The Crucible Mod for Dawn of War

Well hello everyone! It is a year tomorrow since we last posted an article. Sorry about that!

So yes. Last year, after our last release in July, I got super busy with work. I sadly had to take a step back from being hugely involved in development. Luckily our team has expanded quite a bit in the last 6 months so plenty of progress carried on in my absence and I was also able to personally get back to Cruci work this year. We're super happy to now get this patch out. The amount of new stuff is pretty epic and it is also one of the patches that we've done that has added the most general polish to the mod.

So where shall we begin? With a huge CSM faction rework! This has been a project of Olegs and, from what the play testers have been saying, has ended up being awesome :p I actually don't really know the details as I haven't got round to watching Oleg's recently released guide video yet. Think I'll get round to that tomorrow. It's a monster two and a half hour video! Here it is though if you want to get a full look on how the race works now;

My understanding is that each of the gods you can align with will give you units from a certain Chapter and two of these options can be chosen. Depending on which Gods you align with will then fill out your troop and vehicle options. For this article though I'm just going to introduce you all to the 4 Chapters and the new units they will give you.

Firstly we have the World Eaters (aligned with Khorne). Along with the Khorne Berzerkers and Khone Terminators that are already in game, you'll also get access to Death Brigades, Tetsudo Transports, Berzerker Dreadnoughts and Doomblasters.

Next up is the Death Guard (aligned with Nurgle). Plague Reaper and Plague Marines are already in game but they'll be joined by Assault Plague Marines, Desecrators, the Plagueburst Crawler and Blightlord Terminators.

Aligned to Slaanesh we have the Emperor's Children. Noise Marines are a long time staple of CSM but now you'll also have access to Noise Moritat Killteams, Sonic Scorpions, Sonic Warp Speeders, Land Gifters and Phoenix Guard Terminators.

Last of the Chaos Space Marines Chapters is the Thousand Sons (aligned to Tzeentch). Rubric Marines are a long term unit but the roster has now been expanded with the Practicus Coven, Hellblade, Deceiver, Scarab Occult Terminators and the Silver Tower.

So yeah, choose two gods and you'll gain access to the 12 unique units from the 2 supporting Chapters, the only caveat being that each god has an opposing god that it cannot be allied to. Exciting stuff!

Next up we have the remaining two Chapters for Space Marines. This faction rework was started with the Dark Angels, Salamanders and Raven Guard which were released a while back. We've been slower than we would have liked but finally the system is being completed (in its initial form at least). We're super happy to be adding the Imperial Fists and Space Wolves to the game.

Imperial Fists will be getting the Legion Basilisk, Devastator Centurions and the Phalanx Wardens, along with a host of new turret types and wall functionality that the Phalanx Warden Sergeant can drop down.

The Space Wolves will be getting Fenris Wolves, Wolfen Priest, Long Fangs, Wulfen and Wulfen Bikes. These will have some unique fun as far as usual Space Marine mechanics go as they will be based around the pack mechanics (like the Orks), getting interesting buffs as the squad sizes increase.

Me and Oleg recently had a stream where we went into the SM Chapters in detail (along with the Tau changes) so if you want to give that a listen, here is the link;

On the the Tau then. Someone on the Discord server was mentioning just how bad the weapon upgrade descriptions were. I wasn't surprised as Tau has had very little work done. I took a look at them, realised just in what a poor state the race was in in general and decided to do a full overhaul from scratch (just a few weeks before the patch coming out lmao). One of the main issues was a lack of a standard set of infantry upgrades, meaning that Tau infantry had next to no scaling. Their infantry stats were also all over the place. I decided to implement a brand new research system for the tau infantry which can be found in the Path to Enlightenment and Shrine to Mont'Ka buildings.

Along with this there has been a total rework of all the infantry, including the roles of everything and how everything scales. All the descriptions for everything has also been overhauled, along with lots of detail about how things are intended to be used, and also a full rebalance. There really are too many changes and it really is a total overhaul. Details can be found at this link and in the previous stream vod;

Ork stronghold next. I personally have no idea what has been done but Oleg and the testing team have been working tirelessly to iron out all the bugs and make it as fun and engaging as possible. I'm sure Oleg will be making one of his usual guide videos for it but we'll also be talking about it on our normal release day stream.

Another new unit is found in the Chaos Daemons army. The possessed tank!

And a final thing to mention. We've made a big push for this patch to get through the really long list of bugs and issues that our community and playtesting have brought to our attention. Weird model and animation issues. Sound issues. Description issues etc. We've gotten through about 80% of them before my brain started to bleed and I decided that I could do no more for this patch without driving myself crazy. That said this does mean that we've considerably improved on the general polish of the mod which is something that was needed and we're pleased to have made some good progress with this. We'll be looking to do more of this for the next patch too.

As a separate releasing going live alongside v2.06, we have the first version of the Cruci Campaign Configurator, as created by NeoTachyon. This will allow you to apply various skirmish win conditions to the campaign but will stop multiplayer from working properly. Unticking all boxes will allow multiplayer to go back to working as usual. This is very much a v1 release and we can't promise that all win conditions will work perfectly (like auto abilities for example). It is just a few files placed in the top level of your Cruci folder though so any issues, it will be very easy to remove. That said...have fun with it!

Finally I wanted to go through some thanks. We are nothing without our community, our team and the other mod teams that have given us so much help and advice over the years so I'd like to give a few shoutouts. Firstly I'd like to say a huge thanks to the Cruci mod team. To Oleg for being someone that I can trust to head up development of this mod when I'm away and for the insane amount of hours he has put into creating this mod with me over the last years. A huge thanks to Kekoulis for his tireless work concerning the 3D modelling side of development (and as always responsible for all the new units in this patch - so many thanks!). And to the rest of our guys that worked on v2.06; TheClinkingMan, Clonnan and Eagl. Also a huge thanks to Fuggles, Thudo, Gambit and everyone else at Unification for all the advice and help over the years. A huge thanks needs to also go to the Unification Voice Artist Team for all their amazing work that has found it's way into Cruci. Thanks need to go to Zeski for team colour work and Corncobman for his advice and finally I'd like to say a huge thanks to our community and playtesting team. The mod would be nowhere near as polished as it is without all their time playing the game and feeding back their thoughts to us.

Thank you thank you thank you!

We'll be doing our usual release day stream at 6pm GMT today (21st April) so please come and join us :D
Twitch.tv

As always there are loads more changes, so please feel free to take a gander at the changelog;
2.06 changelog - googledrive

And as always, come join us on our discord for tech help and general Cruci discussions;

Cheers and enjoy!!!