Dawn of War Codex

Hey everybody,
when I came across DoW2 I found it so super awesome and started practicing playing with a Chaos Sorceror (Ravener Alpha on occasion), trying to get as good as possible. However, I then suffered a stroke, that pretty much paralyzed my left hand. These days, I can be happy if I can press "shift" reliably as I play.
So I was curious what other people think.
How good can one realistically play with only one functioning hand?

Well damn thats pretty good to see how tenacious you are. I think if you can move your hand fast enough then I reckon you could very easily get by in 3v3s. Lots of players are very casual anyway and some don't use hotkeys at all, so I reckon if you practised enough you could compete decently in teams. 1v1 might be different since theres more to manage, but I reckon as long as you know what you're doing and you aren't playing a micro intensive faction, you'll be alright.

This is interestingly not the first time I've heard of something like this, theres a CoH 2 player who uses only their feet because they have no arms, so I reckon if you keep at it, you'll do just fine. Welcome to the community man.

First of all, really high respect for your determination!

Secondly, I don't know how possible or effective this will be, but maybe you can change a key on your board with shift from computer options. For example, my keyboard has that calculater area at its right, and I don't really use it while playing. Maybe change one of those keys close to you with shift from options and you can press it with your thumb and the left click with your forefinger might do it.

This may allow you to be better. Hell, there are players that don't even use keyboard at all! But when it comes to high micro games like 1v1's against decent players, you will need that keyboard.

There are 2 good news for you

1-) In this game, you can choos who you want to play against. So you can always go against low skill players and everyone will be okay with that.
2-) Not all races are high micro. Chaos, Imperial Guard, Tyranids and maybe Orks, don't requare insane micro, you can play these races with one hand I guess, specially Chaos.

I feel like getting a mouse like this could help immensely.

The keybindings for unit abilities can all be remapped, so it's possible they could be remapped on to buttons on this mouse. It would require a lot of upfront work, but you'd be able to play as well as the rest of them with practice I reckon. And it could be a good experiment to see if you could viably use it for other games.

This mouse is a very good idea...you do not even need so many buttons on your mouse. I think two or three would be enough and it would probably help a lot. Of course, you are in a worse position than other players but I think that it is possible to play with just a mouse and still be competitive.

ziemniakozerca wrote:This mouse is a very good idea...you do not even need so many buttons on your mouse. I think two or three would be enough and it would probably help a lot. Of course, you are in a worse position than other players but I think that it is possible to play with just a mouse and still be competitive.

Tbh, that mouse would gave him a huge advantage over any other players.

Thank you everybody,
for nice words and advice alike,

I feel like getting a mouse like this could help immensely.

The keybindings for unit abilities can all be remapped, so it's possible they could be remapped on to buttons on this mouse. It would require a lot of upfront work, but you'd be able to play as well as the rest of them with practice I reckon. And it could be a good experiment to see if you could viably use it for other games.

I shall be looking into acquiring such a mouse once my financial situation allows it... Til then... I think, I'll however just fight AIs at most.
The last few games I always just locked the enemy bases down with havocs or hivenodes, and watched the AI suicide units XD

I found my biggest problem is that I no longer can organize my troops with CRTL 1,2,3, etc... I tend to lose track of my units and thus have unnessecary casualties.

I lost a 2v2 game with a friend vs 2 normal AIs because my friend was playing DoW2 for the very first time and I could not keep up with two normal AIs... Because I am much worse at multitasking, now. The AIs just always capped more points than I could keep up with and I got overwhelmed.

However, lately, I teamed up with a more experienced friend (Lord Commissar) of mine and we wrecked two expert-AIs without any troubles^^

I use about 6 hotkeys for 90% of all my keyboard presses:

A for attack move.
X for retreat.
Q/W for 90% of all abilities.
H for repair (this is less important if you don't intend to play IG, but vital if you do).
Shift for selecting multiple units quickly for focus firing targets and also for shift-clicking to correctly micro vehicles and send units to solo cap parts of the map.

Then you have your number keys+ctrl too for the individual squads though if your mouse accuracy and DPI are both high enough you could just use 3 or so number keys jump to the one in a certain location and manually select nearby squads.

If you get a gaming mouse with even just 8 or so mouse-keys you are gonna be totally game to play Dawn of War 2.

I recommend this one as it's robust, ergonomic, functional and cheap (and I use it):
https://en.sharkoon.com/product/12527

Doing all that with one hand is going to put it under a lot of stress if you play for more than 2hours though, but I'm sure you are used to that. Just remember those wrist and finger stretches and get a mousepad with wrist-support if you don't already

I used to do only movement arrows and mouse movements when I first started. It's perfectly doable, but your right hand will get tired quickly.

I've used an MMO mouse before and they're super convenient once you get used to it. Makes 2 buttons feel like a gimp I usually only ever used 6 of the buttons in-game and the rest I used for browser commands. There are some people who use all 12 and don't have any issues though. The only downside is that most are pretty heavy at 140 grams. I've switched to a Logitech G Pro Wireless and it's a lot easier on my hand now since it's only 80 grams.

Corsair Scimitar, Logitech G600 and Razer Naga are the popular ones.

I was thinking of something completely different when I saw the post title, never mind.

Cheekie Monkie wrote:I was thinking of something completely different when I saw the post title, never mind.

How cheekie of you.