2.3.0 Update Patch Notes

“Only in death does duty end.”

To revisit Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, a game we love, and to see the warm reception from players has meant so much to us here at Relic. We want to thank all of you for your continued support and passion for the game. We have therefore extended our support plans for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Definitive Edition beyond September and will continue updating the game for the rest of 2025. The next patch is currently targeting late October 2025. You can find a small preview of exciting, and highly requested features coming this year listed below today’s patch notes.

Today’s update for Dawn of War – Definitive Edition includes a complete overhaul of Unit Portraits, improvements to the Automatch experience, Art and Animation fixes, HUD improvements, and fixes for several high priority crashes. Many of the fixes included in today’s patch are thanks to your feedback, so please continue to report any issues to us at help.relic.com.

General

• Unit Portraits – all faction units and buildings have been updated to use portraits built from captures of the updated Definitive Edition models with hand touch-ups to improve clarity and consistency. These can be seen in the HUD in all modes as well as on the Dark Crusade & Soulstorm campaign maps. Note: With the volume of icons updated, it is possible that some may have been missed or mis-implemented. Please report any issues you find, and we will prioritize fixing them in a subsequent patch

• Fixed a crash that could occur when exiting a multiplayer match

• Fixed a crash that could occur when transferring badges in multiplayer lobbies

• Fixed a crash that would occasionally occur when deleting a unit during multiplayer gameplay

• Fixed a crash when a unit would attempt to perform a jump attack near the map border in multiplayer gameplay

• Fixed a crash that would occur when loading an autosave file that was saved right as a building was updating to the next unit in the production queue

• Fixed a rare crash that could occur after the skirmish or multiplayer game was complete and players were viewing the map

• Fixed a rare crash that could occur when loading Dark Crusade or Soulstorm campaign missions

• Fixed two rare crashes that could occur when a player uses a Possession ability in a multiplayer game

• Fixed a rare crash that could occur in Dawn of War campaign missions when defending against large hordes of Orks

• Fixed a rare crash when loading save files created on a modded Soulstorm campaign

• Fixed a rare crash when using the Tyranid mod in multiplayer

• Fixed a rare crash that could occur on attempting to join a custom game

• Fixed a crash that could occur when playing Multiplayer using Parallels on Mac

Gameplay

• Camera - updated edge panning functionality to correctly work while Lock Cursor to Game is disabled

• Audio – updated unit speech to correctly respect the 3D placement of the camera when Sisters of Battle, Tau, and Dark Eldar units enter combat, take damage, or die.

• A.I. – updated a scripting error that would cause Insane difficulty A.I. to default to Easy in the final Dawn of War mission

• Eldar – enabled an Avatar sync kill that was disabled in Soulstorm

• Orks – Ork Warboss range attack upgrades now function correctly in Dark Crusade

Multiplayer

• Match Statistics – fixed an error where match results / statistics would not be correctly reported when spectating after being eliminated from a match

• Automatch – removed Unranked Automatch as an option to prevent confusion. All Automatch matches have always been and will continue to be ranked

• Automatch – Added messaging about the number of players found during an automatch search

• Automatch – added messaging when cancelling automatch to prevent attempting 2 overlapping automatch requests. This prevents issues where automatch would appear to be immediately cancelled after pressing the button

• Team Automatch – fixed an error where after the host changed their own faction it would change the faction of other players

• Skirmish – added an error message when players attempt to start a match with unbalanced teams with auto/random teams enabled. Previously this would automatically add an A.I. player to a Closed slot

• Observers - updated logic used to add Observers to prevent situations where observers would take the spot of a required player. Closed slots now default to Open for Observer and Observers cannot join in Open slots

• Player Statistics – updated the player stats UI to always show the correct player statistics and updated several statistics that were not tracking correctly

User Interface

• HUD – unit portraits and action icons no longer blur when choosing Low Texture Quality

• HUD – updated Dark Eldar HUD to not block mouse input when clicking on the hotkey area of each button

• Automatch – updated team automatch screen to correctly display in widescreen

• Dark Crusade & Soulstorm campaign intro videos now play correctly for all factions when starting a new campaign

• Dark Crusade & Soulstorm – fixed several cases in campaign missions where the help text incorrectly referred to the name of the army from another campaign

• Dark Crusade & Soulstorm – updated Victory and Loss screens with new background images and with better support for ultrawide aspect ratios

• Dark Crusade – the strength value shown when the A.I. is attacking the player now shows the correct value instead of 0

• Soulstorm – updated the units portraits shown during dialogue to use the correct Soulstorm commanders on Tau & Chaos stronghold missions

Art & Animation

• Terrain – reduced specular values on terrain that should not be reflective

• Terrain – updated footstep FX to reduce brightness that was causing it to look like units were walking on snow when on grass

• Buildings – updated textures on building rooftops covered with snow in Winter Assault to avoid seams

• Wrecks – updated tank wrecks that could appear to be squashed

• Tau – added thruster glow FX to the XV8 Crisis Battlesuit

• Tau – updated Fire Warriors running animations to position their gun correctly

• Space Marines – fixed a graphical error on the force commander’s chainsword that made it appear in multiple pieces

• Space Marines – fixed an error causing ground decals around turrets to respawn constantly while it is alive

• Chaos – fixed animation error that caused Chaos Cultists to shoot in the air on their first shot

• Chaos – fixed the Horror’s firing animation

• Chaos – updated the Daemonic Ascension Dark Crusade wargear to correctly display the FX in wargear menu

• Orks – added animations to the wheels on the Trukk

• Orks – added muzzle flash to the Big Mek pistol

• Orks – fixed an animation issue where the Warboss would appear to fire their first shot into the ground

• Orks – added recoil animations for the Shoota Boyz

• Orks – fixed the animations of Orks on the Waaagh! Banner to prevent their feet from clipping

• Imperial Guard – updated Commander to use the correct color scheme in Dark Crusade missions

• Winter Assault – added a gate closing animation to the gates used in Winter Assault Disorder Mission 4

• Winter Assault - updated Winter Assault Order missions to correctly use the Ultramarines color scheme where appropriate

• Sync Kills – fixed an animation issue where units thrown by a sync kill (ex. Killed by Dreadnaughts) would freeze in midair

• Skybox – updated the Dark Crusade Necron stronghold mission to be correctly oriented during cutscenes and gameplay

• Relics – Relic strategic points now animate correctly during capture

Modding

• Map Editor – updated map editor to correctly autogenerate minimaps for maps above the 512x512 size

• Removed A.I. spam about "bad ability name"

Sneak Preview

Here is a short list of highly requested features that we plan to deliver before the end of 2025.

Achievements

• An initial wave of achievements is on the way!

Disable Fliers in Multiplayer/Skirmish Custom Games

• Option in custom games and skirmish to remove flying units

Mod Assistant

• We are preparing a tool to aid in the building of your mods. This is designed to allow modders to more easily launch all the available modding tools, and create new mods in the intended file structure. Use of this tool will not be required for making mods but is intended to help avoid pitfalls of getting a mod started

High Priority Known Issues

The team at Relic is constantly reviewing issues reported by the community and adjusting priorities to address the most frequently occurring issues. These are some of the higher priority issues we are currently tracking. Thank you for all your submissions to help.relic.com!

General

• We have found that the GoG version of the game can crash on startup. We are continuing to investigate the matter.

  The current workaround :

  • Press 'Play' to launch the game.

  • Once the game window appears, alt-tab to a different application.

  • Wait about 5 seconds (until the Relic Mine into movie begins) before selecting the game window again.

  • Continue with game.

• Unit Portraits – Any issues discovered where the new portraits were not updated correctly and extending the new portrait usage to Command Card actions that use unit portraits as icons (ex. building upgrades & abilities)

• Performance – framerate can drop significantly during combat in larger scale games

• Army Painter – visible artifacts when team colors overlap on several models

• Profiles – Cloud saves do not contain profile data when switching between devices which blocks the ability to create a new profile without an error message

• Archive – Map images in the Dark Crusade and Soulstorm UI do not use the correct aspect ratio

Gameplay

• Units with a Jump ability can appear to start/complete the jump then teleport back to the starting location

• Disembarking a squad from a transport vehicle in narrow space can cause units to be spawned out of bounds and become stuck

• Ork Gretchins can fail to move to complete their next build order when shift-queuing after building a mine field

• Faction-specific resources are split among all allies when Resource Sharing is enabled when the ally is a different faction that cannot use that resource

• Using the Deep Strike feature in the Soulstorm campaign can result in the units silently dying when summoned