed first (the v1.7.1 patch is not required...
If you download new races, how do you get them to work in the mod?
Okay, just found out how. Go into Mod Manager and click on "Merge Mods." Select Strongholds, then add in additional race mods.
Small follow up, Deimos is bugged, at some point, when Tier 3 is triggered, you just get obliterated by overwhelming attack waves. Part of the problem is again, the AI in its attack waves simply doesn't respect any form of limits, so you get hit with easily 3 to 5 players worth of units. Generally I end up drowning in 10+ CSM squads with heavy weapons, protected by a front line of 2x possessed, 3+ berserkers, multiple Defilers, constant spammed obliterators. Daemon Price and Bloodthirster. Simply no practical way to actually win, short of modding it so I gave myself comparable supply (gave myself around 250 supply to field a comparable army, especially given I'm resource limited, the AI is not).
The biggest suggestion I would make is to STOP all attacks until the previous one is completely dead. Right now you may as well quit past 20 minutes or so, since the AI is effectively acting like a player with no unit limits, 5+ bases, and rallied to your one base. I should never see the same units attacking me that I just killed 3 minutes before, and having 0 breather.
Yes it seems victory bay beginning and Deimos at 1;05 Hours is broken
(Played Deimos with the Inqusition)
Play Nan yanoi. Same problem but worse, 100 Broadsides base crawling you from all the barracks on the map. Good luck trying to win without rage, because everytime you make a push, a Knarloc and drones will come to cover the Broadsides. The spam keep happening infinitely.
Will there be a patch for strongholds to work with RAGE 3.0 version soon?
Correction to my earlier statement: the latest version of Unification hadn't been installed. It is working just fine now.
Is there any way you could DM me what the names of the rar files you downloaded were? Sadly I got this to work a while back, but now I can't. It's odd since everything appears to be up to date, and the unification mod works but this one won't. If not, well that is okay too. Have a happy new year.
I'm having the same problem. There's no conflictions, but it just refuses to launch. I'm thinking it MIGHT be due to one or two mods, but I have no way to know what works and what doesn't without going through every single Faction Mod one by one. It's strange, since I never had too much of a problem getting it to work before recently.
I've encountered an issue. I've downloaded the mod, all the required submods, ran the configure file, downloaded the newest patch, and SS will not load the mod. I get an error message saying "Cannot load Mod" in the main menu. I am not sure if there was a mistake I made when downloading everything here.
Sidenote, I have TW and UA also on my computer. Is there anything there that might interfere with this mod?
I'm a newb, how do I approach these strongholds?
In general, the non stronghold missions you have to cheese, most have soft kill timers (Eres, Vandea, Pavonis sometimes, Aceria). By cheese, you need to get RNG lucky with faction rolls, and with who the AI attack first. If you get attacked by more then one AI, immediately restart, you will be too far behind before the soft kill timers finish you (all the alternate "victory" conditions are just faster lose conditions, need to avoid them). Let me emphasize, do NOT even THINK of trying to win with the secondary win conditions, they will just cause you to lose faster. Vandea is the worst, it has a soft 10 minute kill timer since everyone but you starts with a thermo gen in their main base. Either cheese the thermos or somehow magically win inside 10 minutes (some factions simply can't do it, not against 3 AI's)
In general, for most strongholds, you need to have an ultra solid defense, and focus on killing off buildings, ignore the armies as much as you can, they are infinite spawned, there's no clearing them. Most again have soft kill timers, where the spawns become overwhelming (basically, nearly every stronghold has a enrage timer of about 45 minutes, at which point you are facing 3-5x a normal army, on the order of multiple relic units, and any unit that might be restricted for you, they will get 3-5 of them). To give you an idea, by the end of Deimos, I was facing 4-6 obliterator squads, and 3-5 possessed squads, 2 bloodthirsters, and a daemon prince, on top of massed cultists and chaos marines.
Basically, play normally, do lots of restarts to dodge the RNG losses, and let that AI's kill each other, then alpha strike the last one standing. For regular strongholds, semi rush, and you will have to learn which race combinations are impossible (IG vs Tau Stronghold for instance, the infinite spawning stealth teams and IG's horrible detection means you really can't win)
Biggest thing you have to accept is the baseline difficulty is about 2 steps above Hard from campaign, and the out of box AI for non stronghold missions directly cheats by focusing you down on multiple maps (I define this as cheating simply because out of the box, you have a butil in RNG autoloss)
To be clear, I've also done some tweaks to the mod myself to make it (in my eyes) playable, the out of the box is functionally impossible for all factions, you simply get overwhelmed since the AI doesn't respect any form of supply cap or restricted unit cap, all units are directly spawned in, not trained at all, and there's basically 4-5 complete AI armies to fight.
I just wanted to skip the boring skirmish maps and play the stongholds. I'm glad this modder took it upon himself to make them hard for no reason and not even let you have access to the bonuses unless I play all those boring missions I downloaded this mod to skip in the first place one at a time with every single race. THANKS